From The New Republic
Trump is offering American Jews a kind of devil’s bargain: throw in with us against the antisemitic universities and campus rabble-rousers, but pay no attention as we dismantle the traditions and institutions that Jews value.
Following the Hamas October 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel, in which that group murdered approximately 1,200 people and took 251 more hostage, Israel began a military campaign of “total victory” against the group—a terrorist organization it has previously promoted by facilitating Qatari funding for the group in order to weaken the Palestinian Authority and thereby lessen pressure on Israel to allow the creation of a genuine Palestinian state. That campaign has since killed well over 50,000 Gazans, a majority of whom were women or children.
During the course of its attacks, Israel has seen fit to cut off water, electricity, and food supplies to Gaza’s population, destroyed much of its physical infrastructure, and left its residents enduring what the British Red Cross called a “desperate humanitarian crisis.” As if that weren’t enough, in addition to the war on Gaza, the Israel Defense Forces have recently launched multiple attacks in the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iran, with the strong possibility of a much larger attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities later this year.
At the same time, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s deeply unpopular, scandal- plagued extremist right-wing government—one that features an avowed racist and homophobe and a longtime supporter of Jewish anti-Arab terrorism—is in the process of attempting to destroy the nation’s democracy from within as it prioritizes military attacks over the lives of its remaining hostages in Gaza.
The war has exacerbated a burgeoning conflict between the country that Israel is becoming and the values of the majority of American Jews. To put it in familiar terms, Israel has grown politically bright red while American Jews, alone among ethnicities that code as “white,” remain proudly deep blue. Two-thirds of Israelis questioned told pollsters they preferred Donald Trump over Kamala Harris; the exact opposite held true among American Jews. (“Trump gets nothing but praise here,” the Tel Aviv–based pollster and political analyst Dahlia Scheindlin told me.)
Despite this, the leaders of the large “legacy” American Jewish organizations, without exception, have chosen to side with Netanyahu, defending Israel against all critics and demonizing as “antisemitic” anyone—especially other Jews—who they believe threatens it. In doing so, however, they face the problem not only of opposing the views of the vast majority of American Jews, but also of throwing in with a U.S. president and political movement that seek to destroy the democratic pillars and educational institutions that have helped to make Jews secure and successful in the United States and are shot through with neo-Nazis and Jew-haters of all sorts.
Eric Alterman is a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College and a contributing writer to The Nation and The American Prospect. A PhD historian, he is the author of 12 books, including the recently published We Are Not One: A History of America’s Fight Over Israel.