Democrats take the House and Senate, carrying El-Sayed, Hamawy, and a bloc of Israel’s harshest critics into power. The counterintuitive alliance between Islamists and liberals was foreseen in Jewish tradition as the partnership of Esav and Yishmael, and we know how it ends.
A blue wave sweeps congress
Abdul El-Sayed claimed victory in the Michigan Senate race early Wednesday with an Arabic flourish, “We can turn Inshallah into Alhamdulillah,” turning “God willing” into “praise be to God,” as Democrats seized both the House and the Senate. The blue wave carries a red-green alliance of Democratic Socialists and Islamists into the halls of American power, led by a senator-elect the Republican Jewish Coalition called “the most antisemitic U.S. Senate candidate in America” and a mayor of New York who refuses to condemn calls to “globalize the intifada.” Jewish tradition foresaw this partnership thousands of years ago: the Sages taught that at the end of days Esav (Esau), the liberal West, and Yishmael (Ishmael), the Islamic world, will unite against Israel, and then turn on each other.
Democrats won 225 House seats to the Republicans’ 136, well past the 218 needed for a majority, with 74 races still uncalled. In the Senate, Democrats won 54 seats to the Republicans’ 43, with three races still uncalled, seizing the upper chamber. Republicans entered Election Day holding 53 Senate seats, and Democrats needed a net gain of four. They found them in Republican territory: in Texas, state Rep. James Talarico defeated Attorney General Ken Paxton, giving the state its first Democratic senator in decades, and the Associated Press called Maine for Troy Jackson over five-term Sen. Susan Collins.
El-Sayed, who told his supporters his campaign had overcome “nearly a quarter of a billion dollars of outside spending,” defeated former Rep. Mike Rogers for the seat vacated by retiring Sen. Gary Peters.
The new House majority brings a crop of Israel’s fiercest critics to Washington. Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan won reelection. In New York, Brad Lander, who accuses the Jewish state of “genocide,” won his race, and the ADL raised “concerns” about Chris Rabb, elected to Congress from Philadelphia. Adam Hamawy, a surgeon who once kept company with the circle of the “Blind Sheikh” Omar Abdel-Rahman, won New Jersey’s deep-blue 12th district, where he will be the state’s first Muslim member of Congress.
In Denver, Democratic Socialist Melat Kiros, who ousted 30-year incumbent Diana DeGette in the primary, won Colorado’s 1st Congressional District with 78 percent of the vote to 14 percent for Republican Christy Peterson, and the Associated Press called the race shortly after the first results came in. Kiros declined to describe the Molotov cocktail attack on a Boulder demonstration for the Gaza hostages as antisemitism, saying she did not know the attacker’s intentions or the protesters’ beliefs.
Pro-Israel Democrats insisted the newcomers would be marginal. “It’s going to be a very big night for Democrats, and a big night for Democrats in the House means that the half-a-dozen or so new DSA new members aren’t going to have much influence,” Brian Romick of Democratic Majority for Israel told JNS. The voting record of the existing Democratic caucus tells a different story.
Weapons, sanctions and severing the Alliance
The first casualty of a Democratic Congress will be the weapons pipeline to Israel. “Netanyahu better hope that his existing stocks of armaments, particularly 2,000-pound bombs, is adequate, because I don’t think there’s going to be another round of arms shipments to Israel if the Democrats take over,” William Galston of the Brookings Institution told JNS a week before the vote. He predicted “political warfare between the Democratic Party and Mr. Netanyahu” and said “outright American aid to Israel is going to come to an end.”
The groundwork is already laid. In April, 36 Senate Democrats backed a resolution from Sen. Bernie Sanders to block the sale of bombs to Israel, according to Matthew Kenney of the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, who called many Democrats’ focus on Netanyahu “a bit of a fig leaf for broader concerns with the U.S.-Israel relationship.” Tyler Stapleton of FDD Action predicted “targeted sanctions bills” aimed at Israeli policy in Gaza and in Judea and Samaria, along with “additional votes to delay or restrict weapon transfers.”
Tobin, writing the morning after the vote, said the sanctions push will be driven by the “false narrative about ‘settler violence.'” He described a party whose organizing principles “are now opposition to enforcement of immigration laws and hostility towards Israel,” and warned that leaders long considered friends of Israel have chosen to follow the base. Sen. Chuck Schumer’s “longtime pose as the shomer or ‘guardian’ of Israel in Congress has been largely conditional,” Tobin wrote.
President Trump moved this week to take the aid issue off the table, announcing that US military aid to Israel will wind down by the end of the year and give way to a partnership built on joint weapons research and development. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has sought that shift for years. “The time has now arrived for us to move from aid recipient to partner,” he wrote in June, backing a congressional resolution to phase out the $3.8 billion annual package.
Tobin warned that the abrupt timetable will strain an Israeli military still at war, and that the new majority is likely to fight the transition itself. “The anti-Israel progressives are not really focused so much on ending aid so much as they are interested in severing the relationship altogether,” he wrote.
The party’s leadership continues to champion the two-state solution: the creation of an unprecedented Palestinian state inside Israel’s borders, militarized and ethnically cleansed of Jews, with its exclusively Muslim capital in Jerusalem, centered on Judaism’s holiest site, the Temple Mount. Three decades of Oslo land-for-peace delivered three intifadas, waves of terror attacks, rockets from Gaza and, ultimately, the war against Hamas.
Tobin’s verdict on the night was blunt: the midterms “delivered a devastating blow to supporters of Israel and a victory to those who wish to eradicate the Jewish state.”
The Jewish vote stays put
American Jews voted for the party anyway. NBC News’ national exit poll found Jewish voters backed Democrats 67 percent to 32 percent in House races, roughly the two-to-one margin they have delivered for decades.
In Michigan, more than 620 Jewish voters signed a September letter organized by Michigan Jews for Democracy pledging their votes to El-Sayed. “Some of us have reservations: there are disagreements with El-Sayed on important issues, including aspects of his approach to Israel and the language used by some of his allies,” they wrote. “These concerns remain serious for many of us, and we will vote for El-Sayed.”
Those reservations concerned a candidate who called Israel “bloodthirsty” in August and refused to acknowledge its right to exist as a Jewish state, according to the Jewish Democratic Council of America. The JDCA declined to endorse him, yet its CEO, Halie Soifer, wrote that “Democrats are really the only choice for Jewish voters, because a vote for any Republican is a vote for Donald Trump.”
Rep. Haley Stevens, who won 47 percent of the vote against El-Sayed in the August primary, chose differently. When El-Sayed refused to condemn a Cenk Uygur ad blaming Israel for high grocery prices, she wrote: “Abdul promises to get money out of politics. He can begin by getting Israel out of his explanation for everything Michigan cannot afford.” El-Sayed disinvited her from a Democratic unity rally, and days before the election she attended church with Mike Rogers and endorsed him. She reportedly sought federal protection after receiving death threats.
Tobin described Jewish Democrats who stay loyal as “deaf, dumb and blind to the way they are being marginalized along with the rest of the community.”
The pattern is old. Barack Obama won 69 percent of the Jewish vote in 2012 after forcing a settlement freeze on Netanyahu and openly seeking “daylight” between Washington and Jerusalem, and the Jewish voters who returned him to office received the Iran nuclear deal and UN Security Council Resolution 2334.
The red-green alliance
Sen. Ted Cruz gave the phenomenon a name at the Republican National Committee’s midterm convention in Dallas in September. “We are witnessing a new and dangerous red-green alliance: communists and Islamists coming together and sweeping over the Democrat Party,” Cruz said. “They are united because they share the same enemies. They hate Christians. They hate Jews. They hate capitalism. They hate the Constitution, and they hate America.”
Cruz explained how a radical minority captures a party: “Not every Democrat in the House and Senate believes this, but they are all afraid of these radicals because that’s where the money and the energy and the young people are in the Democrat Party.”
Wade Miller, executive director of the Center for Renewing America, defined the red-green alliance as “a fusion of Marxism and then Islam.” The partners want different things, “a global communist world power on the one hand, and then a global caliphate on the other,” he said, calling the arrangement “a duo of convenience.” Miller traced its appeal to a generation raised on “identitarian grievances and oppressor versus oppressed.”
Geraghty, distinguishing Islam the religion from Islamism, the drive to make it govern society and state, concluded that the Democratic Party “seems to be evolving into an anti-anti-Islamist position,” relentlessly critical of the fight against Islamism while rarely criticizing Islamism itself.
The candidates
El-Sayed answered the Uygur ad with a single sentence: “No one speaks for Abdul but himself and his campaign.” He campaigned alongside streamer Hasan Piker, who has said America deserved 9/11. In March, Hezbollah-inspired terrorist Ayman Mohammad Ghazali rammed his vehicle into Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan, and opened fire on security guards with an AK-style rifle before killing himself; the FBI said he intended to kill Jews. El-Sayed explained the attack by noting that Ghazali had lost four relatives in an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon the week before: “hurt people hurt people.” He also declined to comment on the death of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
In a 2009 New York Times interview about his “Shariah-compliant” mortgage, El-Sayed said of Islamic law: “When I die and I stand before God … I don’t want to say I did it the easy way instead of the Shariah-compliant way. Not because of fear but because of obligation.” His campaign confirmed he still follows Sharia in his personal life while insisting “Abdul believes in the separation of church and state.” The Washington Free Beacon reported that his half-sister once said the family had “long been Muslim Brotherhood.”
The Atlantic reported days before the election that Hamawy had “not fully accounted for why, as a young man, he kept company” with Omar Abdel-Rahman and his circle. Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, who presided over the Blind Sheikh’s terror trial as a federal judge, called him “one of the world’s leading theologians of terrorism”; from prison, the sheikh issued the fatwa Osama bin Laden used to justify the September 11 attacks. Hamawy dismissed the reporting: “It’s racist. It’s really anti-Muslim.” He opposes funding for Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense and supports a complete arms embargo and a Palestinian “right of return.”
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the movement’s most powerful figure, has declared he has no opinion on the future of Hamas, and during his 2025 campaign refused to condemn the slogan “globalize the intifada.” Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota claimed in 2019 that support for Israel was “all about the Benjamins.” The House censured Tlaib in November 2023 after she promoted the slogan “from the river to the sea,” a call to erase the Jewish state.
The fringe goes further. The Democratic Socialists of America’s self-described “Marxist-Leninist-Maoist” Liberation Caucus has called for the release of “Elias Rodriguez and all political prisoners.” Rodriguez murdered Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim outside an American Jewish Committee event in Washington on May 21, 2025.
Conservative activist Laura Loomer reacted to the results within hours. “I hate to say it, but America is over. The communists and jihadists are going to open our borders and replace our votes with votes from illegals aliens,” she wrote on X in a post viewed 2.5 million times. “We now have reps who openly speak about their hatred of America, their love of communism and their support for sharia law.”
A contradiction built in
The alliance rests on values the two partners do not share. Dr. Elad Ben David of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies documented how the Democratic Party’s embrace of LGBTQ causes collided with Islamic teaching. Sheikh Yasir Qadhi, one of America’s most influential Muslim clerics, told worshippers in a June 2023 sermon that the Democrats’ post-9/11 embrace of Muslims was a “fraud.” Omar Suleiman of the Yaqeen Institute rejected any alliance with the LGBTQ movement, in remarks aimed at Omar, Tlaib and activist Linda Sarsour.
The clash played out in Hamtramck, Michigan, which in 2022 became the first American city with an all-Muslim government. On June 13, 2023, the city council voted 6-0 to ban the Pride flag, along with all “religious, ethnic, racial, political, or sexual orientation group flags,” from city property. “We want to respect the religious rights of our citizens,” Councilman Nayeem Choudhury said. Michigan’s Democratic Attorney General Dana Nessel called the ban a “national embarrassment.”
The Brotherhood blueprint
The strategy behind the alliance was written down decades ago. In 2008, a federal jury convicted the Holy Land Foundation and five of its leaders of funneling some $12 million to Hamas; among the evidence was a 1991 memorandum by Muslim Brotherhood operative Mohamed Akram describing the movement’s goal in America as “a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers.” Prosecutors named the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamic Society of North America and the North American Islamic Trust as unindicted co-conspirators, and defenders of those groups argue the memo was never adopted as policy.
The Arab world treats the Brotherhood as an enemy. Egypt designated it a terrorist organization in 2013, and Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates followed in 2014. Bahrain, Syria, and Russia ban the group, and Jordan outlawed it in April 2025.
Washington moved on January 13, designating the Brotherhood’s Lebanese branch a Foreign Terrorist Organization and its Egyptian and Jordanian branches Specially Designated Global Terrorists over their support for Hamas. “Chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood purport to be legitimate civic organisations while, behind the scenes, they explicitly and enthusiastically support terrorist groups like Hamas,” the Treasury Department said. Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the designations “the opening actions of an ongoing, sustained effort.” Texas and Florida have designated the Brotherhood at the state level, and Texas named CAIR a successor organization.
Europe shows the way
Europe is further down the same road. On October 29, Dr. Abdullah bin Mansour, president of the Council of European Muslims, the Brussels umbrella founded by the Brotherhood in 1989, addressed the International Union of Muslim Scholars in Turkey. “I testify that in Europe, Islam is doing just fine, Allah be praised,” he said, according to a translation by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI). “More than 400 people convert to Islam in Europe every day.”
Bin Mansour then turned to the scholars of the Muslim world. “Esteemed scholars, lead the people back to their Lord, so that unity may return to our nation,” he said. “If you do not do so, we will come from Europe to conquer you, Inshallah.” Europe, in his telling, has become a base from which Islamists will project power back into the Muslim heartland.
The Arab world saw it coming. In May 2017, at a forum in Riyadh with Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir beside him, UAE Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan warned Europe directly. “There will come a day when we see far more radicals, extremists and terrorists coming from Europe because of (a) lack of decision-making, and trying to be politically correct,” he said.
Esav and Yishmael: An ancient alliance
The partnership between Western liberals and radical Islam is new to American politics, but Jewish tradition anticipated it thousands of years ago. What do the Bible and the Sages say happens when Esav (Esau) and Yishmael (Ishmael) join forces against Yaakov (Jacob)?
The Sages identify Esav, also called Edom, with Rome and the Western civilization that grew from it. Today that heritage is carried by the liberal West: secular, progressive, and increasingly hostile to the Jewish state. Yishmael represents the Arab and Islamic world. The Bible records the moment the two families were first bound together:
So Esau went to Ishmael and took to wife, in addition to the wives he had, Mahalath the daughter of Ishmael, son of Abraham, sister of Nebaioth. (Genesis 28:9)
The marriage carries a prophecy. The first-century sage Jonathan ben Uzziel wrote that the alliance would reappear at the end of days, and the Yalkut Shimoni, the medieval anthology of midrash, describes Esav and Yishmael uniting before the final redemption. “At the very outset of their history, Ishmael and Esau forged a bond through marriage,” Rabbi Yechiel Weitzman wrote in The Ishmaelite Exile. “And so it shall be at the End of Days.”
The Vilna Gaon warned that in the final generation, the erev rav, the “mixed multitude” that left Egypt with Israel and never fully joined it, would work from inside the Jewish people to bring Esav and Yishmael together against their own nation. Hundreds of Michigan Jews signing their names for El-Sayed bring that warning to life.
The alliance carries the seeds of its own destruction. The Malbim, the 19th-century commentator Rabbi Meir Leibush Wisser, taught that after the Jewish people return to their land, the children of Yishmael and Esav will unite to attack Jerusalem, and then their religious beliefs will clash, and the two will turn on each other. Rabbi Elie Mischel, director of education at Israel365, describes the same sequence in The War Against the Bible: Ishmael, Esau and Israel at the End Times. “Initially, the Edomites will join the Ishmaelites in an alliance against Israel,” he wrote, before the war of Gog u’Magog (Gog and Magog) pits the former allies against each other.
The pattern has already played out in modern history. In 1979, Iran’s communist Tudeh Party and Marxist guerrillas helped the Islamists topple the Shah. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s regime then outlawed Tudeh, jailed its leaders, and in the summer of 1988 executed thousands of political prisoners, members of the Islamist-Marxist Mujahedin-e-Khalq first, and then hundreds of communists and leftists.
The progressive activists who waved Pride flags beside their Islamist allies learned in Hamtramck whose values prevail once the Islamists hold power. Abdullah bin Mansour stood in Turkey and promised that Europe’s Muslims will return to conquer the Muslim world, and the liberal West that opened its doors to them should take note of his ambitions closer to home.
The prophet Obadiah, whose entire book is devoted to the fate of Edom, described how the story ends:
The House of Jacob shall be fire, and the House of Joseph flame, and the House of Esau shall be straw; they shall burn it and devour it, and no survivor shall be left of the House of Esau, for the LORD has spoken. (Obadiah 1:18)
The new Congress will be sworn in this January. Esav and Yishmael have joined hands in the halls of power, exactly as the Sages foresaw. The same Sages taught how the alliance ends: the partners turn on each other, and Yaakov remains standing in his land.c