WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Our wrongly calling Trump “anti-Semitic,” precipitated most recently by his social media posting this week, does damage to ourselves, not just unjustly to him. It cheapens and weakens our cries of anti-Semitism when they truly apply, as these days on the left and right they too often do. And it distracts us from the gravity of his message, that we need more fully, as he put it, “to appreciate what we have in Israel” today.
No, He’s Not, and Wrongly Calling Him That Weakens Our Cries When It’s True and Distracts Us from the Warning He Gave
Worse than Mere False Crying of “Wolf”
Checking whether anyone was still awake wasn’t the only purpose of the Q&A following Lee’s and my “Ten Misleading Media Expressions” PowerPoint talk to what Lee said was to about a hundred men’s clubs, sisterhoods, Hadassah chapters and more. As with many other Jewish activities, the questions were more meaningful than the answers, giving us insights into our listeners’ beliefs on the issues we raised and on how we addressed them.
Among the questions I recall is one at a men’s club in Delaware, perhaps not coincidentally the home congregation of a key person at CAMERA, the tireless watchdog that fights anti-Israel bias in the American media. “But isn’t what you’re doing superfluous given the enormously greater efforts to the same end by CAMERA?” No, and let me give you two illustrations, relevant I think to the thrust of this weekly email of mine to you – grassroots American Jew to grassroots American Jews – this week.
[1] Some years ago, I was invited to a meeting in someone’s home in suburban Philly, in the living room of which Andrea Levin, president of CAMERA (and one of my heroes for most promptly and effectively taking up the mantle of David Bar-Illan’s ground-breaking Jerusalem Post “Eye On The Media” bias fighting column) spoke. When she was finished everyone descended into the dining room for the enticing spread, leaving standing there alone in the living room the most knowledgeable person on the planet on the subject we’d come to discuss. So Andrea and I had a bagel-with-cream-cheese-and-lox-length one-on-one conversation. She knew about my “media watch” and what we discussed was whether CAMERA and “Brith Sholom Media Watch” were doing the same thing. We agreed that we weren’t. CAMERA endeavors, through intercourse with the media, to secure “Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America.” I’m hardly against that, but my target audience isn’t the American media, but us grassroots American Jews. I want us to stand up against misleading media expressions defaming the historically and legally legitimate, central to our peoplehood, homeland of our Jewish people in Israel.
[2] The clearest instance of this difference between our approaches came up a few years ago when I complained to CAMERA about its use of the expression “West Bank.” Tamar, writing to me for it, explained to me that while the names “Judea and Samaria” are historically legitimate, they are used by only “a very minute fraction of the world’s population” and that communications to the media using these place names would summarily end up on the floor. I countered in that week’s BSMW edition that that very minute fraction of the world’s population that calls Judea and Samaria “Judea and Samaria” is us, and that the more that an historically justified Hebrew-origin Jewish homeland place-name we use differs from the non-Jewish-connection place-name used by the rest of the world, the more important it is that we use it.
So what I want to talk to you about this week, American Jewish grassrootsnik to my fellow American Jewish grassroots, is use of an accusation – Anti-Semitism! – that carries stronger implications for us, American Jews, the target of anti-Semitism in the US, than anyone else. My thesis: Donald Trump is not anti-Semitic, and Jews casting false accusations that he is is worse than Jews just inaccurately crying “wolf,” an hysteria which at least still springs from real fears of attacks on the well-being of Jews. But this anti-Semite accusation of Trump is an intentional Jewish misappropriation of that grave accusation in a cause different from fair and just treatment by Americans of American Jews. I’m not alone this week in saying this. JNS editor Jonathan Tobin (whom I agree with on most everything save his, to me inexplicable, common saying of “West Bank”) put it this way on Wednesday (JNS, 10/19/22, Why the Left Can’t Stop Trying To Link Trump to Anti-Semitism):
“The left in general, and the Jewish left in particular, is addicted to trying to link Trump to anti-Semitism because they think it is a useful issue for them. This is truer now more than ever.”
His sub-headline called this “a partisan narrative aimed at distracting voters from the Democrats’ problems.” Tobin warningly concludes that “the only way to win the battle against hate [of all of us] is to stop linking it to liberal talking points about Trump, and focus on those who are actually spreading Jew-hatred on both ends of the spectrum” [emphasis added by me, way on the other side if short of the end of that spectrum].
The Relevance to All of Us of Trump’s Warning to American Jews
Trump, by me justly, warned in his widely castigated as “anti-Semitic” social media posting this past Sunday:
“US Jews have to get their act together and appreciate what they have in Israel, before it’s too late!”
Ruthie Blum, Jewish Press, 10/19/22, (reprinted from Israel Hayom) Is Trump’s Critique of American Jews Justified?, rightly wrote that his comments, “which were neither threatening nor antisemitic,” were “directed to American Jews.” Blum pointed out the positive things Trump as President did for Israel:
“He canceled the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the nuclear deal with Iran. He moved the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, which he recognized as Israel’s capital. He ceased funding for the terrorist-supporting UNRWA. He shuttered the PLO mission in Washington. He recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. His State Department removed the word ‘occupied’ from references to Judea and Samaria (the West Bank). He designated Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization. And he brokered the historic Abraham Accords.”
This castigating of Trump as “anti-Semitic” recalls some US Jews so regarding Truman, another US president in my lifetime accused of being anti-Semitic. Evidence has been cited that Harry Truman wrote and said some unkind things about Jews. Whatever his overall personal feelings, there was a Jew, Truman’s wartime buddy and business partner, Eddie Jacobson, whom Truman indisputably liked, and one, Dr. Weizmann, whom he respected – when the State Department publicly acted against what he’d just privately told Chaim, and Truman reportedly said “The old doctor will think I’m a liar,” I believe that he meant it. Truman supported partition and was the first to recognize Israel, in fifteen minutes, and Weizmann and Jacobson, in a desperate joint appeal to Truman, had helped secure Truman’s support. Truman’s daughter didn’t convert to Judaism, but Trump’s did and his grandchildren are Jewish. Hardly anti-Semitic. The Jewish Voice carrying i24 Friday, Netanyahu Defends Trump Comments on U.S. Jews, quoted Bibi: “He has a Jewish son-in-law, and his daughter converted to Judaism. His … grandchildren are raised as Jews. So I don’t think so.”
Dear Readers, I do not ask you to vote for Trump in 2024, or for the GOP slate in 2022 (though, of course, I myself on domestic and foreign policy grounds plan to do so). I ask you not to be part of calling Trump “anti-Semitic.” It’s unfair and untrue and damages the legitimacy and credibility of our cries when such accusations justly apply to extremists on both the left and the right, which these days particularly they too often do.
And I ask you to hearken to Trump’s plea that we U.S. Jews fully appreciate “what we have in Israel,” the reconstituted sovereignty of our people’s homeland that is occurring in our own time after eighteen hundred years during which Jews in few places elsewhere were treated by others as being at “home.” Today’s Israel is the furthest place on the planet from a non-indigenous to the Mideast “white colonial” implant. The majority of our ingathered homeland’s Jews are not even “white.” And those whom even we call “the Palestinians” are the majority population of the 78% of Mandated Palestine excised from the Mandate’s Jewish national home, [Trans-]Jordan. And, by me of course, and hopefully by you, the Israel that Trump calls on us to appreciate fully inherently includes Judea-Samaria and above all historic Jerusalem.