Why the American right turned on Israel

The victory of the radical right has resurrected its buried anti-Semitism.

So much has shifted in US politics during the six months Donald Trump has been in the White House that it is easy to forget the origins of those changes. It is easy to see the upheaval as unprecedented and unexpected. It is also easy to see it as largely serendipitous. Rather than Trump being the result of entirely novel historical forces that he has unleashed into the world, it could well be that he stumbled into the presidency for a second time simply because woke sentiments appalled decent people, Joe Biden was faltering, and Kamala Harris arrived too late to the race. Likewise, if Zohran Mamdani becomes mayor of New York in autumn, it might well be not so much because left populism has come into its moment, but because his rivals, Andrew Cuomo and Eric Adams, are even more inadequate than Harris was. To paraphrase a Russian proverb, for a hungry electorate, even a half-baked loaf tastes good.

The same might apply to what appears a sea change among the right with regards to Israel. For generations, the standard perception goes, the right has stood behind Israel through thick and thin. Today, more and more Democrats, appalled by the war crimes in Gaza, seem to have turned against Israel. Meanwhile, the right, in a weird convergence of usually polarised sentiment, is doing the same. Most recently, the prominent political scientist, John Mearsheimer, appeared on Tucker Carlson’s podcast, declaring that the Zionist project was racist and about ethnic cleansing from the beginning.

Leave aside that the Zionist project, which has now, in the hands of Benjamin Netanyahu and his executioners, arrived at a racist and potentially genocidal dead end, was not racist and potentially genocidal from the beginning. There was absolutely nothing surprising about Mearsheimer’s assertion, or about Carlson’s openness to it. Mearsheimer was merely reprising one of the themes of The Israel Lobby, a sensationally controversial book that he published with Stephen Walt in 2007, and which grew out of an essay by both men that had appeared in the London Review of Books the previous year.

This is not the place to examine that book’s thesis and the reaction to it, though my own belief is that the book was factually impoverished and inaccurate in its argument that pro-Israel factions in Washington were responsible for what Mearsheimer and Walt saw as the US’s self-defeating allegiance to the Jewish state. The Cold War had been the cause of America’s allegiance to Israel. (Just as the greed of American oil men pushed America to invade Iraq, not, as Mearsheimer and Walt maintained, the far less remunerative Israel lobby.) Now though, 18 years further along in the post-Cold War period, and nearly two years into the slow extermination of the Palestinians from Gaza, the two authors’ fundamental premise seems correct.

Mearsheimer and Walt took particular aim at the neoconservatives, whom they accused of an attachment to Israel’s interests that undercut American ones. But the neoconservatives were one branch of the conservative movement, the one that happened to prevail among and draw closest to power. But there were also, as they were known at the time, the “paleoconservatives”, on the hard right of US politics. That term now seems quaint, for the simple reason that the extreme right wing of the party that it represented has become its dominant wing. Compared to their Dick Cheney-era pomp, the neocons have to share office space with the kind of Tea Party figures they once arrogantly dismissed as fruitcakes.

Unlike the mostly Jewish neoconservatives, the hard right hailed The Israel Lobby as “an extraordinary accomplishment”. At least that was the judgement of the American Conservative, a paleoconservative magazine founded by one of the fathers of American right populism, Pat Buchanan. It was Buchanan who made the once notorious remark about “the Israeli Defence Ministry and its amen corner in the United States”, which was attacked as anti-Semitic, though his perception was accurate. It might still have been anti-Semitic. No one could say for certain. What has always haunted modern Jews is that no one can say for sure whether, in any given instance, an anti-Zionist is also an anti-Semite. “Everybody hates the Jews,” as the late, great Tom Lehrer once sang. Is it true? Is it more true now than it was pre-Gaza?

The hard right’s enthusiasm for The Israel Lobby seemed less grounded in conscientious agreement with the book’s premises – which, of course, was possible – than in an instinctive expression of an animosity towards Jews on the right that dated back to the anti-Semitic Catholic priest (later defrocked) Father Charles Coughlin in the 1930s. Afterward, Senator Joseph McCarthy continued the hard right’s anti-Semitism, with the large majority of his victims in the anti-communist hearings of the 1950s being Jewish. Indeed, McCarthy seems to have created the template for Trump’s own simultaneous courting of anti-Semitism on the right and his disingenuous “defence” of Jewish university students. Even as McCarthy was winking at the Jew-hating right in his persecution of mostly Jews, he was vociferously accusing critics of his hatchet man – the Jewish Roy Cohn, later Donald Trump’s mentor – of anti-Semitism.

The radical right, especially the Catholics among them, had always been rife with anti-Semitism. The so-called father of modern conservatism, William F Buckley, spent years associating with virulent anti-Semites, even as he gradually distanced himself from them – a ritualistic radical right double motion – as well as opposing Israel, until he later very publicly denounced anti-Semitism in 1991. In light of America’s conflict with the Soviet Union, he became an ardent supporter of Israel.

These days, the fractured feelings on the right with regard to Jews are no less intense. Tucker Carlson invites Nazi apologists on his podcast, Laura Loomer lashes out at Muslims in the name of Jews, Candace Owens calls Israel a “demonic nation”, the National Review defends Israel’s actions in Gaza, Joe Rogan denounces Israeli actions in Gaza and calls Jews “greedy”. In my home state of New Jersey, the Maga candidate for governor, Jack Ciattarelli, is an ardent defender of Israel, while his Democratic rival, Mikie Sherrill, called what Israel is doing in Gaza “genocide”, then played her remarks down.

What is clear is that, because the radical right has become mainstreamed and has all but engulfed conservatism’s moderate strains, it should not come as a surprise that the anti-Semitism that was always a central element of the radical right should also be in the process of being mainstreamed. This is accompanied by a whole new set of phenomena. One is that, despite Trump’s occasional gestures of impatience, he will keep America behind Netanyahu whatever the Israeli leader does in Gaza, merely nudging him from time to time to appear moderate in order to soften Israel’s critics. The other is that, as Trump well knows, such criticism of Israel as he occasionally emits will gratify those anti-Semites on the hard right whose anti-Zionism is seamless with their anti-Semitism.

Another feature of this new status of Jews is the right’s manipulation of what they pretend is the pro-Palestinian fervour sweeping the left and constituting a basis for a left populism. That is a red herring. Palestine, even the atrocity and torment of Gaza, plays little role in Americans’ moral imagination. Vietnam unified the left 60 years ago; Americans are not dying in Gaza, and American liberals will not be drawn away from their differences by a foreign conflict that has no real consequences for them. What the right does achieve, though, by pretending that the pro-Palestinian passion on the progressive left is a threat to its own populist success, is two-pronged. The first is to saddle the left with the appearance of anti-Semitism. The second is to feed the growing anti-Semitic wing of Maga the red meat of making Jews seem at the heart of every foreign and domestic turbulence. No Israeli war crimes in Gaza, no pro-Palestinian outrage unifying the right.

The Jews are slowly being positioned by the right as a kind of Skinnerian stimulus meant to provoke one sort of reaction or another among the electorate. The most dangerous aspect of Trump to Jews, and to Israel, is his seeming philo-Semitism. He will not abandon Netanyahu. He will abet Netanyahu in his atrocities and then use him to titillate the Jew-hatred on the right, all while protesting undying love for Israel and for the Jews. It is hardly a coincidence that Mike Huckabee, an evangelical Christian, is Trump’s ambassador to Israel. Many evangelicals are in thrall to “dispensational millenarianism”, in which, simply put, Jews who do not accept Christ in the end time will be destroyed during a seven-year “tribulation”. A new book, Antisemitism in the End Times by Olivier Melnick, coming out this autumn, makes this very case. As the dispensationalists would have it, fighting anti-Semitism is vital as a path to either the mass conversion, or the collective destruction, of the Jews, which is a precondition for the arrival of the messiah.

In this sense, both the attachment to Israel and the anti-Zionism on the right are the perfect complements to the rising anti-Semitism on the right. This complicated right-wing death hug of Israel is lightyears away from the neoconservatives’ unrealpolitik embrace of Israel. As with so much else, Trump is not inventing anything new. He is taking what was once unspeakable – witness his public support of Poland’s new president, a Holocaust revisionist – tossing it into the chaotic maelstrom he has created, and making it central, and vital.