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| Beinart |
‘So, there’s this video that I just can’t get out
of my mind. It’s a video of a man named Brian McGinnis. He’s a retired Marine
Corps veteran. And he goes to this Senate hearing, and he starts shouting. He’s
in full Marine uniform. And, he starts shouting things like, ‘no one wants to
fight for Israel.’ He’s pulled out of the room very, very brutally. It’s a
disturbing video to watch. He claims that his arm was broken as he was pushed
out, and he keeps shouting some version of this: ‘nobody wants to fight for
Israel.’
I would really encourage you, if you know people who support this war, especially if you know influential people in American politics, in the organized American Jewish community who support this war, to ask them to reflect on this video. Because I think it illustrates, in a terrifying way, the moment that we’re in today.
The American people did not want this war. The initial polling has shown a strong opposition to the war. And remember, polling about war almost always goes down. Wars are usually most popular at the beginning, right? This war wasn’t even popular at the start. And there’s also good reason to believe that Israel was a major part of the reason that America launched this war. Not the only reason: I think Donald Trump’s hubris from his apparent success in Venezuela, and of the 12-Day War, and the Soleimani killing, all of these things have gone to his head and made him think—idiot that he is—that this is gonna be easy, that he can do in Venezuela. He’s basically said as much.
So, it’s not only because of Israel. But anyone with eyes to see knows that Benjamin Netanyahu has wanted the United States to launch a full-scale assault on Iran for many, many, many years. It’s been an obsession of him for his entire political career. He’s open about it, right? And that he’s particularly been pushing Donald Trump to do so, and he took advantage of the vanity, the stupidity of this president that we have, and the brokenness of the foreign policy-making process to be able to get this done, right?
So, what people said about Iraq—that Israel pushed the United States into war in Iraq, which is mostly not true. Israel was not focused on the U.S. invading Iraq, even back then, it was focused on Iran. It is much, much more true today. And what this Marine Corps veteran was saying has actually become the mainstream public understanding of why the U.S. did go to war, that it was pushed into it by Israel. And there’s a significant kernel of truth to that.
And this
is happening in a moment in which real antisemitism is already rising. I’m not
talking about the bullshit claims of antisemitism that say that people are
antisemitic because they ask whether it might be better off if Israel were a
country that treated everyone equally under the law, rather than based on
Jewish supremacy. No. I mean, Nick Fuentes, Candace Owen, quoting the Talmud,
spinning conspiracy theories about Jewish holocausts of Christians, all of this
kind of stuff. This is really rising, right?
It’s rising partly just because all forms of bigotry are now rising as American liberal democracy fails, and this kind of authoritarian ethno-nationalism rises. But it’s also rising because of this specific claim that America has been pushed into wars by Israel with the support of large Jewish donors like Miriam Adelson and Jewish organizations like AIPAC.
And if you wanted to supercharge, if you wanted to supercharge that antisemitism, nothing, nothing could have supercharged it more than what we have seen right now. The chances that MAGA 2.0 or MAGA 3.0 will be openly antisemitic—not veiled antisemitism—but openly antisemitic, the language of Fuentes, the language of Candace Owens, are now much, much greater. And we may see more of this open antisemitism also on the left too because it may well be popular on parts of the left, as well as the right.
Now, I don’t expect Benjamin Netanyahu to have taken the safety and well-being of American Jews into account when he made this decision, right? Netanyahu is the elected leader of Israel. He responds to the electorate of Israel. Most Palestinians who live under Israeli control are not part of that electorate, right? He responds to the electorate of Israel and the sense of its self-perception, right? I think that is actually also going to be disastrous over the long term for Israel, but Netanyahu responds to Israelis.
Israeli leaders have never actually put the interests of diaspora Jews, made that been a serious focus of their foreign policy if it’s conflicted with their sense of Israeli national interest. That’s why Netanyahu hangs out with Viktor Orban. This is an old story. This is why Menachem Begin was pals with Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, they’ve hung out with antisemites for decades and decades if those people supported Israel.
But we do have the right to hope that the leaders of the organized American Jewish community, whose responsibility is to Jews in the United States, that they would think about the consequences of this war for us. And the consequences are catastrophic, right? If you were a small minority in a country, which American Jews are, a small minority, also we have as baggage a very long history of antisemitic stereotypes about Jews, right?
You have to have a decent respect for the opinions of the other people in your country, right? A decent respect for the opinions of the American people, right? And what the pushing and now celebration of this war from AIPAC, from the Anti-Defamation League, from the American Jewish Committee, and for a whole series of commentators, right, who are associated with those organizations, what their attitude shows is, basically, a lack of respect for the opinions of the American people, and a lack of understanding of the position of American Jews in this society.
I want to be clear about what I’m saying. American Jews are and deserve to be understood as absolutely full citizens in this society. But being a full citizen, an owner of this country, right, doesn’t only mean rights, it also entails certain obligations. It entails the obligation to think seriously about the national interest of this country.
The claim that it was in America’s national interest to spend billions of dollars trying to topple the Iranian regime is just nonsense. Can anybody with a straight face say that if the U.S. government has $10 billion, that the $10 billion are best spent doing this, rather than dealing with the many, many, many terrible challenges we have at home? Of course not. It’s an insult to people’s intelligence to suggest this, right?
And what the organized American Jewish community is doing by pushing this, it is creating a dynamic in which it’s going to be even easier for antisemitism to spread, and for American Jews to be seen as not people who are part of a country trying to think about what’s best for that country, but to play exactly in to what Fuentes and others say. Which is that American Jews are not interested in the welfare of this country, not interested in the economic and the human costs of America going to war, because American Jews are loyal to Israel, right?
This is the narrative that by supporting this war, American Jewish organizations are promoting. Obviously, the antisemites are responsible for their own antisemitism, but wise and sane Jewish leadership does not play into the hands of Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens, especially in a very, very dangerous moment like this.
And if you listen, right, to the people in the American Jewish community who are defending this war, right? And when they’re responding to people like Tucker Carlson and others who are saying this was a war for Israel, it’s not a war for the United States, their response is very telling.
They say: are you questioning Donald Trump? Are you saying Donald Trump is a traitor, right? What, essentially, they’re doing is, they’re saying, don’t you dare criticize Donald Trump. They’re not making a serious policy argument. They’re basically trying to play on the authoritarian tendency and instinct that exists within the Republican Party and the MAGA movement today in order to shield themselves and this war from criticism, right?
And this, I think, is a terrifying sign of things to come. Which is to say, the American Jewish community, in the middle of the 20th century, had a strategy, a democratic strategy, a strategy of pushing for greater democracy, and of trying to be engaged in that struggle.
The American Jewish leadership now is doing things that are nakedly opposed to what the American people want. And when people express that public opposition, they are essentially taking refuge in the authoritarianism of the Trump movement, and saying, how dare you criticize Donald Trump, right? He is above criticism, and that’s their defense, right?
This is part, and I think we’re going to see going more forward, the more you lose the American people, right, the more Americans become hostile, right, the more antisemitism grows, the more you have to ally with authoritarian dictators as for your safety, right? You abandon a democratic strategy—a small-D democratic strategy for Jewish safety and well-being—and you go back to this much older model, right, of the court Jew clinging to the authoritarian leader as the public turns more and more anti-Jewish.
I don’t think the American Jewish establishment understands that this is the direction that they’re going, but this is actually the direction that they’re going to have to go because of their own policies, because they can’t distinguish between what the Israeli government wants and what’s good for the American people.
And I think partly, this is a result of how cloistered the American Jewish establishment is. I’m not talking about American Jews in general. American Jews are widely integrated into American society in all kinds of ways. But the oligarchy that runs American Jewish organizations, the large donors, the people who work for those very large donors, that is a very cloistered, self-enclosed world in many ways. And I think it shields people from an actual understanding, in some ways, of what’s happening in American society, about the suffering that Americans endure as a result of these wars, that the American Jewish organizations keep pushing for. And I don’t think that these people in these positions either understand or are willing to understand how dangerous their actions are for us as American Jews.
Watch again this video with Brian McGinnis, and ask yourself how it makes you feel as a Jew in the United States today to be represented by organizations that have pushed the United States into war, into this war. I will say, for me, it makes me feel as frightened as an American Jew for my safety in the United States as I can ever remember in my lifetime.’
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| Leavitt |
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