Anti-Semitism is rising in the U.S. and despite photo-ops with the the Second Gentleman, the liberal American Jewish leadership is failing utterly to combat it.
To discuss the situation, I was joined this week by President of the ZOA Mort Klein.
We began exploration of the issue with a discussion of former President Donald Trump’s meeting with antisemites Kanye West and Nick Fuentes and his refusal to date to disavow either.
Just a week before Trump met with West and Fuentes, the ZOA presented the former president with its highest award, the Theodor Herzl Medallion, for his support and strengthening of the U.S.-Israel alliance, and his efforts to fight growing antisemitism in America. However, Trump’s refusal to date to condemn West has embarrassed his Jewish supporters.
We then turned to the status of the liberal U.S. Jewish leadership. I noted, “For six years, progressive and liberal American Jewish leaders attacked Trump as an antisemite when the opposite was true. Now that he’s done something that actually deserves to be condemned, however, their cries against him sound like the boy who cried wolf.”
Palestinian antisemitism
Mort explained that as bad as West’s antisemitism is, and as dangerous as voices like his are for American Jews, Palestinian antisemitism, advanced by every member of the Biden administration involved in U.S.-Israel relations, is much more dangerous for those ties and for American Jews themselves.
Whereas during the Obama years, organizations like AIPAC and the American Jewish Committee spoke out against anti-Israel policymakers and lobbied against the appointments of Chuck Hagel and Robert Malley, today most American Jewish leaders have remained silent as Biden appointed one foe of Israel after another to key foreign policy positions.
The main reason Mort cited for their silence is that many American Jewish leaders have internalized the anti-Israel narrative and believe that there is justice to the Palestinians’ fabricated claims about the so-called “occupation.”
Israel’s antagonists in the Jewish community are welcome speakers in Jewish communities and enjoy powerful platforms in the liberal media, which most of the Jewish community consumes, he notes.
A number of Jewish leaders were invited to discuss the rising level of antisemitism in the U.S. at the White House this week; Mort Klein was not among them. He speculated regarding what would and wouldn’t be said by the attendees and explained what he would have told the administration if he had been invited.
The political situation in Israel
In my opening, I discussed the unprecedented efforts outgoing Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid and his colleagues in the country’s caretaker government are making to demonize and delegitimize the incoming Netanyahu government.
The purpose of the campaign is to pave the way for the legal fraternity to paralyze the government by blocking Knesset legislation, preventing the government from governing, she argues.
Its impact to date has been to give license to Israel’s opponents in the Washington policy establishment and in the liberal Jewish community to turn against Israel and call for its isolation and sanctioning.
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