Be very afraid: Jewish establishment groups in the US are fueling antisemitism
JVL Introduction
Both articles reposted below, from the USA, make similar points: the war on Iran is fueling antisemitism.
It is a war the majority of Americans do not want.
For Peter Beinart it is crystal clear: antisemitism is rising because of the
“specific claim that America has been pushed into wars by Israel with the support of large Jewish donors like Miriam Adelson and Jewish organizations like AIPAC.
“And if you wanted to supercharge, if you wanted to supercharge that antisemitism, nothing, nothing could have supercharged it more than what we have seen right now.”
Josh Nathan-Kazis in Jewish Currents is equally clear:
“Over the weekend, Jewish establishment groups rushed to yoke themselves to the unpopular war President Trump and the Israelis launched against Iran. Now, as it becomes increasingly clear that the US entered into this war at Israel’s urging, the cheerleading from American Jewish leaders is creating a moment of political peril for their institutions, and for the American Jews they purport to represent.”
Beinart says that as an American Jew, represented by organizations that have pushed the United States into war, he feels “as frightened as an American Jew for my safety in the United States as I can ever remember in my lifetime”.
Josh Nathan-Kazis’s comments follow after those of Peter Beinart.
RK
The Danger This War Poses to American Jews
It’s Almost Guaranteed To Supercharge Antisemitism
So, there’s this video that I just can’t get out of my mind. It’s a video of a man named Brian McGinnis. He’s a retired Marine Corps veteran. And he goes to this Senate hearing, and he starts shouting. He’s in full Marine uniform. And, he starts shouting things like, ‘no one wants to fight for Israel.’ He’s pulled out of the room very, very brutally. It’s a disturbing video to watch. He claims that his arm was broken as he was pushed out, and he keeps shouting some version of this: ‘nobody wants to fight for Israel.’
I would really encourage you, if you know people who support this war, especially if you know influential people in American politics, in the organized American Jewish community who support this war, to ask them to reflect on this video. Because I think it illustrates, in a terrifying way, the moment that we’re in today.
The American people did not want this war. The initial polling has shown a strong opposition to the war. And remember, polling about war almost always goes down. Wars are usually most popular at the beginning, right? This war wasn’t even popular at the start. And there’s also good reason to believe that Israel was a major part of the reason that America launched this war. Not the only reason: I think Donald Trump’s hubris from his apparent success in Venezuela, and of the 12-Day War, and the Soleimani killing, all of these things have gone to his head and made him think—idiot that he is—that this is gonna be easy, that he can do in Venezuela. He’s basically said as much.
So, it’s not only because of Israel. But anyone with eyes to see knows that Benjamin Netanyahu has wanted the United States to launch a full-scale assault on Iran for many, many, many years. It’s been an obsession of him for his entire political career. He’s open about it, right? And that he’s particularly been pushing Donald Trump to do so, and he took advantage of the vanity, the stupidity of this president that we have, and the brokenness of the foreign policy-making process to be able to get this done, right?
So, what people said about Iraq—that Israel pushed the United States into war in Iraq, which is mostly not true. Israel was not focused on the U.S. invading Iraq, even back then, it was focused on Iran. It is much, much more true today. And what this Marine Corps veteran was saying has actually become the mainstream public understanding of why the U.S. did go to war, that it was pushed into it by Israel. And there’s a significant kernel of truth to that.
And this is happening in a moment in which real antisemitism is already rising. I’m not talking about the bullshit claims of antisemitism that say that people are antisemitic because they ask whether it might be better off if Israel were a country that treated everyone equally under the law, rather than based on Jewish supremacy. No. I mean, Nick Fuentes, Candace Owen, quoting the Talmud, spinning conspiracy theories about Jewish holocausts of Christians, all of this kind of stuff. This is really rising, right?
It’s rising partly just because all forms of bigotry are now rising as American liberal democracy fails, and this kind of authoritarian ethno-nationalism rises. But it’s also rising because of this specific claim that America has been pushed into wars by Israel with the support of large Jewish donors like Miriam Adelson and Jewish organizations like AIPAC.
And if you wanted to supercharge, if you wanted to supercharge that antisemitism, nothing, nothing could have supercharged it more than what we have seen right now. The chances that MAGA 2.0 or MAGA 3.0 will be openly antisemitic—not veiled antisemitism—but openly antisemitic, the language of Fuentes, the language of Candace Owens, are now much, much greater. And we may see more of this open antisemitism also on the left too because it may well be popular on parts of the left, as well as the right.
Now, I don’t expect Benjamin Netanyahu to have taken the safety and well-being of American Jews into account when he made this decision, right? Netanyahu is the elected leader of Israel. He responds to the electorate of Israel. Most Palestinians who live under Israeli control are not part of that electorate, right? He responds to the electorate of Israel and the sense of its self-perception, right? I think that is actually also going to be disastrous over the long term for Israel, but Netanyahu responds to Israelis. Israeli leaders have never actually put the interests of diaspora Jews, made that been a serious focus of their foreign policy if it’s conflicted with their sense of Israeli national interest. That’s why Netanyahu hangs out with Viktor Orban. This is an old story. This is why Menachem Begin was pals with Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, they’ve hung out with antisemites for decades and decades if those people supported Israel.
But we do have the right to hope that the leaders of the organized American Jewish community, whose responsibility is to Jews in the United States, that they would think about the consequences of this war for us. And the consequences are catastrophic, right? If you were a small minority in a country, which American Jews are, a small minority, also we have as baggage a very long history of antisemitic stereotypes about Jews, right?
You have to have a decent respect for the opinions of the other people in your country, right? A decent respect for the opinions of the American people, right? And what the pushing and now celebration of this war from AIPAC, from the Anti-Defamation League, from the American Jewish Committee, and for a whole series of commentators, right, who are associated with those organizations, what their attitude shows is, basically, a lack of respect for the opinions of the American people, and a lack of understanding of the position of American Jews in this society.
I want to be clear about what I’m saying. American Jews are and deserve to be understood as absolutely full citizens in this society. But being a full citizen, an owner of this country, right, doesn’t only mean rights, it also entails certain obligations. It entails the obligation to think seriously about the national interest of this country. The claim that it was in America’s national interest to spend billions of dollars trying to topple the Iranian regime is just nonsense. Can anybody with a straight face say that if the U.S. government has $10 billion, that the $10 billion are best spent doing this, rather than dealing with the many, many, many terrible challenges we have at home? Of course not. It’s an insult to people’s intelligence to suggest this, right?
And what the organized American Jewish community is doing by pushing this, it is creating a dynamic in which it’s going to be even easier for antisemitism to spread, and for American Jews to be seen as not people who are part of a country trying to think about what’s best for that country, but to play exactly in to what Fuentes and others say. Which is that American Jews are not interested in the welfare of this country, not interested in the economic and the human costs of America going to war, because American Jews are loyal to Israel, right?
This is the narrative that by supporting this war, American Jewish organizations are promoting. Obviously, the antisemites are responsible for their own antisemitism, but wise and sane Jewish leadership does not play into the hands of Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens, especially in a very, very dangerous moment like this.
And if you listen, right, to the people in the American Jewish community who are defending this war, right? And when they’re responding to people like Tucker Carlson and others who are saying this was a war for Israel, it’s not a war for the United States, their response is very telling. They say: are you questioning Donald Trump? Are you saying Donald Trump is a traitor, right? What, essentially, they’re doing is, they’re saying, don’t you dare criticize Donald Trump. They’re not making a serious policy argument. They’re basically trying to play on the authoritarian tendency and instinct that exists within the Republican Party and the MAGA movement today in order to shield themselves and this war from criticism, right?
And this, I think, is a terrifying sign of things to come. Which is to say, the American Jewish community, in the middle of the 20th century, had a strategy, a democratic strategy, a strategy of pushing for greater democracy, and of trying to be engaged in that struggle. The American Jewish leadership now is doing things that are nakedly opposed to what the American people want. And when people express that public opposition, they are essentially taking refuge in the authoritarianism of the Trump movement, and saying, how dare you criticize Donald Trump, right? He is above criticism, and that’s their defense, right?
This is part, and I think we’re going to see going more forward, the more you lose the American people, right, the more Americans become hostile, right, the more antisemitism grows, the more you have to ally with authoritarian dictators as for your safety, right? You abandon a democratic strategy—a small-D democratic strategy for Jewish safety and well-being—and you go back to this much older model, right, of the court Jew clinging to the authoritarian leader as the public turns more and more anti-Jewish.
I don’t think the American Jewish establishment understands that this is the direction that they’re going, but this is actually the direction that they’re going to have to go because of their own policies, because they can’t distinguish between what the Israeli government wants and what’s good for the American people.
And I think partly, this is a result of how cloistered the American Jewish establishment is. I’m not talking about American Jews in general. American Jews are widely integrated into American society in all kinds of ways. But the oligarchy that runs American Jewish organizations, the large donors, the people who work for those very large donors, that is a very cloistered, self-enclosed world in many ways. And I think it shields people from an actual understanding, in some ways, of what’s happening in American society, about the suffering that Americans endure as a result of these wars, that the American Jewish organizations keep pushing for. And I don’t think that these people in these positions either understand or are willing to understand how dangerous their actions are for us as American Jews.
Watch again this video with Brian McGinnis, and ask yourself how it makes you feel as a Jew in the United States today to be represented by organizations that have pushed the United States into war, into this war. I will say, for me, it makes me feel as frightened as an American Jew for my safety in the United States as I can ever remember in my lifetime.
Over the weekend, Jewish establishment groups rushed to yoke themselves to the unpopular war President Trump and the Israelis launched against Iran. Now, as it becomes increasingly clear that the US entered into this war at Israel’s urging, the cheerleading from American Jewish leaders is creating a moment of political peril for their institutions, and for the American Jews they purport to represent.
The Trump administration on Monday confirmed what had seemed apparent from the start: that Israel pushed the US into this war. Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, told reporters that the “imminent threat” to which the US felt compelled to respond early Saturday was not an Iranian provocation, but rather anticipated Iranian retaliations to a planned Israeli attack. Earlier in the day, a startling New York Times report had depicted President Trump as having been talked into war by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “Because Israel was determined to act with or without the US, our commander-in-chief . . . had a very difficult decision to make,” the Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, said after a Pentagon briefing.
Each of the major Jewish establishment groups have put out statements supporting the war. “We commend President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for their close coordination and clear resolve at this critical moment,” the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations said late Saturday. “Their leadership reflects the strength of the US–Israel security partnership and a shared determination to halt a regime that endangers regional and global stability.”
The American Jewish Committee affirmed in their statement that diplomacy was impossible, as Iranians had not been negotiating in good faith. The Anti-Defamation League’s initial statements were muted, expressing hope for the safety of US soldiers, Israeli civilians and soldiers, and “our partners and friends in the Gulf,” but on a conference call put on by the group Sunday night, its CEO and national director, Jonathan Greenblatt, was more forthright. “What we know beyond a shadow of a doubt is that the demise of the Islamic Republic makes this a safer world,” he said.
Mainstream American Jewish groups have long committed themselves to the foreign policy of the Israeli right, and their response on Saturday is by no means a surprise. This is the war, after all, that Netanyahu has been demanding since the 1990s, and the war that the hardline pro-Israel crowd has fought to get him ever since. It’s the war the neoconservative writer Bill Kristol and his Emergency Committee for Israel were begging for in 2012, when they ran attack ads against President Obama saying he should have bombed Iran, and the war AIPAC and its allies wanted in 2015, when they did their best to kill the Iran nuclear deal.
And yet their political positioning currently puts them at odds with most Americans, who think the war is a bad idea. A University of Maryland poll found early last month that just 21% of Americans favored war with Iran. Now, the conventional wisdom across the US political spectrum is that the US is fighting an unpopular war as Israel’s junior partner. “Donald Trump is so weak that he couldn’t tell Bibi Netanyahu no, so now we are at war,” the former Obama White House staffer Ben Rhodes wrote Monday. His comments rhymed somewhat with those of the former MAGA stalwart Marjorie Taylor Greene, who wrote: “We are now a nation divided [between] those who want to fight wars for Israel and those who just want peace and to be able to afford their bills and health insurance.”
The Jewish establishment wants to project an image of unified American Jewish support for this new war. And yet they do so at a moment of extraordinary political weakness, when Democrats increasingly see AIPAC as toxic, and the power that groups like Conference of Presidents were able to exert in Washington just a decade ago have been vastly diluted. They have little political capital to expend, and they’ve bet it all on a risky and unpopular foreign entanglement.
In the meantime, they are setting up American Jews to take the blame if the war goes badly, as it appears destined to do. Though left-wing and progressive Jews have tried to distinguish between Jews and Israel in the American imagination, mainstream Jewish institutions have done their best to confuse the issue, conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism. On Tuesday, the ADL was busy eliding the distinction between Israeli’s political interest and Judaism itself, with a social media post that implied that Ali Khamenei, the Iranian supreme leader killed by the Israelis on Sunday, was a modern-day Haman, the villain of the biblical Purim story. “This year, the Purim story feels closer than ever,” the group wrote.
The Jewish establishment sees where the national discourse is heading, and is scrambling to divert it without dropping their support for the war. They will make the case that it was the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, not the Israelis, that pushed Trump into this war. That’s the argument Greenblatt tested out on the ADL Zoom on Sunday, saying that the fact that critics of the war were focused on the Israeli role “just underscores the antisemitism which is, unfortunately, so persistent.” Trump himself has tried, unconvincingly, to walk back the narrative: In response to the first question shot at him after an Oval Office meeting Tuesday with the German chancellor, Trump said Israel hadn’t forced his hand. “If anything, I might have forced Israel’s hand,” he said. But it was the Israelis who, according to Rubio and to Johnson, had promised to send their jets out over Tehran and set off a war with or without the participation of the US president.
Not every Jewish group has come out in favor of the war. There was opposition from the anti-Zionist Jewish Voice for Peace, and from the liberal Zionist J Street, among others. J Street and JVP have both endorsed the war powers resolutions under consideration in the House and Senate, which tell the president to stop attacking Iran without Congressional authorization. (The establishment groups have not expressed positions on the war powers votes, though some AIPAC-supported Democrats, like Rep. Greg Landsman of Ohio, have said since the attacks that they will oppose the resolutions.)
Jewish progressives and the Jewish left have struggled, in recent years, to cooperate with each other. I wrote on Friday about the strategic divisions between the two factions, which are rooted in deep political differences and personal resentments. In this moment, though, American Jews need a united anti-war front that can present a real alternative to the establishment propaganda, and can contest in a forceful way the notion that this is a war American Jews want.
This war is creating chasms and tectonic political movement and realignment, like nobody could surely have imagined? AIPAC and those “Jewish” “Community Leaders” and organisations, are digging their own graves, but at the expense of real Jews, not the Zionists. The MAGA base has always been inherently Anti-Semitic, including far right groups to which the Zionist “right” have attached themselves. That cosy relationship looks like falling apart, with all Jews across America being the objects of vile anti-Semitism, including violence and aggression. I fear, that when the real number of American Service Personnel already killed across the Middle East becomes clear, and American Soldiers are seen coming home in coffins, draped in the Stars and Stripes; the consequences will spill over on the streets, affecting all Jews, not just the Zionists. Frightening. Absolutely frightening.
Reading the article it becomes very clear that the Super Rich, who control most politically motivated organisations, are the same all over the world whether Jewish or not. They care nothing for the rest of the population no matter where they live. They all play the Blame Game when they stir up troubles with their bullying attitude. Having said that, The Authors of the two pieces are right in that the war will stir up antisemitism and it will be the ordinary person who suffers in society the Military will suffer in a pointless war and Jews will suffer because Americans are going to lose sons and daughters, in fact they are already losing them, for a president that thinks a baseball cap is suitable headgear to wear when the Nation is mourning their loss.
It’s a time of huge upheaval and danger for Jewish people, especially in the US, my heart is with you. But this also presents opportunities, as Leonard Cohen says – there’s a crack in everything that lets the light in.
Can Jewish progressives and the left seize that opportunity, identify common areas in which to work together and speak out? You have to keep speaking out as publicly as possible and shape the debate.