Guess Who Was Actually Being Cavalier With Jewish Lives

There’s a certain kind of right-wing American Jew who fancies himself (almost always himself) an arbiter of Jewry. In his eyes Jewry has almost nothing to do with living a life of private and civic rectitude, and almost everything to do with supporting Israeli belligerence in every conflict.

This is why the Republican commentator Ben Shapiro felt entitled to slap the headline, “No, It Doesn’t Matter That Bernie Sanders Is Ethnically Jewish. He’s a Jew In Name Only,” on an article that indicts Sanders principally for being “anti-Israel.”

(Sanders, who lived and worked on a kibbutz for several months in the 1960s, can claim to have—in his own small way—helped build modern Israel.)

Some of this hostility is rooted in right-wing blood-thirst, and anti-Muslim bigotry. But more generously, the logic is simple; almost childlike: Israel encompasses the Jewish holy land, and is now home to a significant percentage of the world’s Jewish population. The Jewish faith is thus not safe if Israel is not safe, and if you, as a Jew, don’t support a militant Israeli government, you’re being cavalier with the lives of Jews, and deserve excommunication.

Through this logic they could justify any moral compromises they might feel compelled to make, simply by telling themselves compromise was essential to the survival of Jews and their faith tradition. Now, though, these hubristic fools must wrestle with perhaps the most predictable irony in the history of mankind: that on their preferred course, Israel is all but friendless in the world; its last powerful ally is a thief and a liar, loyal to no one, who seems to recognize that he must cut Israel loose to save his own skin.

Someone was being cavalier with the lives of Jews, but it wasn’t those of us counseling toleration and pluralism.

Share Off Message

The men who’ve done the most to endanger Jewish people around the world in my lifetime are Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump. It isn’t even a particularly close call.

But they had help. Shamefully, they had help from many Jews: like Shapiro and his fellow travelers on the Jewish-American right; and, of course, in the Israeli population. A minority of U.S. Jews and a majority in Israel, but a subset totaling in the millions. A double digit percentage of a relatively small global population.

As an American, my interest is mostly in the former: Jewish citizens of the United States, who made common cause with a vulgar con artist, even as he mocked and stereotyped Jews to their faces. They believed he’d be solicitous enough of Israel to allow Israeli Jews to bring hostile populations in the Middle East to heel. To establish lasting security and regional dominance.

So they egged the Israeli state on as it embraced antidemocratic politics domestically, and a disproportionately violent disposition toward its adversaries. When liberal governments in the democratic world blanched, these American political operators further encouraged Israel to become an appendage of right-wing parties, endangering in particular its most important alliance: with the United States.

Netanyahu’s meddling in U.S. politics on behalf of Republicans, while laying waste to Gaza, has made it all but impossible (in both practical and moral terms) for U.S. Democrats to maintain pro-Israel politics. Choosing an alliance with the GOP rather than the United States has thus left Israel reliant on the whims of a faithless tyrant.

Trump isn’t just faithless, though. He’s also term-limited. This meant Netanyahu could only bank on four years of impunity. He thus accelerated his assault on Gaza, and—the best reporting indicates—manipulated Trump (as he’d attempted to manipulate Trump’s predecessors) into launching a joint U.S.-Israel regime change war against Iran.

They lost that war within days. Trump’s personal interests now militate for extracting the U.S. from the war and reopening the Strait of Hormuz. The price for this, Iran seems to be demanding, is a terminal breach in U.S.-Israel relations. Israel’s options are thus dwindling: Netanyahu can concede defeat; he can escalate hostilities and force Trump to choose; or (perhaps) he can resort to bribery.