Beinart (2023) notes a provocative example of their putative coexistence from recently in the United States: “Last November [2022], the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) awarded Donald Trump its highest honor, the Theodor Herzl Gold Medallion. Nine days later, the former president dined with two of America’s most prominent anti-Semites, rapper Kanye West and white nationalist provocateur Nick Fuentes.

Noting the proximity of the two events, The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner asked ZOA president Morton Klein an uncomfortable question: Could Trump be among those ‘people who, for whatever reason, have sympathies with Israel but don’t like Jews?’” Klein dismissed the proposition.

Then Beinart pushes the case further. Trump’s support for Israel, well established during his term of office, and his clearly expressed hostility towards U.S. Jews as a group, are not contradictory but stem from the same impulse: “He admires countries that ensure ethnic, racial, or religious dominance. He likes Israel because its political system upholds Jewish supremacy; he resents American Jews because most of them oppose the white Christian supremacy he’s trying to fortify here.”

Even with a Jewish son-in-law and Jewish-convert daughter, Trump sees no contradiction in supporting Israel more or less unconditionally and calling out American Jews as agents of “globalism” and of plots to encourage unrestricted immigration into the United States. When neo-Nazis at a demonstration in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 chanted “The Jews will not replace us” (representing the idea that Jews are behind the “replacement” of “true” Americans of northwest European heritage with myriad immigrants) the message was as clear as day. Trump nodded and winked in their direction. [The] Prime Minister Netanyahu remained silent (Field, 2017).

[…]

Beyond American shores, and in France, the European country with the largest domestic Jewish and Muslim populations, the tendency in the media and among politicians is to blame anti-Semitic incidents on Muslim antipathy toward Jews rather than the fact that intense anti-Jewish sentiment correlates in the population at large, unlike for most Muslims, with a pro-Israel outlook (e.g., Piser, 2018; Porter and Alderman, 2023). Across Central and Eastern Europe a similar pattern prevails. Long before the Gaza War anti-Semitism was increasing and was accompanied by a growing affiliation with Israel.

As explained by Krastev (2019), this is not just a superficial realpolitik, even though it has that aspect to it, for Israel benefits from “friends” inside the European Union and they from Israel’s status as a dynamic economy with friends in Washington D.C. Rather, populist leaders like Viktor Orbán in Hungary see in Israel a model for their own future: “Zionism in many respects was the mirror image of the nationalistic—and often anti-Semitic—politics that dominated Central and Eastern Europe between the two world wars. What attracts Eastern European populists to Israel today is their old dream realized: Israel is a democracy but an ethnic democracy; it defines itself as a state for Jews in the same way East Europeans imagine their countries as a state for Poles, Hungarians or Slovaks.”

Now that [many] Jews are nationalists, their historic cosmopolitanism no longer poses a threat. Shorn of their diffuse presence, in [occupied Palestine] they become a rôle model.

Of course, a few neofascist gentiles do cynically exploit anti-Zionism, but even these types would be highly unlikely to oppose a plan to deport all Jews to occupied Palestine. They may feel that having a state is a privilege that Jews do not deserve, but enticing Jews to leave their countries is not one of their objections to the concept.


Click here for events that happened today (November 16).

1861: Luigi Facta, Italy’s last prefascist Prime Minister (but later member of the Fascist Senate), existed.
1889: Dietrich Kraiss, Axis general, blighted the world.
1896: Oswald Mosley, English fascist, disgraced life with his existence.
1933: Tōkyō commissioned submarine tender Taigei into service.
1934: Emperor Showa visited the Nakajima aircraft plant at Ota, Gunma Prefecture.
1935: The Blohm und Voss shipyard in Hamburg received the contract for laying down the hull of the future battleship Bismarck, and the order for the construction of Prinz Eugen was awarded to Germaniawerft of Kiel.
1936: Spanish Nationalist Colonel José Varela’s troops had forced a bridgehead over the River Manzanares en route to Madrid, and would capture almost three quarters of the University City in the coming week before being stopped by Spanish Republican militias. In Asia, Tōkyō named Captain Ryozo Fukuda as Nachi’s commanding officer.
1940: In response to the Luftwaffe’s leveling of Coventry two days before, Hamburg suffered another Allied bombing for the twoth day in a row. The Axis scuttled its tanker Phrygia to avoid capture, but Axis submarines U‐65 and U‐137 each sank an Allied ship. The Fascist 9th Army defensive line at Korcë, Albania yielded to the Greek 3rd Army Corps, and Berlin named Heinz Guderian as Panzer Group 2’s commander.
1941: The 11.Armee captured Kerch, and the 3rd Panzer Party established a crossing over the Lama River 70 miles west of Moscow. Axis carrier fleet exercised in the Kurile Islands, and the obsolete battleship Settsu began to sail around the Inland Sea in the Empire of Japan to generate fake radio communication messages at different ports. Crown Prince Yi Un became attached to the training department of the IJA.
1942: The Regia Aeronautica merged its ‘Loreto’ combat engineers battalion and the 1st Air Force Paratroop Unit to form the 1st Air Force Assault Regiment ‘Amedeo d’Aosta’ at Marsala, Sicily. As well, the Axis promoted Georg von Bismarck to the rank of Generalleutnant posthumously, and it awarded Oberfeldwebel Karl Lipp of the Kampfgeschwader 55 wing the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross.
1943: The Greek island of Leros surrendered to the Axis again, and the Axis carried out severe reprisals against the Italians who cooperated with the Allies.
1944: The Axis lost the town of Düren to Allied aircraft seeking to assist the Battle of Hürtgen Forest.
1947: Giuseppe Volpi, Fascist Italy’s Minister of Finance, bit the dust.