Among all Israelis, the name Hassan Piker is probably familiar only to those who follow American politics religiously. But in the US, he is a star, with roughly 10 million followers across the social media accounts where he is active.
Unlike other online influencers, who gain legitimacy only from other users, Piker is different, both in the way he tries to brand himself and in how the people around him respond to him. He always appears in an aesthetic but old-fashioned suit, better suited to an academic at a prestigious university than to a man in his 30s, but that is precisely the brand.
Hassan Piker is not just another tweeter, but a revolutionary intellectual, at least in his own eyes. His worldview, which he spreads across hundreds of hours of podcasts and thousands of posts, includes blatant antisemitism. For example, he has said that if American Jews continue to support Israel, then surely someone will "do something." He has called Zionism a "mental illness," and said that supporters of the Houthis can be compared to Anne Frank, that in a corrected world every "Zionist tendency should be treated in the same way as being neo-Nazis," and any number of other "pearls."
Yet despite these statements, politicians, led by Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, continue to associate with him, and major media outlets continue to grant him legitimacy. Last week, it was the Axios website that conducted a nearly hour-long interview with Piker in which, despite Israel's centrality to his rhetoric, there was no genuine, serious engagement with his antisemitic statements. One of Piker's more troubling comments in that interview was that he serves as a litmus test, a measure of how people think about Israel.
At first, I recoiled but sadly, Piker is apparently right. Despite the excessive posturing and self-importance which mask a shallower intellect than he would like to think, he is correct about this point. He represents a new generation of Americans who have turned their hatred of Israel into a flag they wave, one that helps them signal to others what they think across a wide range of other issues. Is opposition to Israel your central agenda? It goes without saying you also support a socialist economy, public housing, open immigration and more.
But hatred of Israel does not stop only within this extreme camp. Piker said in the interview – and sadly, it seems he is right about this too – that the Democratic Party talks about Israel publicly in a different way than it talks about it internally. In other words, the party has become far more anti-Israel than we know or think. Among some Israelis, that claim stirs feelings of disgust toward the party – but we do not have the privilege of giving up on the Democratic Party, certainly not on its moderate wings. This is a flashing warning sign, not a barrier that should stop us from working to repair the relationship.
Anyone who listened to the interview will surely wonder how an American media outlet can treat with such equanimity a person who not only hates Israel, a US ally, but also says Iran should have nuclear weapons, and that the US has spread more terror than anyone else in the world, a person who, while criticizing the US and Israel, praises China and Turkey. That is certainly a question worth asking, and there is no doubt his words contain a great deal of hypocrisy, but while that hypocrisy should and must be pointed out, we cannot ignore that this is the reality we live in, young people (and not only young people) who have become so obsessed with Israel that it has blinded them to all the world's other ills, and a broader environment that fails to notice the absurdity.
But unfortunately, this is reality, and this is the field on which we are required to operate. The hypocrisy, naivete, foolishness or even malice of others does not grant us the privilege of abandoning the arena. We must recognize reality as it is, and act within it to restore Israel's standing. It is a matter of national security.
