His recent comments to Barak Ravid surely leave no room for doubt that Trump is just the latest figure whose ‘pro-Israel’ stance should not be used as cover for being an antisemite
December 30, 2021 14:31
When it comes to Donald Trump, you’re never going to get a consensus. The two sides, cheerleaders and critics, are too far apart to agree on anything. Nearly five years ago, for example, Jews around the world — and even on these very pages — slugged it out over whether the incoming US president was or was not an antisemite. (For what it’s worth, I was avowedly in the “yes” corner.)
Earlier this month, Trump himself offered up a crateload of evidence for the prosecution. It came via an interview with the Israeli journalist Barak Ravid, extracts of which were revealed for the first time on Unholy, the podcast I present each week alongside Yonit Levi, the anchor of the nightly news on Israel’s Channel 12.
Both of us have reported on Trump a fair bit, so not much that comes out of his mouth is a surprise — yet it’s fair to say that we both felt our jaws drop as we heard the clips Barak played us.
“There’s people in this country that are Jewish that no longer love Israel,” Trump said. “I’ll tell you, the evangelical Christians love Israel more than the Jews in this country. It used to be that Israel had absolute power over Congress and today I think it’s the exact opposite, and I think Obama and Biden did that. And yet, in the election, they still get a lot of votes from Jewish people, which tells you that the Jewish people — and I’ve said this for a long time — the Jewish people in the United States either don’t like Israel or don’t care about Israel. . . . I mean, you look at the New York Times, the New York Times hates Israel, hates them, and they’re Jewish people that run the New York Times — I mean the Sulzberger family.”
There is, as they say, a lot going on there. In the space of 44 seconds, Trump crammed in a seminar’s worth of antisemitic tropes. There’s the hoary canard of Jewish control of the media, with that reference to the ownership of the New York Times — even though the Sulzberger heir currently at the helm was raised in the Episcopalian faith of his mother. More overt still is the talk of Israel wielding “absolute power over Congress”, a notion that fits neatly alongside antisemitic motifs of Jews as string-pulling puppet-masters.
As for the insistence that American evangelicals love Israel more than American Jews love Israel, that skips lightly over the fact that plenty of those evangelicals warm to the idea of Jews returning to the holy land because they believe such an ingathering will trigger the Rapture — a moment in which Jews will either convert en masse to Christianity or else be incinerated in heavenly fire. Neither of which sound exactly Jew-friendly.
All of this has been debated hotly since, with several observers hearing an echo of Trump’s remark two years ago, that any Jew who votes for a Democrat is showing “either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty”. Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit told the New Yorker that Trump met the definition of an antisemite, not least in his “obsession” with Jews as “betrayers”. Others spotted the weird tic by which the ex-president speaks of US Jews as if they were foreign citizens whose first loyalty should be to Israel and its interests — as defined by him.
There are a few who still believe that Trump has not fully crossed the line into antisemitism, among them Barak Ravid himself. I think that’s a mistake. The fact that Trump has always had Jewish lawyers and accountants — and now even a son-in-law and daughter — does not alter that picture. He’s the latest in a long line of figures broadly hostile to Jews who nevertheless deem some Jews useful, for reasons often rooted in antisemitic prejudice. Trump was once said to have remarked he liked kippa-wearing Jews counting the money at his casinos — certainly preferring them to “Black guys” — for reasons he did not need to spell out. (Trump later half-heartedly denied making the remark.)
Still, three things leap out from this whole affair. The first is confirmation of a view that has become sharper in the year Yonit and I have been doing Unholy: that Israelis and Jews in the diaspora see the world ever more differently. In Israel, Trump’s remarks about US Jews were all but shrugged off. Israelis were much more interested in the former president’s slating of former PM, Benjamin Netanyahu, again for supposed disloyalty and betrayal. As Trump put it: “Fuck him.”
In 2020, polls showed that roughly three in four Israelis approved of Trump; in the US, Jews disapproved of him by the same margin.
At the risk of being a broken record, Israelis are from Mars, diaspora Jews are from Venus.
Second, a reminder of a lesson we should have learned already: the fact that someone holds an apparently “pro-Israel” stance is no guarantee that they’re not also anti-Jewish. Too many, from Hungary’s Viktor Orban to the BNP’s Nick Griffin, hold both positions for us to pretend they can’t and don’t coexist. They do, and Trump is just the most visible example.
Third, we ought to be consistent when it comes to antisemitic tropes and those who traffic in them. There’s little doubt how Jews would have reacted if a figure of the left had said that Israel had once exerted “absolute power” over Congress. If it’s wrong on the left, it’s wrong on the right. I know that when it comes to Trump, it’s hard to agree on much. But perhaps we can agree on that.
