Sometimes, you have to give it to the Democrats. With the party on the verge of an expected “blue wave”, it has somehow managed to reveal a fracture within its ranks. Unsurprisingly, that fracture has involved a series of litmus tests for party figures concerning where they stand on Israel and the Middle East.

Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic candidate in a vital Michigan Senate race, is currently in the hot seat, having campaigned with controversial streamer Hasan Piker. In 2019, Piker claimed America “deserved” 9/11, while earlier this year he suggested that Hamas is “a thousand times better” than Israel. Thanks to comments such as these, he has become something of an albatross around El-Sayed’s neck. “If you want to make this race about a streamer in California, I just think you’re missing the boat,” the Michigan candidate told reporters in August.

But it’s not so easy to make Piker go away. In August, he said that if Jews in America “keep putting this idea out there that they are singularly invested in Israel” then someone may “take action — not against the State of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews”. In 2025 he claimed that, in a just world, “any kind of fucking Zionist tendency should be treated in the same way as being a fucking rabid neo-Nazi.” In September he suggested that America was “pound for pound” worse than al-Qaeda.

Mike Rogers, the GOP’s Michigan candidate, has seized the opportunity to refer to Piker as his opponent’s “running mate”. The association presents enough of a liability that El-Sayed called Piker this week and asked him to tone down his public statements.

El-Sayed may squeak by — he leads Rogers by one point, according to polling this week — but his tribulations should provide a lesson to Democrats across the country. This week, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani issued a statement commemorating the third anniversary of the Hamas terror attack on Israel. But for the bulk of the text, he denounced Israel’s “devastating, ongoing genocide” and called for an end to “occupation, apartheid…[and] war crimes”.

In response, Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, the president of the New York Board of Rabbis, called the statement “morally perverse”. Trying to strike the right moderate note, the Mayor attended a vigil organized by a group called Israelis for Peace New York, but found that he couldn’t win: pro-Palestinian hecklers, protesting the event, denounced him as a “coward” and a “sellout”.

If the Democrats can’t cut off the radical Left, the pain of El-Sayed and Mamdani will be felt throughout the wider movement, just at the moment when the party should be on the verge of a major congressional win and preparing for 2028. The Israel-Palestine issue nastily bifurcates the Democrats along liberal and progressive lines. Then there is also a generational divide, with 58% of young Democrat-leaning adults saying that they sympathize more with Palestinians than Israelis. These numbers are reversed among older Democratic voters, as well as among Republicans of all age ranges.

There is, as Mamdani discovered this week, no good way to split the difference and, from a political standpoint, the only move is to close ranks. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries had the right idea when in August he denounced one of Piker’s more extreme statements on Israel as “dangerous, malicious, and antisemitic”.

If the Democrats are serious about winning, this year or in 2028, the party will have to enforce some discipline on this score. If not, it is heading for the kind of position in which the British Labour Party found itself when then-leader Jeremy Corbyn failed to distance himself from antisemitism among activists and grassroots organizers, an issue that essentially scuppered the party’s ability to challenge nationally.

That risk can only be magnified with the heightened tensions following October 7, Israel’s war against Hamas, and antisemitic attacks worldwide. It is an entirely plausible scenario that the Piker association could cost El-Sayed his Senate race, the result of which could prevent the Democrats from taking control of the upper chamber. The lesson couldn’t be clearer: strident anti-Zionism is a third rail for Democrats. The party trips over it entirely at its own peril.