Last week former president Donald Trump declared that American Jews don’t appreciate him enough.
“U.S. Jews have to get their act together and appreciate what they have in Israel — before it is too late!” he declared on his site Truth Social. “No President has done more for Israel than I have. Somewhat surprisingly, however, our wonderful Evangelicals are far more appreciative of this than the people of the Jewish faith, especially those living in the U.S.”
Trump is openly conflating Judaism with Zionism here. It’s antisemitic and deserves to be called out, but some of those criticisms have come from individuals and groups who have been pushing this very narrative for years.
Take Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, who tweeted, “We don’t need the former president, who curries favor with extremists and antisemites, to lecture us about the US-Israel relationship. It is not about a quid pro quo; it rests on shared values and security interests. This ‘Jewsplaining’ is insulting and disgusting.”
Greenblatt would know. The ADL is ostensibly a civil rights group, but Greenblatt’s leadership has been defined by his insistence on equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism. Just a couple months ago he was giving a speech to the World Zionist Organization conference and warning that some Jewish people “traffic” in critiques of Zionism.
“In the political context today there is no doubt that anti-Zionism is antisemitism. And we must reckon with the fact that there are anti-Zionists within the Jewish community. We must be honest and acknowledge that reality,” he told the crowd. “But the reality is that just because you are Jewish doesn’t exempt you from trafficking in anti-Zionism. Just like you can be someone who is a person of color, that doesn’t exempt them from trafficking in racism. We have got to deal with this openly…”
Here’s DMFI, a group specifically created to stomp out growing sympathy for the Palestinian cause within the Democratic party: “Once again, the former president manages to be both insulting and ill-informed. American Jews support the U.S.-Israel relationship. What they don’t support is his bigotry, cruelty and incitement of a deadly insurrection.”
You’ll notice that the group agrees with Trump about all American Jews supporting Israel. They shift the focus to his racism, but this is a group with a board member who has openly called for a genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and, like Greenblatt, they regularly imply that the only Palestinian member of congress is an antisemite because she has the temerity to acknowledge that Israel is an apartheid state.
The reality is that pro-Israel groups can’t launch good faith arguments against the antisemitism of right-wingers like Trump because their framing of the issue hits very similar beats.
Jeremy Bash
This week The Guardian ran a very interesting story that should probably be getting more attention.
Jeremy Bash is a former senior CIA official who President Biden recently appointed to an advisory role in The White House. From 2017 to 2020 Bash was also an advisor to the NSO Group, the controversial Israeli spyware company. A 2021 investigation into a data leak found that found NSO’s Pegasus hacking technology was used by authoritarian governments around the world to target over nearly 200 journalists. This included Saudi Arabia, who surveilled the family of slain Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi before and after the Saudi Arabian government murdered him.
In November 2021 the Biden administration put the NSO Group on a blacklist over the revelations. The New York Times called the move “the strongest step an American president has taken to curb abuses in the global market for spyware.”
This situation gets even more awkward when you look at what Bash’s role with the company was. He was part of NSO’s business ethics committee (BEC), where he gave advice on whether selling spyware to certain governments would create problems with the United States government. From The Guardian piece:
He was one of about eight members of the BEC, who would vet highly confidential requests from government agencies to buy a licence to access Pegasus. The identity of the members of the BEC was also a tightly held secret.
Bash declined to respond to specific questions about his role on the BEC. Ashley Barry, a spokesperson for Beacon Global Strategies, said Bash had “long believed that the technology at issue must be regulated by export controls and by the establishment of international rules of the road that the United States should lead.”
In July the group Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN) said that four lobbyists (Brian Finch, David Tamasi, Steve Rabinowitz, and Timothy Dickinson) violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act by misrepresenting the Israeli government’s relationship with NSO Group and called on the Justice Department to launch an investigation.
“Despite the well-documented human rights abuses committed with NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware, these four lobbyists and their firms have chosen to contribute to the company’s abuses by misleading public officials about its deservedly maligned reputation,” read a statement put out by DAWN Director of Israel-Palestine Advocacy Adam Shapiro at the time. “Our investigation shows that the four lobbyists and NSO Group are misleading Congress, the Biden administration, and the American public by failing to register the Israeli government’s control of the company in their FARA registration forms.”
Odds & Ends
?? It’s been one year since the Israeli government designated six Palestinian human rights groups as terrorists organizations, purposely undermining their important work. The targeted organizations are launching using the hashtag #IfWeDisappear to highlight why their efforts are so crucial. “#IfWeDisappear hundreds of Palestinian children detained by the Israeli military won’t receive free legal aid each year,” tweeted DCI Palestine. “With no legal help, these Palestinian children will have no one by their side as the Israeli military detention system violates their rights again and again.”
?? Mitchell Plitnick on how a new program aimed at fighting anti-Zionism among Reform Jews is destined for failure.
? At The Intercept Ryan Grim has an important and comprehensive piece on how pro-Israel groups came to dominate Democratic primaries.
?? A Washington Post investigation found that over 500 retired U.S. military personnel have taken jobs with foreign governments, mostly Persian Gulf monarchies like Saudi Arabia:
Saudi Arabia’s paid advisers have included retired Marine Gen. James L. Jones, a national security adviser to President Barack Obama, and retired Army Gen. Keith Alexander, who led the National Security Agency under Obama and President George W. Bush, according to documents obtained by The Post under Freedom of Information Act lawsuits.
Others who have worked as consultants for the Saudis since Khashoggi’s murder include a retired four-star Air Force general and a former commanding general of U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) blocked an additional $75 million in American military aid to Egypt, citing human rights concerns. “We can’t give short shrift to the law because of other policy considerations,” Leahy told Reuters. “We all have a responsibility to uphold the law and to defend the due process rights of the accused, whether here or in Egypt.”
? Shireen Abu Akleh’s niece Lina Abu Akleh was interviewed by NPR about her fight for justice:
Until this day, we haven’t heard back from them in terms of meeting with the president. The president was here in July. He was 10 minutes away from our home, from Shireen’s home where she grew up. And unfortunately, he did not meet with our family. And when we went to D.C., we were hoping that he would be meeting with us, but again that did not happen.
And we were definitely disappointed, because it’s very important to us for the president to hear from us and for us to know that he’s taking this seriously, since she’s a citizen and a journalist. And this is something he’s always talked about, especially a few days before Shireen was killed, he said it’s important that journalists, especially women in the field, in war zones, are protected. Yet this did not apply to Shireen. So until this day we continue to demand and to request that the president meet with us.
⚖️ More on the recent Berkeley Law smears from pro-Israel groups and lawmakers, which we covered in the last couple newsletters. Dylan Saba is a Palestinian/Jewish lawyer, former Berkeley Law student, and member of Law Students for Justice in Palestine (LSJP). He has an important op-ed in the Daily Beast breaking down the controversy:
Berkeley Law’s Dean Erwin Chemerinsky publicly condemned the campaign in a statement, strongly implying it ran afoul of free speech and anti-discrimination principles. Chancellor Carol Christ, too, condemned the campaign, suggesting that excluding speakers with particular views on Israel would endanger the safety and security of Jewish community members. Following these statements, a Democratic member of Congress and a long list of Israel lobby organizations and professors piled on. And to add to the absurdity, an article in Jewish Journal falsely alleged that the campus was creating “Jewish free zones” by permitting the adoption of the pledge.
But this is nonsense: student organizations can determine for themselves which speakers align with their politics; they cannot be compelled to invite any speaker. Campus groups organized around issue areas, from antiracism to reproductive rights, host speakers and events in order to advance a particular political perspective. Just as these groups are under no obligation to host white supremacists or people who oppose a woman’s right to an abortion, no student group is constitutionally obligated to host pro-Zionist speakers.
? At Jewish Currents Mari Cohen and Alex Kane obtained an internal memo from the American Jewish Committee (AJC), which shows that the group disavowed the September Jewish Journal op-ed in which former Trump official Kenneth Marcus accused Berkeley Law of maintaining “Jewish free zones”:
The AJC’s internal disavowal of the Marcus op-ed illustrates a strategic tension that exists even among Israel-advocacy groups that broadly share the goals of combatting Palestine activism on US campuses. While hardline groups like Marcus’s Brandeis Center condemn US colleges as bastions of Jew-hatred and seek to punish them with civil rights claims on behalf of Jewish students, organizations like the AJC tend to employ a softer touch, and are more willing to work with universities.
? More Trump comments on Israeli vs. American Jews. This from a 2021 video shot by documentarian Alex Holder:
Former President Donald J. Trump inquired whether a documentary filmmaker recording an interview with him last year was a “good Jewish character,” described Persians as “very good salesmen” and complained that Israeli Jews favored him more than Jews in the United States, a new clip released by the filmmaker shows.
“In Israel, I’m at like 94 percent, but I got 27, 28 percent,” Mr. Trump says in the video, referring to what he claimed was his approval rating among Israeli Jews versus American Jews.
?? At a State Department briefing this week Biden spokesperson Vedant Patel was asked about a viral video in which an IDF solider steals a Palestinian child’s bike and throws it in a dumpster:
QUESTION: And lastly, today an Israeli soldier was seen grabbing the bicycle of a six or seven-year-old child, and taking it and dumping it in the dumpster. And I mean, this happens time and time and again. I remember asking you predecessor, Mark Toner, back I think in 2016 or something like this – well, the incident, and they keep doing this. Have – they seem to have a thing against bicycles of Palestinian children and so on. Would you deduct some money that you give Israel so readily – billions of dollars – to maybe compensate this kid for his bicycle?
PATEL: Said, I have not seen this specific report, but the U.S. urges the full respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms in Israel, in the West Bank, and Gaza. And as we have said many times, we believe that Palestinians and Israelis alike deserve equal measure of security, prosperity, and freedom as well.
Stay safe out there,
Michael
