[rad-green] Christian Zionist philo-Semitism is driving Trump’s Israel policy

*https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/01/28/trump-thinks-supporting-israel-means-letting-it-do-whatever-it-wants/
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/01/28/trump-thinks-supporting-israel-means-letting-it-do-whatever-it-wants/>Washington
Post          Jan. 28, 2020 Christian Zionist philo-Semitism is driving
Trump’s Israel policyThe administration acts like ‘supporting Israel’ means
letting it do whatever it wants.*

[image: President Trump speaks during a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu in the Oval Office on Monday. (Evan Vucci/AP)]
*President Trump speaks during a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu in the Oval Office on Monday. (Evan Vucci/AP)*

By Mairav Zonszein
Mairav Zonszein is an Israeli-American freelance journalist.

President Trump will join Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on
Tuesday to announce his Middle East peace plan. The announcement comes not
long before Israel’s third election in the past year, on March 2. Details
of the plan haven’t been released yet, but most analysts expect
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/in-israel-election-politics-again-runs-through-the-oval-office/2020/01/25/b9d15880-3f7f-11ea-afe2-090eb37b60b1_story.html?tid=lk_inline_manual_2>
it
to continue Trump’s policy of recognizing Israeli annexation of territories
it occupied in 1967, while excluding Palestinians from the process entirely.

This is no surprise: The evangelical-heavy Trump administration is the most
fervently Christian Zionist government the United States has ever had,
making it a driving force of pro-Israel attitudes in Washington. U.S.
support for Israel these days doesn’t mean just championing the idea of a
Jewish state — it means supporting the idea of Greater Israel
<https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/.premium-u-s-jews-are-funding-the-far-right-dream-of-greater-israel-we-must-end-this-now-1.6575110>,
the Israeli far right’s dream of a single state. The United States hasn’t
merely dropped the support for a two-state solution, or stopped condemning
Israeli settlements on Palestinian land. U.S. policy has shifted to
endorsing the reality that Netanyahu’s right-wing government has put on the
ground: an ethno-national state where Israel retains territories it
occupied in the 1967 war, Jews are the sole sovereign from the river to the
sea, Palestinians are denied self-determination and international law has
no currency.

Many of the evangelical Christians whose votes Trump courts believe in the
notion that God promised the land to Jews and that the return of Jewish
rule in the Holy Land will bring about the Rapture and Second Coming, after
which Jesus will restore a divine kingdom in which all Jews either become
Christians or perish. Evangelicals comprise Trump’s core base, with more
than 80 percent
<https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/white-evangelicals-love-trump-aren-t-confused-about-why-no-ncna1046826>
of
white evangelicals having voted for him in 2016. (They also make up a
quarter of the overall U.S. population, though obviously not all
evangelicals share Trump’s views on the Middle East.) Evangelical leaders
are regular visitors
<https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/01/evangelicals-are-anticipating-the-end-of-the-world-and-trump-is-listening/>
in
the White House.

The influence of evangelical Christianity on U.S. policy toward Israel is a
practical expression of philo-Semitism
<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2011/feb/16/antisemitism-philosemitism>,
which is the flip side of anti-Semitism; it involves having an affinity for
Jews, as opposed to hating them. Evangelical adoration for Israel — and
Israel’s reciprocal efforts to join forces with evangelicals in the United
States — obviously predates Trump. Israel made the decision long ago to embrace
evangelical support
<https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/11/06/trump-first-jews-later-pittsburgh-attack-white-supremacy-adl-netanyahu-israel-ron-dermer-antisemitism/>.
In the 1980s, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin made the strategic
decision to tap into the religious right in America, which he presciently
realized was a burgeoning power base. At the time, the Rev. Jerry Falwell
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1981/09/12/jerry-falwell-vows-amity-with-israel/282947d1-47ff-4851-8884-495506fe1773/?tid=lk_inline_manual_7>
was
organizing evangelicals as a political force in the Republican Party
through his founding of the religious, hyper-conservative Moral Majority,
which Begin declared in 1981 to be a great friend of Israel. Both Falwell
and the Rev. Billy Graham — the prominent evangelical leader who played a
pivotal role in fostering
<https://aeon.co/essays/christian-zionism-the-interfaith-movement-hiding-in-plain-sight>
Judeo-Christian
relations in the United States after World War II — were advisers to
President Ronald Reagan, who ushered evangelical politics squarely into
Washington.

This is today most evident in the work of Christians United for Israel, the
largest pro-Israel lobby in the United States, boasting
<https://www.cufi.org/> 8 million members. Since 2006, it has been
advocating for continued military aid to Israel, settlement expansion
and Israeli
war with Iran
<https://newrepublic.com/article/156166/pence-pompeo-evanglicals-war-iran-christian-zionism>.
CUFI director John Hagee, who said <https://www.salon.com/2007/03/16/aipac/> at
the annual AIPAC conference in 2007, “The sleeping giant of Christian
Zionism has awakened,” had been pushing for the U.S. Embassy to move to
Jerusalem for years before Trump finally did it; Hagee delivered the closing
remarks <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-9XM-q8cdg> at the embassy’s
relocation ceremony in 2018. Another evangelical pastor, Robert Jeffress,
who led opening prayers at the ceremony, has said
<https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/14/world/middleeast/robert-jeffress-embassy-jerusalem-us.html>
Jews,
Mormons and Muslims are bound for hell. Trump sent five senior officials to
CUFI’s annual conference last summer.

Trump’s administration has combined evangelical power with support from
conservative Jews who support Netanyahu’s program, among them senior
adviser Jared Kushner and U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman. Vice
President Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are both evangelical
Christians, and their support for Israeli control over the West Bank
appears part and parcel of their belief that Israel’s borders should expand
across the ancient Davidic Kingdom. “We stand with Israel because we
cherish that ancient promise that those who bless her will be blessed,”
Pence said <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPM8Fe6E3lg> at last year’s
CUFI conference.

For decades, American support for Israel as a matter of foreign policy was
mostly steered by geopolitical and economic considerations. But under
Trump, it appears far more driven by Christian, Philo-Semitic views that
the distinct role of Jews in the biblical land of Israel is paramount. The
administration made this clear when it recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s
capital early on in Trump’s term, then recognized Israeli annexation of the
Syrian Golan Heights.

In a recorded keynote speech to a Jerusalem policy conference this month
hosted by the right-wing Kohelet Policy Forum, Pompeo reaffirmed a new
policy, first announced in November, that the United States has ditched the
1978 State Department’s Hansell Memorandum that deemed Israeli settlements
illegal. “We’re recognizing that these settlements don’t violate
international law,” he said.

Trump and his allies have also extended this approach to U.S. domestic
politics, fostering a climate where opposition to Israeli settlements —
once a mainstream American position — is seen as dangerous, while being a
pro-Israel hawk provides the veneer of being a friends to Jews. There was
the executive order
<https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-combating-anti-semitism/>
Trump
signed in December, which codifies the definition of anti-Semitism to
include criticism of Israel’s model of governance and, in practice, grants
the Department of Education more tools with which to crush Palestinian
advocacy in educational institutions. This month, South Dakota became the 28th
state
<https://fmep.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/State-BDS-and-Settlement-legislation-table.pdf>
to
pass legislation designed to punish companies or individual contractors who
boycott Israel — without making any distinction between settlements in the
West Bank and Israel proper. Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-N.Y.) introduced legislation
last week
<https://zeldin.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/rep-zeldin-leads-60-members-introducing-israel-anti-boycott-act>
that
classifies the United Nations as pro-boycott because it maintains a
database of companies that do business in Palestinian territories. This
mostly seems to be a solution in search of a problem: More than half of the
country hasn’t even heard of the boycott movement, according to recent
polling
<https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2020/01/08/what-do-americans-think-of-the-bds-movement-aimed-at-israel/>
by
the University of Maryland. But to evangelical Christian voters who support
Israel at all costs, it’s a sign that Republicans are doing the right thing.

Last month in Tel Aviv, I heard Elan Carr, the State Department’s special
envoy for monitoring and combating anti-Semitism, boast
<https://www.972mag.com/elan-carr-philosemitism-israel/> to a group of
Israelis and Americans that the United States is “still the most
Philo-Semitic country in world history” — as if that’s a good thing. Carr
said that to combat anti-Semitism, the United States must “educate on
philo-Semitism,” which essentially means, let’s show people how great Jews
are so they can go from hating them to loving them. This was astonishing to
me because philo-Semitism is not part of everyday discourse; not many
people know what it is. No politicians who I am aware of has ever employed
the term, because the concept is often considered a form of anti-Semitism
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/08/21/trump-keeps-pushing-anti-semitic-stereotypes-he-thinks-hes-praising-jews/?tid=lk_inline_manual_19>
.

Conservatives — Jewish and non-Jewish alike — have taken to framing support
for Israel as essential to protecting Jewish existence and fighting against
anti-Semitism. A new bill
<https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-resolution/782> in
Congress by Rep. Ted Budd (R-N.C.) urges public schools to teach “the
historic importance of the Jewish state of Israel” as part of an effort to
combat anti-Semitism. A Jewish teacher at an elite private school in New
York City was just fired
<https://jewishcurrents.org/the-war-on-free-speech-comes-to-high-school/> for
expressing anti-Zionist sentiments. During a recent march against
anti-Semitism in New York City, Anti-Defamation League director Jonathan
Greenblatt said “those who deny that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism are
contributing to the problem” and New York Times columnist Bari Weiss,
perfectly complementing him, declared
<https://jewishinsider.com/2020/01/the-full-text-of-bari-weiss-address-to-the-no-hate-no-fear-march/>,
“I am a Jew because of students across this country who refuse to be
smeared and denigrated because of who they are, who are standing up against
humiliation, pressure, and abuse to affirm the justness of Zionism.” But
among the loudest voices affirming the “justness of Zionism” in the United
States these days aren’t Jews; they’re evangelical Christians in the Trump
administration.

The great sociologist Zygmunt Bauman argued that philo-Semitism and
anti-Semitism both fall under “allosemitism”: literally Othering the Jew.
He defined it not as resentment of what is different, which is xenophobia,
but rather of what defies order and clear categories. In 1997, he wrote,
“The Jew is ambivalence incarnate. And ambivalence is ambivalence mostly
because it cannot be contemplated without ambivalent feeling: it is
simultaneously attractive and repelling.”

This is an apt description of how the Trump administration relates to Jews
and Israel. “You have people — Jewish people — and they are great people
and they don’t love Israel enough,” Trump told a room full of
ultraconservative Jewish supporters at the Israel-American Council
conference (funded by Sheldon Adelson, a big donor to Trump) last month.
This is precisely that ambivalence: the love and hate, admiration and
contempt. This is the mainstreaming of philo-Semitism, and as the Trump
administration continues to normalize Israel’s occupation regime, we can
expect the tokenization and instrumentalization of Jews to continue being
normalized, as well.

*Mairav Zonszein is an Israeli-American freelance journalist.*

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