If the 2016 presidential election had been a game show in which contestants competed to find newer and more extravagant means to praise Israel’s virtues and attack its adversaries, it might have been called Can You Top This? As the liberal Jewish journalist Peter Beinart aptly observed early in the nomination process, the seventeen Republican presidential candidates represented three sometimes “overlapping” positions on the Israel/Palestine question: those who believed the Israeli military occupation should continue “indefinitely”; those favoring “expelling Palestinians from Israel”; and those “deny[ing] that Palestinians exist[ed] at all.”1
Though it included only two serious candidates, the Democratic side proved more diverse. Hillary Clinton hewed close to the AIPAC-defined parameters of the debate, paying rhetorical tribute to the idea of a Palestinian state just so long as Israel was free to dictate all the conditions under which it might one day come into existence. As a candidate for the US Senate in New York in 2000, she had been the target of robocalls from Republican opponents expressing shock over the fact that, as First Lady, she had accepted the greeting of a kiss on both cheeks from Yasser Arafat’s wife, Suha Arafat, at a diplomatic reception. She was damned if she was going to leave herself open to any more such attacks. As Obama’s first secretary of state, Clinton had had many strong disagreements with Netanyahu, and these sometimes grew heated. But as a presidential candidate, she might as well have been on Israel’s public relations payroll. According to candidate Clinton, Ariel Sharon’s 2000 visit to the Temple Mount, which set off the Second Intifada, had not been provocative at all; it was long past time to move the US embassy to Jerusalem—and maybe the US Justice Department had been a little too hard on poor Jonathan Pollard. Clinton did not, like some Republicans, deny the existence of the Palestinians; she simply ignored them. In one speech on the Middle East given at the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center—named after and paid for by Clinton’s own close adviser and major funder, the Israeli-born billionaire Haim Saban—she said the word “Israel” or “Israeli” forty times, but “Palestine” or “Palestinians” not even once. When her adviser for Jewish affairs, Ann Lewis, was asked about the overall thrust of Clinton’s Middle East policy, she replied, reversing the usual relationship between the leader of a superpower and one of its client states, “The role of the president of the United States is to support the decisions that are made by the people of Israel.”2
Clinton’s only meaningful competition for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination was the independent socialist senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, and in his coalition, one could glimpse the dawning of a new era for Democrats and Israel. Sanders, who as a Jewish boy in Brooklyn had attended Hebrew school, and who was Bar Mitzvahed in 1954—spoke more openly and critically about Israel than any previous Democratic presidential candidate, saying on the campaign trail the kinds of things that previously had been voiced exclusively in private. He was particularly critical of Israel’s December 2008 invasion of Gaza. Israel had “every right in the world to destroy terrorism,” but that did not justify “some 10,000 civilians who were wounded and some 1,500 who were killed,” Sanders thundered at an April 2016 Democratic Party debate held in Brooklyn (where Clinton’s national campaign office happened to be located). Clinton surrogate Eliot Engel, a US congressman from New York and soon to be chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, called Sanders’s comments “disgraceful and reprehensible,” as they gave “radical left-wing elements in the party more license to attack Israel.” But they earned the loud applause of the attending audience. The progressive Brooklyn rabbi Andy Bachman correctly noted that Sanders “spoke to this growing rift in the Democratic Party—it was proof of a major crisis in the Jewish community that no major Jewish organization has resolved or figured out to handle.” (Ironically, in 2020 Engel would lose his seat in a Democratic primary to a Black candidate, Jamal Bowman, who spoke in Sanders-style rhetoric about the importance of “establishing a true Palestinian state where they can have safety and security and self-determination as well.”) And the trends among self-described liberal Democrats—a heavily Jewish category—continued to move in Sanders’s direction. By 2017, support for Israel and the Palestinians was now basically equal among Democrats in general, but among self-described “liberal Democrats,” the Palestinians were now ahead. All Democrats under thirty would also come to view Palestinians more favorably than Israelis, as evidenced by a Pew survey released in May 2022. What’s more, fully 42 percent of Jews surveyed that year by the Pew Research Center thought Trump was “favoring the Israelis too much,” nearly double the proportion of Christians who said they felt this way.3
While the Democratic contest revealed the transformation underway in the party’s Israeli/Palestine discourse, the Republican side reached ever greater heights of absurdity, culminating in Donald Trump’s nomination and election. Trump had no particular knowledge of, or views on, Israel, save for an adherence to a number of the antisemitic stereotypes he had picked up from his notoriously racist father and during his own career as a real estate shyster (this was only partially mitigated by the conversion of his favorite child, Ivanka, to Orthodox Judaism, preceding her marriage to Jared Kushner, a Modern Orthodox Jew, in 2009). Trump was more than happy to share some of these tropes during the campaign, even when speaking to Jewish audiences. “You’re not going to support me because I don’t want your money,” he announced to Sheldon Adelson’s Republican Jewish Coalition. Speaking to another right-wing Adelson-funded organization, the Israeli American Council, he opined, apparently thinking he was offering compliments: “You’re brutal killers, not nice people at all.” But Trump went on to predict, inaccurately, that Jews were “going to be my biggest supporters,” because, he said, Democrats were proposing to raise taxes on the super wealthy. Apparently he was unaware that by this time the vast majority of Jews had been voting for the party that supported the poor and working class for more than eighty years.4
The unmistakable tolerance and often unsubtle promotion of antisemitism by Trump and his allies in the Republican Party had a far darker side than this casual ribbing, however. They almost constantly stoked hatred toward the liberal Jewish billionaire philanthropist George Soros, for example, whom conservatives treated as an all-purpose bogeyman, often with exaggerated features in the traditional antisemitic fantasy of the Jew as puppet master. During the final days of the 2016 campaign, Trump ran a commercial attacking Soros, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, and Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen—all of them Jews—claiming they were seeking to control the world. During the 2018 midterm elections, House majority leader Kevin McCarthy warned on Twitter that Soros and his fellow Jewish billionaires Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer were trying “to BUY this election!” Fox Business Network host Lou Dobbs invited a guest to make the ridiculous argument that the (largely imaginary) migrant caravan supposedly about to “invade” the United States at its Mexican border was part of a plan hatched by the “Soros-occupied State Department.” This notion was picked up by his Fox colleague Maria Bartiromo, who asked, “Who do you think is behind these caravans? A lot of speculation that it was George Soros.” This led Congressman Louie Gohmert, a Texas Republican, to say, again on Fox News, that “the Democrats—perhaps Soros, others—may be funding this, thinking it’s going to help them.” These themes continued to figure prominently in Republican campaigns through all the national elections that followed 2016. The 2022 midterm elections, for instance, featured Republican candidates refusing to renounce supporters with neo-Nazi ties, employing antisemitic dog whistles, and attempting to blame George Soros for everything from crime to abortion to promoting a “globalist agenda, a new world order.”5
That right-wing antisemites were also enamored with Israel was hardly the contradiction it first appeared. First, many were evangelicals, who, as we have seen, had eschatological reasons for their affection for the Jewish state. Second, right-wingers admired Israel’s harsh treatment of its Muslim minority, those living under its occupation and those with whom it occasionally went to war. Trump himself credited Israel with its allegedly “unbelievable job” of internal racial profiling, adding that America demonstrated weakness in this area because “we’re trying to be so politically correct in our country and this is only going to get worse.” Third, right-wing nationalists have long combined their antisemitic beliefs with support for Zionism. The neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, recognized as a leader of US “alt-right” forces, explained, “You could say that I am a white Zionist in the sense that I care about my people, I want us to have a secure homeland for us and ourselves. Just like you want a secure homeland in Israel.”6
American Jews may have been offended by Trump—they voted approximately three to one against him in both 2016 and 2020—but Israelis polled the reverse. (The Americans felt that “Israelis insulted our former president, whom we loved; now you love our current president, whom we hate,” as two op-ed writers put it.) In Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu’s government did not mind the exploitation of antisemitic resentments in other countries—which, in the eyes of many Israelis, only strengthened their case that Jews belonged in Israel—and anyway, it was more than balanced out in fellow illiberal democracies by pro-Israel (really anti-Muslim) policies. When Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary made Soros public enemy number one in his 2018 reelection campaign, using Nazi-style graphics to demonize the eighty-seven-year-old Holocaust survivor, the Netanyahu government actually joined in the slander.7
Members of Netanyahu’s coalition were more than happy to run interference for Trump so long as he delivered for them on the things they really cared about. This became clear following the horrific October 27, 2018, mass murder at the Tree of Life synagogue in the Squirrel Hill section of Pittsburgh, when Trump announced that he would be visiting. Protesters marched through the neighborhood with signs containing messages such as “President Hate is not welcome in our state,” and the Tree of Life rabbi pleaded with Trump to please stay away. Trump didn’t care. He showed up anyway, and Israeli ambassador Ron Dermer flew in to meet him. Naftali Bennett, then the leader of Israel’s pro-settler Jewish Home Party and former minister of diaspora affairs (and later Netanyahu’s successor), took to Twitter to defend the president as well. He also felt it necessary to try to equate the far-right antisemitic murderer in Pittsburgh with Israel’s enemies in the Arab world, saying that “the hand that fires missiles is the same hand that shoots worshippers.”8
That a massive increase of antisemitic violence had accompanied Trump’s political rise was undeniable. An Anti-Defamation League report that happened to be released a day before the Tree of Life shooting found that before Trump’s 2016 election, antisemitic harassment of Jews was relatively rare. Afterward, however, it became a daily occurrence. The ADL estimated that about 3 million Twitter users posted or reposted at least 4.2 million antisemitic tweets in English in just Trump’s first year—a 57 percent increase in what it defined as antisemitic incidents. Of the tweets judged to be antisemitic, fully 80 percent came from the political right, and nearly 40 percent of these featured the pro-Trump hashtags #MAGA and #KAG. Here again, the Israelis ran interference for the president. When Trump and Netanyahu held a joint press conference in February 2017, an Israeli journalist mentioned the “rise in anti-Semitic incidents” since Trump’s election and asked whether his administration was “playing with xenophobia and maybe racist tones.” Trump gave a nonsensical response about his electoral college victory before pivoting to the fact that his daughter and son-in-law were Jews. Netanyahu immediately stepped in to swear that “there is no greater supporter of the Jewish people and the Jewish state than President Donald Trump.” Trump had not even been in office thirty days at the time. But just a few weeks earlier, in his remarks on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, he had somehow failed to mention the fact that any of the victims were Jews. (This is a favored tactic of “soft” Holocaust denialism.) Here, yet again, he found Netanyahu squarely in his corner. When asked about Trump’s conspicuous omission, the man who fancied himself the representative of all the world’s Jews could only repeat, “This man is a great friend of the Jewish people and the State of Israel.” American Jews’ concerns about him were therefore “misplaced.” Trump complemented these arguments in August 2019 by insisting that American Jews owed their allegiance not to the United States but to Israel. He called Netanyahu “your prime minister” and insisted that for a Jew to vote for a Democrat “shows either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty [to Israel].”9
Trump supporters tended to answer accusations of antisemitism with the typical “whataboutism” that characterizes so much of the debate on Jews and Israel-related topics. Rather than addressing the very real concerns about the president, his movement, and his party, they responded by accusing Democrats of coddling antisemites in their own ranks. The party had begun to welcome Muslims into its coalition and saw two of them elected to Congress: Michigan’s Rashida Tlaib, a daughter of Palestinian immigrants (with family still living in the West Bank), and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, a former Somali refugee. Both spoke about Israel in a fashion rarely, if ever, previously heard in Congress, creating an entirely new set of controversies.
By focusing her criticism on Israel’s American supporters, and doing so, on occasion, using language loaded with antisemitic tropes that she likely did not understand herself, Omar sometimes gave her allies heartburn and her enemies a sword. For instance, in 2019, it was discovered that back in 2012, she had tweeted that “Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel.” For some Jews, this language was especially offensive because the word “hypnotized” evoked medieval charges of occult powers. Another time, also in 2019, Omar told an audience, “I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is okay to push for allegiance to a foreign country.” AIPAC and the ADL typed the “dual loyalty” keys on their computers and pushed send. “The charge of dual loyalty not only raises the ominous specter of classic antisemitism, but it is also deeply insulting to the millions upon millions of patriotic Americans, Jewish and non-Jewish, who stand by our democratic ally, Israel,” AIPAC tweeted. “[Omar’s] comments were anti-Semitic. Accusing Jews of having allegiance to a foreign government has long been a vile anti-Semitic slur used to harass, marginalize and persecute the Jewish people for centuries,” wrote the ADL’s executive director, Jonathan Greenblatt. While being pilloried not only by Republicans and neoconservative pundits, but even many Democrats, Omar did what Republicans never did in such circumstances: she apologized. “I heard from Jewish orgs. that my use of the word ‘Hypnotize’ and the ugly sentiment it holds was offensive,” she tweeted. She also made it clear she was “disavowing the anti-Semitic trope I unknowingly used, which is unfortunate and offensive.” But this became a kind of pattern. Omar also said that support for Israel in Congress was “all about the Benjamins baby,” hip-hop slang for hundred-dollar bills, suggesting that Israel’s support was bought and paid for by AIPAC and its allies. Again, this was extremely clumsily articulated and definitely deserved an apology. But the reference to the Puff Daddy rap song lyric—and the 2002 buddy comedy starring Ice Cube—aside, in substance, what Omar was saying was not terribly different from what many Jews had long said themselves, usually in private, to one another. Back in 1980, Rita Hauser, a pro-Israel Republican lawyer, had warned in a Commentary magazine symposium that President Carter’s proposed campaign finance laws “eliminated the strongest weapon the Jewish community exercised in influencing the selection of nominees in both political parties.” (And subsequently, none other than Donald Trump would endorse Omar’s argument when, in November 2021, the ex-president expressed his regret over the passing of the days when Israel “literally owned Congress.”)10
Her apology notwithstanding, Omar continued to insist that the questions she sought to raise, however clumsily, demanded attention. “Because Rashida [Tlaib] and I are Muslim… a lot of our Jewish colleagues, a lot of our constituents, a lot of our allies, go to thinking that everything we say about Israel to be anti-Semitic because we are Muslim,” she observed. In addition to this being racist and unfair, she added, it meant that “nobody ever gets to have the broader debate of what is happening with Palestine. So for me, I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is okay for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country. And I want to ask, why is it okay for me to talk about the influence of the NRA, of fossil fuel industries, or Big Pharma, and not talk about a powerful lobby?”11
That the congresswoman had a point in both respects could not have been less relevant to the arguments she inspired. AIPAC launched a campaign against the two Muslim women that, much to the delight of Republicans, attempted to paint all Democrats in their ideological colors. During the 2020 presidential campaign, it produced an advertisement that featured two little girls wrapped in Israeli and American flags against a desert background. But this image was mixed in with frightening photos of the two Muslim representatives, while a voiceover accused “the radicals in the Democratic Party” of “pushing their anti-Semitic and anti-Israel policies down the throats of the American people.” Following an outcry, including announcements from Democratic presidential candidates Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders that they would be skipping AIPAC’s annual conference that year, the group backed off a bit. AIPAC said it was offering an “unequivocal apology to the overwhelming majority of Democrats in Congress who were rightfully offended by the inaccurate assertion that the poorly worded, inflammatory advertisement implies.” No apology, however, was forthcoming to Tlaib or Omar, and AIPAC continued its campaign against the two without pause in the coming years. It also began including Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Cori Bush (D-MO) in its attacks. All four were women of color as well as critics of Israel. And all of them started receiving death threats. Omar’s communications director, Jeremy Slevin, tweeted that “the language AIPAC uses in paid ads to smear and vilify [Omar] is virtually identical to the language used in death threats she gets.” But AIPAC was unmoved. Not only did the advertisements continue, but AIPAC sent out fund-raising emails specifically tied to its attacks on Omar, asking people to contribute funds so that it might continue its campaign.12
Republicans were largely spared such treatment. In 2019, for instance, the retired army colonel Douglas Macgregor offered the observation, during an interview, that Trump’s national security adviser at the time, John Bolton, had “become very, very rich and is in the position he’s in because of his unconditional support for the Israeli lobby.” He also said, of Trump’s secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, that he “has his hands out for money from the Israeli lobby.” In a previous appearance, seven years earlier, with Russian state television, he had credited AIPAC “and it’s [sic] subordinate elements or affiliated elements that represent enormous quantities of money” with amassing “enormous influence” and “power in Congress.” The White House had announced—rather incredibly—Macgregor’s appointment as US ambassador to Germany, but when his comments were made public, he was given the consolation prize of a job as a senior adviser to the acting secretary of defense. After leaving the administration, he was heard to complain that “Jews are just gonna destroy white power completely, and destroy America as a white country.” Nevertheless, he found himself frequently invited on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News program, where both men praised the actions of Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Despite all this, at least until he left the Trump administration, Macgregor’s vitriolic antisemitism rated nary a whisper among Jewish groups or in the mainstream media.13
Almost comical attempts to argue that antisemitism was present in both Republicans and Democrats in equal measure—the Beltway addiction to “bothsidesism”—followed. In January 2021, for example, American Jewish Committee CEO David Harris attempted to equate Omar’s criticisms of US policy toward Israel and the Palestinians with the lunatic ravings of the right-wing QAnon-spouting congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA). Rather than drawing attention to AIPAC’s heavy-handed tactics in Congress, Greene was concerned about Jewish-owned space lasers controlled by Jewish bankers—she specifically mentioned the Rothschilds—starting California wildfires. She was also upset with the survivors of the horrific 2018 Parkland school massacre in Florida, because, she said, they were lying in order to collect their payments from George Soros. Greene also shared videos in which Holocaust deniers explained how “Zionist supremacists have schemed to promote immigration and miscegenation.” That her lunatic beliefs appealed to so many Republicans is consistent with a fact that became obvious during the Trump presidency, that David Harris should have known, and that is backed up by a consistent set of survey data: that conservatives are more likely to hold antisemitic attitudes than liberals, with young conservatives, in particular, being the most likely to believe false stereotypes about Jews.14
No doubt the biggest concern among Israel’s supporters in the United States during the Trump administration was the rapid growth of the movement to “Boycott, Divest and Sanction” (BDS) Israel among college students and liberal and left-wing activists. Judged by its stated goals, the BDS movement was an abject failure. None of the groups that voted to support it had the power to influence divestment or US policy. Not a single major American university, corporation, or even labor union actually chose to boycott Israel. The effect on the Israeli economy of those scattered institutions that did endorse the idea was literally invisible. The BDS movement never did succeed in reaching enough Americans for even a remotely significant number of them to form an opinion on it. According to a Pew Research Center survey released in May 2022, just 5 percent of Americans questioned said they supported the movement (with 2 percent doing so “strongly”). Fully 84 percent said they had never heard of it. But what BDS “did not fail at,” as Samuel and Carol Edelman wrote in an essay collected in The Case Against Academic Boycotts of Israel, was inspiring “weeks, months, and even years of constant attacks against Israel, portraying it as a pariah nation, an occupier, a human rights violator, a racist nation, and a denier of Palestinian rights” on America’s college campuses. And its success—in this narrow but crucial venue for American Jews—could be judged in the profoundly disproportional backlash it created.15
The academic version of the BDS campaign was founded in 2005 by Omar Barghouti, then (ironically) a graduate student at Tel Aviv University. It called on all universities and related institutions to refuse to participate in any activities—whether conferences, classes, or journals—that enjoyed any institutional affiliation with the Israeli government until such time as the goals of the movement were met. But the actual goals of the BDS movement were never clearly defined, and hence always remained a matter of dispute. If one took Barghouti as a guide, his goal was most definitely not a “two-state solution,” but the replacement of Israel with a Palestine in which some, but not all, Jews would be allowed to remain. At various times, he called for, “at minimum, ending Israel’s 1967 occupation and colonization, ending Israel’s system of racial discrimination, and respecting the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their lands from which they were ethnically cleansed during the 1948 Nakba.” He went so far as to say, “I am completely and categorically against bi-nationalism because it assumes that there are two nations with equal moral claims to the land.” In 2013 he proclaimed that “no Palestinian—rational Palestinian, not a sell-out Palestinian—will ever accept a Jewish state in Palestine.”16
The movement’s greatest weakness was its inability to craft a credible theory of meaningful success. The official BDS website calls not only for the unrestricted right of return for all Palestinian refugees, but also an end to the “occupation and colonization of all Arab lands,” again meaning the end of the state of Israel as founded in 1948. Understood literally, it demanded that the Israeli people turn over their country to their sworn enemies. Just how they might be convinced to do so, however, was a question for which BDS adherents had no coherent response. Was the very same US government that had backed Israel to the hilt in virtually every conflict it had ever had with the Palestinians now going to reverse its entire foreign policy and force Israel to dismantle itself? When pressed on such issues, BDS proponents invariably changed the subject to the successful example of the global boycott of South Africa. Pressed further, however, on the many fundamental differences between contemporary Israel and late twentieth-century South Africa, and the myriad reasons why success in one could hardly guarantee success in the other, all practical discussion tended to be replaced by rhetorical tropes such as the need to be on “the right side of history.”17
The inability of the movement’s leaders to think strategically mirrored a fundamental tension at the heart of the Palestinians’ historical struggle. Its leaders sometimes act, in the words of US State Department and National Security Council official Robert Malley, as if they see themselves as avatars of “a national liberation movement, whose leaders are militants, whose objective is independence and whose main currency is resistance.” At other times, however, they view themselves as heading a “political party, whose leaders are statesmen, whose objective is institution-building, and whose main currency is negotiations.” BDS served the former goal even as it simultaneously undermined the latter. It had no means to improve the material conditions of the lives of the Palestinians who were forced to live in refugee camps, under occupation, in exile, or even under discriminatory conditions inside Israel. Its practical energies were exclusively devoted to inspiring a popular movement to consistently condemn Israel. It had no plan beyond that.18
The movement’s focus on college students and academics created another set of complications. By demanding a boycott of Israeli scholars, BDS adherents sought to undermine the fundamental purpose of a university: the unimpeded pursuit of knowledge and enlightenment. Although they argued that they did not seek to suppress individual Israeli voices, only those who represented its government, practically speaking this was a distinction without a difference. When academics travel abroad to attend conferences and seminars, they do so with university funds. Given the fact that virtually all Israeli universities are publicly funded, Israeli academics became automatic targets for silencing. In pursuing this line of protest, the movement ended up trying to silence the very Israelis who were likely to be among the country’s most vocal supporters of Palestinian dignity and independence. And yet, despite these contradictions, the movement grew like kudzu among progressive student groups and faculty organizations on the nation’s most elite college campuses—as illustrated by its endorsement by Harvard’s student newspaper, The Crimson, in April 2022, in an editorial by the paper’s editorial board. This naturally led to considerable panic among Jewish parents, college administrators, and the sorts of people who worried about the views of America’s future leaders.19
The BDS movement’s greatest success was likely achieved among university faculty associations and student governments. The American Studies Association’s 2013 BDS endorsement was followed by ones from the Association for Asian American Studies, the African Literature Association, the Critical Ethnic Studies Association, the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, the Middle East Studies Association, and many others. Dozens of student governments also endorsed the campaign at a rapid pace (and are likely continuing to do so as you are reading this book). “Israel Apartheid Week” became an annual event on many campuses.
Ironically, the ambiguity of the movement’s aims, as well as its cloudy-to-the-point-of-nonexistent theory of change, would turn out to be one of its great strengths, especially on campus. In this respect, together with some of its tactics, the movement recalled the heyday of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA). During the 1930s and 1940s, countless CPUSA members believed they were fighting for racial equality, peaceful relations between nations, and an end to the threat of nuclear annihilation. Its leaders, however, were interested merely in discrediting the United States in Europe and the third world as they built up the reputation of Stalin and his murderous minions. Now, countless young people on campus understood themselves to be marching and chanting for the dignity of the Palestinians and a peaceful end to the brutality inherent in Israel’s occupation, unaware that the movement’s leaders sought the end of Israel entirely (and, in many cases, such as Barghouti’s, the expulsion of most of its Jewish inhabitants). The movement’s idealistic varnish no doubt attracted garden-variety student leftists similar to those of earlier generations that had protested earlier US policies, such as those relating to Southeast Asia, Central America, or South Africa. Unfortunately, BDS adherents also borrowed tactics from the communists on occasion, winning votes and taking over academic organizations in the proverbial dead of night, by scheduling campus-wide debates and student government resolutions on or near Jewish holidays, thereby making it impossible for many Jews to participate.
Rather than communism, or even Marxism of any variety, the movement relied on the theory of “intersectionality,” which, by the early 2000s, had grown extremely popular among campus and other leftists. Originally developed by the legal scholar Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw—and consistent with, if not a direct successor to, Edward Said’s “Orientalism”—intersectionality provided a “lens through which you can see where power comes and collides, where it interlocks and intersects.” What this theory meant in practice was a responsibility on the part of progressives to support not only the causes that inspired them personally, but also those of peoples deemed to be “oppressed” by the dominant group or ideology—a category in which Palestinians were all but universally understood to qualify. It was an ideal theory for a college seminar room in which students could draw connections to different forms of perceived oppression and sound out connections between them that appeared both morally and intellectually compelling. As a strategic foundation for political action, however, it was a disaster. Because each cause was really about every other cause, it paralyzed adherents from devoting the time and effort to understand, and therefore attempt to address, the dynamics that drove each one. Moreover, it often prevented speakers from sticking to anyone subject. The problem of Zionist “settler colonialism” intertwined with US racial oppression and stolen land from Native Americans, US-Western capitalism despoiling the earth as it simultaneously propped up white supremacy across the globe. When “everything” matters, then nothing is likely to get done. Attention, after all, is a limited resource in the best of times. In the immediate matter of the summer of 2020, however, when the Black Lives Matter movement exploded across the country, Trump supporters used the support voiced by movement spokespeople for the BDS movement to attempt to discredit it among the larger Jewish community.20
Back in 2016, fifty Black organizations meeting under the BLM umbrella had accused Israel of pursuing “genocide” against Palestinians. “Being committed to a fight for global freedom, we saw no choice, really, to not include a critique of the way the U.S. enables the state-sanctioned killing on [sic] an occupation of black and brown people globally across the diaspora,” explained Janae Bonsu, one of the drafters of the BLM platform. “Our freedom fight knows no borders, so that has to include unequivocal support for the Palestinian struggle for freedom and peace.” Many found it significant that members of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, which had violently suppressed a protest in Ferguson, Missouri, following the 2014 police shooting (twelve times) of Michael Brown, an unarmed Black teenager, had been trained in “crowd control” in Israel (as part of an ADL-sponsored program that would be put on pause in 2002 owing to its “high risk, low reward”). So when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez compared the police violence directed toward Black protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, to Israel firing at demonstrators on its border with Gaza, she was tapping into a rich history that had tied together supporters of Black Lives Matter and Palestinian solidarity groups—one that included large numbers of young Jews who had become increasingly disaffected with and alienated from Israel.21
BDS supporters found themselves denounced and shunned (and then denounced again) by all the remotely mainstream Jewish organizations, with the partial exception of J Street, which was itself denied membership in the President’s Conference, and T’ruah. The typical response among Jewish leaders and their funders was to create a new group, or an offshoot of their old ones, specifically dedicated to fighting BDS on campus. “Funders,” explained Kenneth Stern, speaking of his experience working at the American Jewish Committee, “who were parents and grandparents of college students, were deeply concerned about anti-Israel activity on campus,” and they wanted the organizations they supported to do something to counteract it. But because these organizations remained committed to the mythical Exodus narrative of a nearly flawless Israel, they could not really enter the discussion in a way in which their arguments were likely to be convincing. One reason for this handicap was, yet again, a question of money. A number of anti-BDS organizations, including Aish Hatorah, an Orthodox group that sponsors trips to Israel for college students, and gives them lessons in hasbara (Israeli propaganda) to help them argue the case for Israel back home, as The Forward revealed in 2019, were secretly receiving funding from the Israeli government, which had allotted millions to the cause and fought court battles to keep this information secret. Curiously, one of the largest gifts, $1.3 million, was bestowed on John Hagee’s Christians United for Israel. Even more remarkably, Sheldon Adelson had chosen to pony up over $22 million to the “Maccabee Task Force,” with CUFI’s former chief, David Brog, at its helm. The Israelis added insult to injury by publishing dossiers on pro-BDS activists and stopping rabbis, professors, and even Peter Beinart at Ben-Gurion Airport for questioning. On occasion Israeli authorities even expelled such visitors—thereby further diminishing the nation’s reputation for respecting free expression and democratic debate.22
A few Jewish groups, including the anonymously authored Canary Mission, began sending out blacklists of professors and even students believed to support BDS. The explicit goal was to intimidate them into silence, for fear of being denied jobs and scholarships. In June 2017, following the annual “Celebrate Israel” parade in Manhattan, then minister of strategic affairs Gilad Erdan announced the launch of a new digital campaign, replete with a phone app that students could use to report on unfavorable comments made by their professors or fellow students about Israel. The app, developed by the Interdisciplinary Centre in Herzliya, together with the Israeli-American Council and the Maccabee Task Force—all three of which were funded by Sheldon Adelson—included a prewritten note complaining to deans and other university personnel. Meanwhile, Canary Mission accused BDS enthusiasts on campus of “defending terror-financiers,” “spreading anti-Semitism,” and “supporting violent protesters.” It began publishing BDS supporters’ names and photos with the explicit goal of destroying their professional future. In 2021, Natalie Abulhawa, a young athletic trainer who had been targeted by the Canary Mission, was fired by the Agnes Irwin School, an All-Girls College Preparatory School near Philadelphia, after members of the school’s community raised concerns over pro-Palestine social media posts. A year later she remained unemployed. “It is your duty,” its website proudly announced, “to ensure that today’s radicals are not tomorrow’s employees.”23
Jewish and Israel studies professors did not need to be told not to invite pro-BDS speakers to their campuses, even for the purpose of debate with Israel supporters. And if they had any thoughts otherwise, there were more than enough private funders—or university personnel who dealt with private funders—to set them straight. At publicly funded universities, local officials often found BDS events an irresistible target. At Brooklyn College, New York State assemblyman Dov Hikind—who represented a district heavily populated by ultra-Orthodox Jewish constituents—demanded the resignation of the school’s president because of her willingness to allow a joint lecture by BDS founder Omar Barghouti and the pro-BDS literary scholar Judith Butler. Inspired by a lengthy document compiled by the far-right Zionist Organization of America, and filled with falsehoods, exaggerations, and McCarthyite insinuations, New York state legislators sought to radically cut back funding for Brooklyn’s parent institution, the City University of New York (CUNY). The tactic appeared on the verge of success until a way to have the cut deleted from the final legislation was found in a last-minute budget agreement with Governor Andrew Cuomo. This was only one of many assaults on CUNY related to the issue, however. The university has proven willing to protect free speech while simultaneously seeking to discourage students and faculty from raising the question repeatedly. A similarly farcical set of events could be found at the University of California, orchestrated—ultimately unsuccessfully—by another right-wing Jewish organization, the “AMCHA Initiative.” (“AMCHA,” the group’s website explains, “is the Hebrew word meaning ‘your people’ and also connotes ‘grassroots,’ ‘the masses,’ and ‘ordinary people.’”)24
The fight naturally extended to Congress. While Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib were the only Democratic representatives to endorse the BDS movement during the Trump administration, most Democrats felt a need to tread around it cautiously. BDS supporters were often the same politically dedicated activists who volunteered for election campaigns and registered people to vote in primaries—the very people candidates needed to win elections. BDS opponents even succeeded in destroying—at least temporarily at this writing—the Constitutional protection that boycotts have long enjoyed as “free speech,” going back to the nation’s founding, when a three-judge panel of the Federal court’s 8th Circuit ruled that the state of Arkansas had the right to demand that anyone who worked for, or did business with the state of Arkansas, must sign a pledge to refuse to adhere to the boycott or forfeit twenty percent of their compensation. The decision was celebrated by the American Jewish Committee, which had celebrated numerous boycotts in the past.25
The debate spilled into social media, of course, as well as other media. Facebook admitted to suppressing posts from people supporting BDS or criticizing Israel’s human rights record. In the mainstream media, no prominent political columnist publicly supported BDS. When, in 2018, the African American CNN commentator Mark Lamont used the BDS slogan in a speech at a United Nations event and called for a “free Palestine from the river to the sea,” the ADL condemned him for allegedly “promot[ing] divisiveness and hate.” He was immediately fired by CNN. In 2021, a young Associated Press reporter found herself fired as well, owing, apparently, to blogposts she had made as a member of Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine while a student at Stanford University—though the issues she covered for AP had nothing to do with the Middle East. The Israelis were so concerned about budding support for Palestinians on campus that, on occasion, their diplomats were known to contact college administrators to try to prevent pro-BDS professors—and even graduate students—from being allowed to teach courses on the conflict.26
In both 2017 and 2019, congressional representatives, working with AIPAC, introduced a bill condemning BDS. It eventually passed in the House by a vote of 398–17, with a companion bill passing 77–23 in the Senate, though the two were never conferenced and enacted into law. Omar responded with a bill affirming the “right to participate in boycotts in pursuit of civil and human rights at home and abroad.” It attracted only six cosponsors, but these included the revered civil rights leader John Lewis (D-GA). It also enjoyed the endorsements of both J Street and the American Civil Liberties Union, among other liberal groups. Republicans, predictably, used the legislation as yet another cudgel with which to beat Democrats over the head for alleged softness on antisemitism. Marco Rubio (R-FL) lambasted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for “allow[ing] the radical, anti-Semitic minority in the Democratic Party to dictate the House floor agenda.”27
Donald Trump naturally jumped into the BDS fray as well. In December 2019, the president signed an executive order empowering the US Department of Education to add discrimination on the basis of “religion” to the categories of offenses that allowed the government to withhold funds from a college or educational program under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, a right-wing extremist, had appointed Kenneth Marcus, a dedicated right-wing anti-BDS activist, to be her civil rights chief. Within days of the order’s announcement, two extremely sensitive former Columbia University students, with impressively long memories, filed legal action under the new rules. The first, Jonathan Karten, complained of, among other things, a report about an alleged speech by the Palestinian American professor Joseph Massad given at Oxford University seventeen years earlier. The second, by Jaimie Kreitman, addressed the “hostility and toxicity” Kreitman said she had experienced while a grad student sometime during the 1980s. Apparently, “a professor thought that [her] thesis was completely subjective and that it wasn’t worthy of a graduate’s level.”28
The Trump administration’s Title VI change was not designed to prevent any actual discrimination. Jewish students already had all the protections they needed under the act’s coverage of discrimination on the basis of a “group’s actual or perceived ancestry or ethnic characteristics,” or “actual or perceived citizenship or residency in a country whose residents share a dominant religion or a distinct religious identity.” The principal drafter of the order’s definition of discrimination, Kenneth Stern, denounced its deployment and predicted that “students and faculty members will be scared into silence.” While there definitely were incidents that raised genuine concern about antisemitic harassment on some campuses, the alleged remedy—as well as the rhetoric that accompanied it—was entirely inconsistent with the scope of the problem. In 2017, four scholars at Brandeis University conducted an in-depth study of the issue at four high-profile campuses and found that “Jewish students are rarely exposed to antisemitism on campus,” and that “Jewish students do not think their campus is hostile to Jews.” Further, they wrote, “the majority of students disagree that there is a hostile environment toward Israel on campus,” and “support for BDS is rare.” They concluded that “Israel and Jews are not a top concern for students.” Scholars associated with the Jewish studies program at Stanford University found a similar picture of campus life among six California campuses. Students interviewed “reported low levels of antisemitism or discomfort,” and by and large agreed that they “felt comfortable as Jews” on campus. “When they did encounter discomfort, they traced it either to the carelessness of student speech or to tensions within campus debates about the Israel-Palestine conflict.” But “they held both supporters and critics of Israel responsible for creating this environment.”29
Back in the halls of power in Washington and Jerusalem, it was difficult to determine where Donald Trump’s Middle East policies ended and Benjamin Netanyahu’s wish list began. Past US presidents had at least tried to negotiate with, and sometimes even threaten, Israeli leaders before (eventually) giving in. Regarding the Palestinians, they had often sought to restrain Israel from doing anything that would make peace unachievable under any circumstance, even if they proved reluctant to pressure Israel to take any immediate steps toward a peaceful resolution of the conflict. Not so Donald Trump.
Trump’s extraordinary largesse to the Israelis was due in part to the similarities in how he and Benjamin Netanyahu viewed the world. While the Israeli leader did not indulge all of Trump’s most bizarre beliefs and personality quirks, the two men shared a remarkable number of both personal and political prejudices. Both politicians were profoundly corrupt, even compared to their respective colleagues and predecessors, and each sought desperately to cling to power while faced with the possibility of being imprisoned in the event of political defeat for the various crimes they appeared to have committed (in Netanyahu’s case, while in office, and in Trump’s both in and out of office). Both leaders also displayed degrees of racism, nativism, and ethnocentrism that were considered extreme even by the standards of the racist, nativist, and ethnocentric parties they led. Politically, both were aspiring authoritarians who were eager to forge alliances with fellow illiberal politicians consolidating power based on ethnonationalist appeals in places such as Russia, Turkey, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, the Philippines, Brazil, Egypt, Oman, Azerbaijan, the Gulf states, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere. Neither evinced any patience, much less respect, for democratic niceties such as freedom of speech, freedom of the press, or the separation of powers. The fact that so many of the regimes they courted engaged in the exploitation of antisemitism at home for political gain was, at least for Netanyahu, more than offset by their more intense focus on the Islamic threat they believed they faced from their own citizens, the refugees flooding their borders, and the fiery rhetoric emanating from Iran and elsewhere that led those regimes to wish to work with Israel. Common enemies bred friendships of convenience. Netanyahu repeatedly excused Trump’s antisemitism and that of his political allies. So did Trump’s Jewish Republican supporters, who were willing to make the same tradeoff that had appealed to the neoconservatives of a previous generation, when they had chosen to embrace antisemitic but pro-Zionist evangelical preachers beginning in the 1970s. As long as Trump was willing to indulge Netanyahu, they were willing to indulge Trump.30
On a personal, psychological level, both leaders were also paranoid, pathologically dishonest, and eager to blame others when the natural consequences of their actions eventually manifested themselves. Each tacitly encouraged violence against political adversaries. It is an intriguing coincidence that both Netanyahu and Trump lived much of their respective lives beneath the shadow of a powerful father figure whose prejudices they each apparently inherited. Netanyahu’s father, Benzion Netanyahu, had treated all of Jewish history as a march from one Holocaust to another; Trump’s real-estate mogul father had attended a Ku Klux Klan rally and consistently discriminated against Black home buyers and renters. Both Trump and Netanyahu were also, not surprisingly, essentially friendless, insisting on unstinting loyalty from cronies and colleagues but showing none in return.31
This convergence was exclusively a matter of political convenience rather than any shared affection between the two men, and Trump became furious with Netanyahu when the Israeli failed to endorse his efforts to steal the 2020 election. Trump dismissed Netanyahu in a December 2021 interview with the words, “I haven’t spoken to him since. Fuck him.” But it was not Netanyahu whom Trump was seeking to please with his embrace of the Israel leader’s wish list. Rather, it was his base, which, when it came to Israel, was made up almost exclusively of evangelical Christians and Sheldon Adelson.32
Adelson donated an estimated $426 million to Donald Trump and the Republican Party between 2016 and 2020 to buy support for Israel’s right-wing government, and this was one sale on which Trump can honestly say he delivered. Upon becoming president, he appointed David Friedman and Jason Greenblatt to carry out US Israel policy under the watchful eye of his Jewish son-in-law, Jared Kushner. All three had worked with (or for) Trump in the real estate business before taking on these responsibilities, and none of them had any experience in diplomacy or specialized knowledge of the Middle East. Their only qualifications for their jobs in the administration were their relationships to Trump and their support for Jewish extremist organizations.
For instance, Friedman, a bankruptcy lawyer, had previously suggested that unless Arab citizens of Israel decided “to support the state,” Israel should reconsider its policy of “bestowing upon them the benefits of citizenship.” He considered liberal Jews to be “smug advocates of Israel’s destruction,” and compared J Street to “Kapos during the Nazi regime”—that is, the Jews who aided in their own genocide. Trump also appointed former congressman Mike Pompeo (R-KS), an evangelical Christian Zionist who believed Christianity to be engaged in a “holy war” with Islam, as his CIA director, and then as secretary of state. It was no coincidence that when Pompeo campaigned for Trump while on official duty during the 2020 election—a violation of the federal Hatch Act’s limits on partisan political activity, according to the State Department’s Office of Special Counsel—he did so by giving a partisan speech at the Republican National Convention from Jerusalem.33
Kushner, meanwhile, by far the most important and influential among the group, had grown up in a family that was intimately tied up with funding the settler movement. It was not merely that Israel was seeking to deepen its relationship with the Gulf states, and particularly with Saudi Arabia, during Trump’s presidency that led to Kushner’s interest in the region. He was also indebted to Middle East financial institutions for stepping in with hundreds of millions of dollars to save his family’s real estate business while he served in the White House. Moreover, he was apparently planning to raise additional capital in the region in his post–White House career for an investment fund he began shortly after his father-in-law lost the 2020 election. The size and scope of Kushner’s payoff was revealed, however, in April 2022, when the New York Times broke the news that the Saudi sovereign wealth fund had agreed to funnel at least $2 billion to Kushner’s new firm, Affinity Partners. In return, the Saudis received not only nearly 40 percent off of the firm’s regular management fees, but an additional “stake of at least 28 percent” of Kushner’s firm. Kushner got the money despite the fact that a panel charged with screening its investments, especially investments of this magnitude, “cited concerns.” According to the Times, “those objections included ‘the inexperience of the Affinity Fund management’; the possibility that the kingdom would be responsible for ‘the bulk of the investment and risk’; due diligence on the fledgling firm’s operations that found them ‘unsatisfactory in all aspects’; a proposed asset management fee that ‘seems excessive’; and ‘public relations risks.’” These warnings were cast aside, however, by the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), who ultimately exercises control over the fund. Hardly coincidentally, President Trump was heard to brag to a reporter about the lengths to which he went to prevent Congress from holding MBS accountable for the brutal murder and dismemberment of US-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi, when he said, as Bob Woodward reported in his book Rage, “I saved his ass. I was able to get Congress to leave him alone. I was able to get them to stop.” As the Times also noted, “Mr. Kushner played a leading role inside the Trump administration defending Crown Prince Mohammed after U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that he had approved the 2018 killing and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi,… who had criticized the kingdom’s rulers.” To complete the circle, in May 2022, the Wall Street Journal revealed Kushner’s plans to invest “millions of dollars of Saudi Arabia’s money in Israeli startups.” (The Israeli government and its supporters in the US lobbying community had been energetically lobbying both Congress and the Trump administration, and later its successor, to ignore the killing and proceed to deepen its ties with the Saudis; software tracking the victim’s phone was later discovered to be that of the Israeli spy company Pegasus.)34
These were just a few of the blessings Trump bestowed on Israel during his one term as president. Others included:
• The transfer of the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
• Recognition of Israeli sovereignty, just before Netanyahu faced an election vote, over the Golan Heights, making the United States the only nation to do so (despite a unanimous 1982 Security Council resolution, which included the United States, that termed Israel’s annexation of the territory to be “null and void and without international legal effect”), and the encouragement of what would turn out to be, according to Peace Now, a 63 percent increase in settlement construction during Trump’s presidency. (It was Republican President George W. Bush who declared, on June 4, 2009, that “the United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. This construction violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace.”)
• The end of the official use of the term “occupied territories” and an end to the US practice of labeling its products as such, rather than as coming from “Israel” itself.
• The February 2020 presentation of Jared Kushner’s comically biased “peace plan,” which invited Israel to annex some 20 percent of the West Bank and maintain full control over security, borders, and air space, thereby ensuring a permanent occupation of the West Bank and the enshrinement of what numerous human rights organizations have termed “apartheid.”
• A cutoff of all aid to, and official US government communications with, the Palestinian Authority.
• The closing of the US consulate in East Jerusalem that had served Palestinians since 1844 (in breach of the 1995 Oslo II agreement) and the forced shuttering of the PLO’s offices in Washington.
• Massive arms sales to Israel and continued and intensified support for repressive Gulf Arab monarchies in the UAE and Bahrain, as well as an endorsement of Morocco’s territorial claims over the occupied Western Sahara in contravention of long-standing US policy, UN Security Council resolutions and a decades-long independence campaign by the Polisario Front.
• Unilateral US withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran (commonly known as the Iran nuclear deal).
• Strong support for anti-BDS legislation, especially that related to shutting down campus speech critical of Israel.
• The willingness—though his administration did not succeed before time ran out—to define human rights organizations that criticized Israel as “antisemitic.”
• A Presidential Medal of Freedom (the United States’ highest honor) for Miriam Adelson.35
Many Israel partisans had long argued that if only the United States fully allied itself with Israel’s aims and showed the Palestinians and the Arab nations that they could not rely on US pressure to force Israeli concessions, Palestinians would finally realize that it was time to make the best peace deal possible and give up their unrealistic dreams of replacing the Jewish state and returning to their (now nonexistent) ancestral homes. Trump’s policies did make significant progress in winning Israel the recognition of a group of Arab nations that shared an enemy (Iran) and could mostly be bought off with promises of generous US military aid and weapons sales—and, in the case of Morocco, an endorsement of its territorial claims. The agreements were promoted as the “Abraham Accords,” and American Jews could not help but celebrate this important advance in Israel’s acceptance in the region. But an Israeli/Palestinian peace deal was never further away from realization than following Trump’s unilateral concessions.
According to a number of military and intelligence specialists in Israel and the United States, including Gadi Eisenkot, former head of the Israel Defense Forces; Danny Citrinowicz, who headed the Iran Branch of IDF’s Military Intelligence Research and Analysis Division; former Mossad chief Yossi Cohen; and former defense minister Moshe Ya’alon, the US withdrawal from the JCPOA was a mistake—as Ya’alon put it, “the main mistake of the last decade.” Iran was released from all restrictions and international inspections—rules with which it had appeared to be complying. Absent the robust inspection regime that had been in place under the agreement, Iran—which continued to adhere to the accord long after the United States itself had violated its terms—was finally left to improve its nuclear program with more efficient cascades of centrifuges and uranium stockpiles at higher capacities. It also achieved far greater levels of both decentralization and clandestine activity, which enabled Iranians to make their nuclear facilities increasingly invulnerable to attack. In June 2022, the Israeli news site Ynet reported that several Israeli generals, including the chief of Military Intelligence, had also argued in favor of a return to the pact. The macho posturing of Trump and Netanyahu in torching the accord succeeded only in creating a far more ominous threat to Israel from Iran than would have been the case had the United States stuck with the Obama administration’s negotiated agreement. The Obama deal had kept Iran’s nuclear capabilities in check. This is among the reasons, no doubt, why the American Jewish Committee CEO, David Harris, argued for a US attack on Iran in late December 2021, just as Netanyahu had consistently done throughout Trump’s presidency, according to the (officially vetted) memoir of ex–US defense secretary Mark Esper. Meanwhile, a number of other Jewish leaders, echoing a statement crafted by former general and CIA director David Petraeus, former secretary of defense Leon Panetta, and others, called for “high-profile military exercises by the U.S. Central Command, potentially in concert with allies and partners, that simulate what would be involved in such a significant operation, including releasing air-to-ground attacks on hardened targets,” should Iran continue on its post-agreement path.36
Virtually none of the “pro-Israel” hardliners who originally advocated these policies proved willing to admit their error, and it’s unlikely that Trump even concerned himself with what his unprecedented indulgence of Israel might or might not achieve. What he did likely understand, however, was the fact that this policy of consistent concession would appeal to many of the increasingly conservative and politically active 10 percent of American Jews who, like Friedman, Greenblatt, and Kushner, identified as Orthodox and were now voting Republican. But while their numbers were increasing, they were not yet sufficiently numerous to carry much weight politically. Indeed, the vast majority of American Jews would grow even more supportive of the deal, reaching a figure of 68 percent in support restoring it according to a poll of 800 registered Jewish voters undertaken in the spring of 2022. This support came as both AIPAC and the Israeli government were gearing up to amass yet another campaign, this time to try to prevent the US from reversing the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the accord, albeit under necessarily considerably less favorable terms. Far more likely is that Trump and company had two specific political targets in mind. One was quite obviously Sheldon Adelson and the hundreds of millions of dollars he committed to the cause. But the second, no less significant target was the evangelical Christian population that made up the most loyal component of Trump’s base, and whose 2020 voting pattern matched the polling preferences of Israelis in supporting the president. (Numerous conservative Christian groups—not only Hagee’s CUFI, but also countless others, including relatively unknown ones such as the United States–Israel Education Association, based in Alabama—had long been in the business of ferrying US representatives to the West Bank and helping to lobby for support for the settlements there.)37
Saying the quiet part out loud once again, Trump complained at an August 2020 campaign rally that while he had moved the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem “for the evangelicals,” he found it “amazing that—the evangelicals are more excited by that than Jewish people. It’s incredible.” More than a year after he left office, he was still evincing shock, telling an interviewer that he found it “incredible” how little Jewish support he received. His explanation was that “Jewish people in this country, many of them, do not like Israel.” Had he been even slightly self-aware, Trump might have considered the fact that one of the people he had invited to the Jerusalem embassy ceremony was Pastor Robert Jeffress, who taught his followers that because Jews had allegedly “led people away from God,” they would, like Muslims, unfortunately, end up “in a pit of Hell.”38
During a spirited 2020 Democratic primary campaign, the second- and third-place challengers, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, attacked AIPAC and embraced policies conditioning US aid to Israel on a demand for better behavior. But in the end, former vice president Joe Biden brought the party back to its previous ambivalently pro-Israel position. Its election platform eschewed the word “occupation.” It denounced the goals of the BDS movement but reluctantly agreed that it qualified as constitutionally protected speech. It opposed the expansion of Israeli settlements but praised Jerusalem as the “undivided” capital of Israel. Biden won the historically typical three-quarters-plus of American Jewish votes.
Meanwhile, a group called the Democratic Majority for Israel raised millions of dollars, first to attack Sanders—ironically, the only Jew in the race, and certainly the only presidential candidate who ever worked on an Israeli kibbutz—during the presidential primaries, and then to try to intervene at the local level to defeat pro-Palestinian candidates, whom it accused of seeking to “sow hatred of Israel.” These efforts failed in almost every case. Omar and Tlaib were returned to Congress. Despite his seniority as chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Representative Eliot Engel of New York—who had voted with Netanyahu rather than with Obama on the Iran deal—lost in a landslide to Jamal Bowman, who eagerly joined the admittedly tiny “squad” of representatives led by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that insisted on challenging the party’s seventy-year policy of deference to Israel.39
Bibi Netanyahu greeted Biden’s presidency with a brazen assassination of Iran’s top nuclear scientist. This was followed by the announcement (later reversed by his successor) of yet another massive expansion of housing units in the West Bank and East Jerusalem in locations chosen, as if by design, to make it all but impossible to implement any sort of two-state solution that might be acceptable to Palestinians at any time in the future. (Fully 600 of the 2,600 proposed units would have been in Palestinian territory even under Jared Kushner’s biased proposals.) The IDF expanded the scope of its military exercises into Palestinian areas it had deliberately avoided for the previous seven years, ignoring earlier promises to allow their inhabitants to live their lives in relative peace.40
The Biden administration’s response was that there would be no conditioning of aid to Israel; no thought of moving the embassy from Jerusalem; no reconsideration of the arms sales or other concessions made by Trump to support Arab recognition of Israel; and no overt pressure on Israel to take any steps to move toward peace with the Palestinians. Meanwhile, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, Biden’s choice to be US ambassador to the United Nations, made the administration’s promised priorities clear at her confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when she affirmed that the United States would be “standing against the unfair targeting of Israel, the relentless resolutions that are proposed against Israel unfairly.” “It goes without saying,” she said, “that Israel has no closer friend than the United States and I will reflect that in my actions at the United Nations.”41
The Democratic Party, according to poll after poll, was now evenly divided on whether to root for Israel or the Palestinians in their never-ending conflict. Its younger members leaned heavily in the direction of the Palestinians, while seventy-eight-year-old Joe Biden kept his feet planted firmly in the party’s pro-Israel past. But below the presidential level, among Democrats, liberals, young Jews, and even young evangelicals, the foundations that had always undergirded America’s support for Israel had grown decidedly shaky—a problem for Biden and company that would only grow in size and scope as his presidency progressed.