Donald Trump and his unlikely presidency have been like a huge boulder tossed into a swamp, upsetting the comfortable certainties of American politics and exposing the rot underneath. He may do the same for the relationship between Israel and American Jews.
Trump’s visit to the Middle East was in some respects extraordinary. First, the Saudi monarchy, which styles itself custodian of the two holiest sites of Islam and therefore the guardian of the religion, pulled all stops to flatter a man who has been stirring blatant hatred of their coreligionists in the United States and is still trying to ban visitors and refugees from a number of majority Muslim countries.
Two days later, an equally lavish welcome was given to Trump in Tel Aviv, where Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressed hope that a direct flight between the two countries taken by Air Force One could one day be replicated by an Israeli prime minister.
The flight Netanyahu was hoping for remain a distant dream, but parallels between Saudi Arabia and Israel during Trump’s visit are hard to ignore. Along with Islamophobia, Trump’s emergence on the American national scene has reawakened anti-Semitism. He became the first presidential candidate in US history to be endorsed by racists, Holocaust deniers, neo-Nazis and other far-right groups – some of which believe that the US government is ZOG – Zionist Occupation Government. Trump was slow and clearly reluctant to repudiate his endorsement by former Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan David Duke and others of his ilk.
Trump is not an anti-Semite himself – as a New Yorker, he is surrounded by Jews as professional associates and members of his family – and yet his Jewish critics in the press were being “outed” by his supporters who enclosed their names in triple brackets on social media. Anti-Semitic attacks jumped by 86% in the first three months of this year, as attacks on Muslims, immigrants, African-Americans, Latinos, Indians and others also increased dramatically and became more violent.
Trump has mentioned all this very reluctantly if at all – but neither did his Israeli hosts. They ate clearly much happier to have him in the White House than Barack Obama.
Israel’s embrace of Trump goes very much against the grain of Jewish opinion in the United States – even though most American Jews strongly support Israel, and Trump was unusually vociferous in his denunciations of Muslims, criticism of the Iran nuclear deal and promises to move the US Embassy to Jerusalem, three issues that appeal most to pro-Israel American Jews. Still, 71% of American Jews voted for Clinton and only 24% supported Trump – a very small percentage that also includes some half a million Russian-speaking Jews who mostly voted for him.
Anti-Trump sentiment among American Jews was even stronger than those figures suggest, since many Jews who consider themselves Republicans – including a large number of prominent neo-conservatives – despised Trump but couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Clinton and therefore stayed home on Election Day.
There is nothing new about the political divide between the world’s two largest Jewish populations. Most American Jews descended from the European diaspora, who suffered from centuries of discrimination and persecution. European Jews struggled to be accepted by their host countries but they wanted this acceptance to be granted without full assimilation – i.e., while retaining their religion and customs. In Europe in the 19th century Jews became the first “other” to be thus accepted, becoming the harbingers of the multiculturalism and diversity of modern society.
American Jews realize that they can continue to enjoy full rights of citizenship only in an inclusive democracy. They therefore remain liberal and tolerant, and always readily respond to discrimination of others – be that gays, transgender, African-Americans, Hispanics or Muslims.
Israel was established by people who had the same roots – and they wanted to be a liberal, inclusive democracy as well. Israeli writer Amos Oz, the son of early Jewish settlers from the Russian Empire, recalls in his memoir how before the founding of the State of Israel Jews in Palestine sincerely believed that they would provide an example of tolerance to the world by granting the Arab population all conceivable rights of citizenship and never discriminating against them.
Jews from the Muslim world had no such illusions. They never stood a chance of being accepted as equal by the countries where they lived and they were more hostile to Arabs. Since Palestinians and Arab states remained hostile to Israel, as well, staging terror attacks and waging wars, Israeli attitudes hardened and illiberal views eventually gained prominence.
The political shift toward the right, which started with the first Likud government in the 1970s, was sealed by the arrival of some two million ex-Soviet Jews which started around the same time. They were born and raised in the Soviet Union and their political attitudes and beliefs were shaped by their upbringing. Just as in Russia, where there has been no de-Stalinization and therefore no real understanding of the nature of the Soviet regime, so in the ex-Soviet community the hatred of liberal democracy flourishes, with the accompanying vices of ignorance, intolerance and preference for simple, radical solutions to complex administered by some kind of a Duce-like figure.
We see this in Israel, but also in the United States, Germany and wherever else my former countrymen settle. Rather typical in this respect is the case of Russian Israeli blogger Anton Nosik, who in 2015 wrote a series of entries gloating over the civil war in Syria and expressing joy over the death of Syrian civilians who, according to him, are sworn enemies of the State of Israel regardless of their age, religious affiliation or gender. Nosik was actually put on trial in Russia for those Ideas, but only because he was talking about Syrians. Had he expressed similar sentiments about Ukrainians, nothing would have happened to him – and in fact many Russians sound just like Nosik when they talk about their “little brothers.”
As far as American Jews are concerned, political differences weren’t necessarily a great divide, and since Israel remains a liberal democracy, in which less than a quarter of the electorate voted for Likud in the latest election, they still felt great affinity for Israel. This may start to change with Trump’s visit to Israel. As in many other cases, Trump may become a catalyst laying bare existing problems.
Zionists envisioned Israel as a homeland of the Jews, a place where all of the world’s Jews will settle. Everyone of us can claim his or her Israeli citizenship. However, only about one third of the world’s Jewry have chosen to become Israeli.
Over time Israel, which was established to imitate existing nation states, became a nation state all its own. While for the past seventy years it continued to defend and protect Jews around the world, it has developed national interests that are completely different from the interests of Jews still living in the diaspora.
Today’s Israeli leadership – and, apparently, public opinion – has much more affinity with Trump than with American Jews. This is why Trump’s Israeli hosts said nothing about the wave of anti-Semitism in the United States and about Trump’s support on the part of racists and anti-Semites. This is wholly unprecedented and betrays the principles of Zionism.
However, American Jew and other diaspora Jews had betrayed the principles of Zionism even earlier – by refusing to live to Israel. Zionism is effectively dead and it is not going to be revived unless – or perhaps until – there is persecution of the Jews in the United States. In the meantime, American Jews and Israel will gradually grow apart not just politically but in every other conceivable way, leaving Israel as just another nation state, one whose state religion happens to be Judaism.
