Can Josh Shapiro’s Party Forgive Him for Telling the Truth?

Can Josh Shapiro’s Party Forgive Him for Telling the Truth?

His 1993 college op-ed on the Middle East was vindicated by events, so of course he had to apologize.

The damage antisemitism has done to the Democratic Party and the country isn’t best reflected by Kamala Harris’s rejecting Josh Shapiro as her running mate. Far more telling is the Pennsylvania governor’s apology for an opinion piece he published in his college newspaper.

On Aug. 2 the Philadelphia Inquirer ran a story titled “Josh Shapiro once wrote that peace ‘will never come’ to the Middle East. He says his views have changed over 30 years.” Whether intended as negative research or honest vetting of a prospective nominee, the newspaper treated Mr. Shapiro’s college op-ed as an indiscretion he has since tried to correct.

Actually, his article, published when he was 20, was so sound that it could have proved his qualifications for leadership. Its context, which the Inquirer usefully supplied, was the Sept. 13, 1993, signing of the Oslo accords, which put Yasser Arafat in charge of the Palestinian Authority and, territorially, Judea, Samaria and Gaza. Recalling Neville Chamberlain’s proclamation of “peace for our time” after meeting with Hitler in 1938, the younger Mr. Shapiro found it “extremely difficult to trust a man with as much blood on his hands as Arafat, who was also on both the Israeli and American lists of international terrorists.”

As an advocate of peace and “realism,” Mr. Shapiro described Arafat as an “egotistical power-hungry tyrant” who didn’t represent majority Palestinian opinion and was unlikely to control other warring factions like Hezbollah. To his sorrow, Mr. Shapiro believed that “Palestinians will not coexist peacefully.” “They do not have the capabilities to establish their own homeland and make it successful even with the aid of Israel and the United States,” he added. Once they tired of fighting among themselves, they would turn against Israel. Not satisfied with Gaza and Jericho, they would “demand . . . Jerusalem.”

Nevertheless, Mr. Shapiro ended with hope, not in ceremonial treaties that contradict sober assessments but in a peace that can come only when the children of Ishmael agree to coexist with the children of Isaac. His judgment is even more remarkable published alongside that of the university’s Hillel director, who, echoing most of American Jewry, praised the Oslo accords as an agreement “no rational Israeli government” could fail to support.

As it happens, my own assessment of the accords was grimmer than Mr. Shapiro’s: I doubted Israel could survive its mistake. No country had ever armed its enemy, as Israel was doing, expecting to gain security. Days before the signing, I was quoted in the New York Timeswarning that Israel’s leaders were choosing a killer to lead the Palestinians, and that when things went wrong, Israel would be blamed. “It’s the first time that an Israeli government is doing something for which I, as an American Jew, would not like to bear moral responsibility.”

Mr. Shapiro and I both underestimated the disaster. Every subsequent Israeli concession of land or authority inspired Palestinian leaders to greater anti-Jewish aggression and repression of their own population. The Palestinian Authority’s “pay to slay” policy made killing Jews the highest and most lucrative civic honor. Yahya Sinwar was known as the “butcher of Khan Younis” long before he unleashed the savagery of Oct. 7 on Israel—which had earlier imprisoned and released him. As Mr. Shapiro had warned, Israel and the U.S. couldn’t save Palestinians from their own rulers.

What we didn’t foresee was that Iranian Islamists would recruit the Houthis, Hamas, Hezbollah and other terrorist proxies in Syria and Iraq to form a “ring of fire” around Israel. Nor did we imagine that anti-Zionism’s ideological assault would come to the U.S. When Germans spread fascist antisemitism in the 1920s and ’30s, they found no American allies among liberals in the universities, media or government. Today, Islamists have penetrated all these institutions and seek control over the Democratic Party. The military war against Israel is being fought as a political war in America.

Here enters a new twist. Historically, liberals have resisted antisemites only when the latter threatened from the political right. More recently, Arab and Islamist lobbies, themselves representing autocratic and despotic regimes with more land than the U.S., have successfully used the United Nations’ calumny that “Zionism is racism” to reframe their war against the Jews as one from the left, the dispossessed Arabs against “colonizing” Jews.

In turn, the ideology that blames Israel as “racist oppressor” has been enthusiastically welcomed by homegrown intersectional coalitions of disaffected minorities, delighted to put a Jewish face on their otherwise abstract targets such as “the patriarchy,” Wall Street and “white supremacy.” People whose forebears found refuge in the U.S. now burn its flag on campuses that welcome them as students. Adding to the fun of bullying Jews is that Jews crave acceptance from those who hate them. The more these Jews have clustered in today’s Democratic Party, the easier it has been to take over.

Mr. Shapiro in 1993 felt free to tell the truth about the enemies of freedom, hoping for Middle Eastern reform while valuing Israel as America’s own fighting front line. We can only hope that today’s college students will, like him, become “advocates of realism” rather than the kind of Islamist appeasers his party is pressing him to become.

Ms. Wisse is a senior fellow at the Tikvah Fund and author of the memoir “Free as a Jew.”