The State of Israel vs. the Jews by Sylvain Cypel

Author:Sylvain Cypel [Cypel, Sylvain]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-09-28T00:00:00+00:00

The cement of Islamophobia

The great crusade that now unites Israel and ethno-nationalists everywhere is a combination of general xenophobia and the new alliance’s cement, Islamophobia. How else to explain Netanyahu and his fellows uncritically supporting Donald Trump after eleven Jews were gunned down at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh on October 27, 2018? The president’s first reaction was to lash out on Twitter against the “fake news media” and the press as “the true enemy of the people” for generating “divisions,” “hate,” and “great anger.”21 About the shooter’s motivation, he said not a word. Fed on a diet of racism spread by “white” websites, killer Robert Bowers claimed the Jews were “bringing the invaders,” those immigrants he despised. (It’s worth remembering that the theme of Jews slyly working to defile the purity of the Aryan race appears very early in the Hitlerian playbook. In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote: “It was and it is the Jews who bring the Negro to the Rhineland, always with the same concealed goal and with their clear goal of destroying, through bastardization, the white race they hate.”)22

Some 35,000 Pittsburgh-area Jews signed a petition informing Trump that he was not welcome in their city. It read in part, “For the past three years your words and your policies have emboldened a growing white nationalist movement…Yesterday’s violence is the direct culmination of your influence.” The letter continued: “Our Jewish community is not the only group you have targeted. You have also deliberately undermined the safety of people of color, Muslims, LGBTQ people, and people with disabilities.”

Ron Dermer, Israel’s ambassador to Washington, leaped to Trump’s defense, as did his colleague Dani Dayan, the consul general in New York. Dermer, who is close to both Netanyahu and the ZOA, justified the president’s strategy of spreading the blame around equally.

This tactic had been used before. On August 11 and 12, 2017, American neo-Nazis paraded through Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting, among other things, “The Jews will not replace us.”23 They were expressing the same idea as the Pittsburgh killer’s view of Jews playing a role in the “great replacement.” On August 12, one of the neo-Nazis suddenly rammed his car into a crowd of antiracist demonstrators, killing a young woman, Heather Heyer. President Trump’s reaction at a press conference: “You also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.” In other words, neo-Nazis and antiracists balance each other out, leaving the truth somewhere in between.

Eager to make a point, the Israeli ambassador picked up the theme. The Pittsburgh killer might be a white supremacist, he argued, “but I see a lot of people on both sides who attack Jews.”24 On the left and the right, presumably. Then he shifted his sights to Ilhan Omar, a Democrat running for Congress from Minnesota who is very critical of Israeli policies. In other words, Dermer segued from a crime committed by a white neo-Nazi to a Democratic Minnesota officeholder: a Black and Muslim immigrant guilty of no crime whatsoever. That

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