The Trump right’s pro-Israel antisemitism

Over and over again, the Trump administration has claimed to be fighting antisemitism while wielding power against its domestic enemies. Yet, at the same time, there’s been a troubling surge in antisemitism among MAGA influencers and even some Trump administration staff.

Columbia “has fundamentally failed to protect American students and faculty from antisemitic violence and harassment,” the Trump administration wrote in a March 13 letter to the university. The administration is threatening to expand this funding cutoff, investigating over 60 universities and colleges on suspicion of tolerating or encouraging antisemitism.

Top MAGA podcasters like Joe Rogan and Theo Von have hosted prominent right-wingers like Candace Owens, who has a long track record of embracing antisemitic ideas, and Ian Carroll, who has blamed Israel for 9/11 (and spread many other antisemitic conspiracy theories), for friendly chats. Both Rogan and Tucker Carlson, arguably the two biggest media stars on the Trumpy right, have taped episodes with Hitler apologist Darryl Cooper.

It’s gotten so bad that even Christopher Rufo, one of the movement’s leading lights, recently admitted that the right has an “antisemitic influencer problem,” warning his comrades that they are being infected by a “poison” that must be rejected for the good of the movement.

So is the Trump administration friendly to Jews, as they claim, or threatening to us? The answer is that it depends on what kind of Jew you are — or, perhaps, where you live. The MAGA right’s approach can best be described as “pro-Israel antisemitism”: a simultaneous embrace of the Jewish state and attack on American Jews’ place in American life.

Over the years, pro-Israel antisemitism has quietly become an essential part of the MAGA movement. And its rise augurs nothing good for American Jews.

I first encountered the term “pro-Israel antisemitism” in a 2021 paper by Jelena Subotić, a political scientist at Georgia State University. Subotić is interested in what she calls “the populist international” — the web of far-right populist parties in Western democracies ranging from France’s National Rally to PiS in Poland. Subotić’s focus on the European far-right is important, as they are the originators of the pro-Israel antisemitism that’s now made its way to America.

On a continent deeply shaped by the legacy of the Holocaust, far-right parties needed a shield against charges that they were neo-Nazis in sheep’s clothing. At the same time, they recognized that hostility to Jews remains a powerful force among subsections of the European population, particularly amid a section of their own base.

So parties like Germany’s AfD and Hungary’s Fidesz developed an insidious three-step maneuver:

The central role of pro-Israel rhetoric in this three-step has produced what Subotić calls a “decoupling” of what was once seen as tightly linked issues: support for Israel abroad and Jews domestically.

One striking example of this decoupling is Germany’s AfD, the deeply anti-Muslim far-right party that placed second in Germany’s national elections in February. The party has long taken a strongly pro-Israel position: After October 7, for example, it called on the German government to cut off funding to Palestinians. Its top figure, Alice Weidel, blasted “a deeply vested antisemitism within the leftish [anti-Israel] movement” in a January interview with Musk.

Yet the party has direct links to white nationalists and neo-Nazis, to the point where it has been put under surveillance by German intelligence.

Björn Höcke, a Weidel ally and the leader of the party’s extremist wing, has been fined twice for using a Nazi slogan in his speeches. Another AfD parliamentarian claimed a German Jewish organization was “using Islam to bring about multicultural relations.” Jews in Germany are increasingly scared: The International Auschwitz Committee, a Berlin-based anti-hate group founded by Holocaust survivors, has warned that “the AfD repeatedly trigger disconcerting memories in the survivors of the German concentration and extermination camps with their speeches and performances.”

This is how “pro-Israel antisemitism” works in practice. The far-right party’s top leadership takes staunchly pro-Israel and anti-Muslim positions, using both to frame itself as a defender of Jewish interests. At the same time, they deploy antisemitic dog whistles and permit the spread of poisonous antisemitism throughout the party rank-and-file. The result is the mainstreaming of right-wing antisemitism by a party that claims to be standing up for Israel and the Jewish people.

This is exactly the pattern that we’ve seen in the GOP under Trump — with an added twist.

In his personal rhetoric, Trump draws a clear distinction between the American Jews who support him (good) and the liberal American Jews who oppose him (bad). This is often explicitly linked to Israel: The good conservative Jews understand that Trump is good for Israel, while the bad liberal Jews don’t care about their own people.

“I think any Jewish people that vote for a Democrat, I think it shows either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty [to Israel],” Trump said in 2019.

Trump has even gone so far as to excommunicate Jews he dislikes.“[Senate Minority Leader Chuck] Schumer is a Palestinian as far as I’m concerned. He’s become a Palestinian. He used to be Jewish. He’s not Jewish anymore. He’s a Palestinian,” Trump said.

There is, of course, obvious racial bigotry in using “Palestinian” as a slur. But it’s also a clear example of pro-Israel antisemitism at work.

Because Trump seems to believe he’s more pro-Israel than Schumer, he acts as if he has the right to weigh in on the validity of Schumer’s Jewishness. This depends, at least implicitly, on the notion that Jewishness is defined by the degree to which one identifies with a) Israel and b) the current far-right government of Prime Minister Netanyahu.

Chuck Schumer is, by all accounts, a pro-Israel member of Congress. His hostility to Netanyahu — Schumer called on the prime minister to resign last year — is rooted in his belief that Netanyahu’s far-right politics endanger Israel’s security in the long term. He’s not alone in this view: A November poll found that roughly two-thirds of American Jews disapprove of Netanyahu’s performance as prime minister.

Yet none of this matters to Trump. He behaves as if American Jews are worthy of respect if and only if they support him personally. Equating true or loyal Judaism with a hardline vision of support for Israel gives him license to disparage and even diminish the vast bulk of American Jews who support neither him nor Netanyahu. Invoking Israel serves as a rhetorical shield for comments that would be obviously antisemitic — calling American Jews “disloyal” or “not Jewish” — in any other context.

Understanding the way that Trump replaces Judaism with Israel also helps explain why his actions that purportedly defend Jews do nothing of the sort.

Think about the two headline examples of Trump’s action on antisemitism: stripping funding from Columbia and detaining Khalil. Only one of Trump’s nine demands for Columbia getting its money back even mentions antisemitism; no one has presented evidence that Khalil himself either engaged in antisemitism or provided material support for antisemitic terrorist groups.

Rather, Trump’s actions focus on defending Israel. He wants to punish Columbia for failing to curtail anti-Israel demonstrations, and deport Khalil for leading them. What is billed as an attempt to fight antisemitism is, in fact, an attempt to shield Israel from criticism and deepen the Trump administration’s powers to curtail left-wing speech more broadly.

“The rise of anti-Semitism on campus since October 7, 2023, is real. But the Republican campaign to use it as a justification to extend political control over universities has nothing to do with protecting Jews, and everything to do with undermining liberal democracy,” The Atlantic’s Jonathan Chait writes.

The rise of pro-Israel antisemitism poses a significant challenge for American Jews — not only because it’s dangerous, but because our institutions aren’t built to confront it.

Leading Jewish advocacy groups like the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee have long advocated simultaneously for anti-hate and pro-Israel causes. This fits the attitude of most American Jews, who are both politically liberal and broadly speaking pro-Israel.

In doing so, they are not only betraying American Jewry’s historic commitments to civil liberties and free speech. They are unintentionally helping the MAGA movement launder antisemitism into the mainstream.

Pro-Israel antisemitism works by creating credibility: a perception that the far-right party in question cannot be antisemitic because it is standing up for the interests of Jewish Israelis. This is the go-to maneuver for Trump’s allies — including prominent Republican Jews — who have dismissed his extensive record of antisemitic comments by citing his support for Israel.

But partisan actors inherently have less credibility than Jewish advocacy groups. By lending their imprimatur to Trump’s policies, suggesting that he is doing good work against antisemitism by cracking down on pro-Palestinian speech, they are bolstering his credibility against charges of antisemitism. In effect, they are directly undermining the power of their own critiques on other issues. And if they think that praising Trump will cause him to listen when they ask him to condemn someone like Joe Rogan, they’re fooling themselves.

But the problem is that they are dealing with people who have welcomed antisemites into their coalition and show little interest in purging them. It’s become so commonplace among the right-wing social media and podcast set that prominent conservatives, like Rufo and Meghan McCain, are being forced to recognize the problem’s severity. Ironically, you can now find a call from Rufo for the GOP to build “an establishment capable of…enforcing boundaries of decency” — the very thing the MAGA movement tore down during its conquest of the Republican party.

Treating the Trump movement and its allies as honest brokers on campus issues gives exactly the reputational shield they need to get away with it. Moreover, it gives a Jewish imprimatur to repressing speech that the GOP deems as anti-Israel — which they could easily deploy against Jews they don’t like.

Mainstream Jewish organizations need to take notes from some of the smaller center-left peers, whose ideological positioning has liberated them to call out Trump’s faux concern for Jewish welfare. Until their centrist peers come to the same realization, they will be unintentionally facilitating the rise of Europe’s new antisemitism at home.