Israel’s times may be ‘a-changin’

 

By James M Dorsey

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When Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu first cultivated Evangelical and far-right support for Israel, he didn’t worry about their theologically rooted associations with anti-Semitism and/or willingness to turn a blind eye to racially-motivated anti-Jewish sentiment.

It was a bet that paid off for decades. It solidified Republican support for Israel and helped ensure that successive US administrations, whether Republican or Democratic, had Israel’s back.

 

A recent Gallup poll showed 83 per cent of Republicans as viewing Israel favourably as opposed to Democrats, among whom positive perceptions of Israel dropped from 74 per cent in 2014 to 33 per cent this year.

President Donald J. Trump catered to his pro-Israel base in his first two months in office by authorising US$11 billion in arms sales, signing a swath of executive orders to crack down on criticism of Israel, and putting universities and student protesters in his crosshairs.

Even so, the times may be ‘a-changin’ to borrow singer Bob Dylan’s phrase.

This week, the conservative Washington-based Heritage Foundation postponed publishing a report calling for a rejiggering of the US-Israeli relationship after Yechiel Leiter, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, cancelled his participation in the event.

Heritage is widely believed to have influenced Mr. Trump’s second-term administration with many of its policies outlined in Project 2025, the foundation’s strategy to reshape the United States’ federal government.

The Israel report called on the administration to use next year’s expiration of the current Memorandum of Understanding to “forge a new relationship with the State of Israel.” Israel receives US$3.8 billion in security assistance annually under the memorandum.

The report suggests raising the assistance to $4 billion but reducing it annually by $250 million starting from 2029 until 2047, when the aid would stop. At the same time, Israel would be required to increase purchases of US defense equipment by $250 million a year starting in 2039.

Credit: Democracy Docket

The foundation argued its proposition would elevate Israel from being a “security aid recipient” into a “true strategic partnership” with the United States.

The behind-the-scenes controversy over the report came as isolationists, who are critical of America’s two-peas-in-a-pod relationship with Israel and dabble in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, gained greater prominence in the Republican Party and Mr. Trump’s support base.

Former Israeli lawmaker and ambassador Colette Avital warned that Israel’s alignment with the global far-right is “opportunistic, short-sighted and outright dangerous… Who would have believed that eighty years after the greatest tragedy in Jewish history, the mass murder of half of the Jews in the world, a Jewish state would choose anti-Semites as its allies?” she asked.

Ms. Avital was referring to Israel’s ties to the European far-right, but she just as well could have been referring to Mr. Trump’s Republican party, pro-Trump podcasters, and some he appointed to his administration.

The cast of problematic characters includes technology billionaire Elon Musk, influential podcasters Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, and Steve Bannon, Mr. Trump's first-term strategic affairs advisor, and deputy Pentagon spokesperson Kingsley Wilson.

Recent gestures by Messrs. Musk and Bannon at separate events evoked the Nazis’ outstretched arm salute. Both men stand accused of backing anti-Semitic expressions.

Mr. Rogan recently hosted Ian Carroll on his show, one of the most coveted slots in the podcast business.

A fellow far-right podcaster and Tik-Tok influencer, Mr. Carroll used his 2:41 hours on the show to hold forth on sexual predator and financier Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged operation of a “Jewish organization of Jewish people working on behalf of Israel and other groups,” including organized crime and elements of the CIA, to blackmail American politicians and businessmen.

Mr. Carroll suggested that the blackmail prevented newly appointed Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel from proving the cabal’s existence and ensured that Mr. Trump would never cut Israel loose.

Mr. Caroll charged that organized crime syndicates, sinister transnational bankers, and terrorists who use methods embraced by the pre-state Jewish underground, founded Israel.

In the past, Mr. Carroll has accused Israel of staging the 9/11 Al-Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington, asserted that a “Zionist mafia” controlled the United States, and denounced the power of the "Jewish mob" and the "Rothschild banking family."

Mr. Rogan has further scheduled to host Darryl Cooper, a self-proclaimed Nazi apologist and Holocaust denier who last year asserted on Mr. Carlson’s show that “millions of people ended up dead” in concentration camps because Germany went to war “completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war.”

Mr. Cooper suggested that British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, rather than Adolf Hitler, was the main culprit in World War Two even if “he didn’t kill the most people” and “didn’t commit the most atrocities.”

Candace Owens with Tucker Carlson

Mr. Carlson, who also hosted

Mother Jones, a left-leaning magazine, reported that Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson had “a long history of bigoted, xenophobic, and deliberately provocative” social media posts.

A ‘Make America Great Again’ supporter appointed in January, Ms. Wilson compared the killing of infants in Hamas’ October 7, 2023, attack on Israel to abortion.

Like Mr. Carlson, a propagator of the Great Replacement Theory, Ms. Wilson peddled an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory about Leo Frank, a Jewish businessman who was wrongly convicted and lynched for the murder of a 13-year-old Georgia girl in 1915.

The theory holds that non-white immigrants are lured to the United States, often by Jews, to replace white Americans.

The rise of Messrs. Rogan, Carlson, and Cooper, and Mmes. Owens and Wilson comes at a crucial moment for Israel, with this week’s second-phase negotiations in Qatar potentially pitting Messrs. Trump and Netanyahu against one another.

Adam Boehler, Donald J. Trump, and Binyamin Netanyahu. Credit. YnetNews

Seemingly exasperated with Mr. Netanyahu’s delaying tactics, Mr. Trump twice fired a shot across Israel’s bow in recent days, first by authorising his hostage negotiator, Adam Boehler, to meet face-to-face with Hamas, the first-ever such encounter, and then to report his conclusions, in several Israeli television interviews, rather than through Mr. Netanyahu’s filter.

“I think you could see something like a long-term truce… I believe there is enough there to make a deal between what Hamas wants and what they have accepted and what Israel wants and it's accepted,” Mr. Boehler told CNN after his meetings. He made similar comments in an interview with Israel’s Channel 12.

“Boehler presented to the Israeli public…what Netanyahu refuses to say,” said journalist Chaim Levinson.

Ever concerned that the slightest change of US language signals a shift in policy, Israeli analysts noted that Mr. Boehler described Palestinians incarcerated in Israeli prisons as hostages rather than inmates and Hamas-held Israelis as prisoners instead of hostages.

Moreover, Mr. Boehler sought to humanise Hamas by trying “to identify with the human elements of those people and then build from there.” Mr. Boehler argued that the “most productive” approach “is to realize that every piece of a person is a human.”

Further alarming Israelis, Mr. Boehler differentiated between US and Israeli interests. “We’re the United States. We’re not an agent of Israel. We have specific interests at play,” Mr. Boehler said.

Asked about Israeli anger at his talks with Hamas, Mr. Boehler added insult to injury by saying he didn’t “really care about that that much.”

With direct criticism of Mr. Trump off limits, Israel and its surrogates stepped up their long-standing targeting of Qatar amid reports that the Gulf state engineered Mr. Boehler’s contact with Hamas without informing Israel.

Qatar has long been the bete noir of the Israeli far-right and Israel’s Republican supporters in the United States, despite Mr. Netanyahu’s convoluted relationship with the Gulf state.

The anti-Qatar campaign is as much an effort to undermine the Gulf state’s status as a Gaza mediator as it is to prevent Mr. Netanyahu from being held accountable for his years-long soliciting of Qatari funding for Hamas to keep the Palestinian divided between the Gaza-based group and the West Bank-based, internationally recognised Palestine Authority.

In a series of recent articles, the Philadelphia-based far-right Middle East Forum recently returned Qatar to its crosshairs in support of Mr. Trump’s crackdown on expressions of support for the Palestinians.

One article accused Georgetown University of having “links…to hostile foreign states and a powerful domestic extremist network that has gained influence over one of the nation’s top universities.” Georgetown has a campus in Qatar.

Another article asserted that Qatari funding for US universities, including Georgetown, Harvard, and Northwestern, had turned campuses into breeding grounds for extremist ideologies by manipulating curricula and promoting a pro-Hamas narrative. The article charged the funding had fuelled the rise of anti-Semitism.

A third article called on Mr. Trump to hold Qatar accountable for its alleged alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood and support for Hamas, a Brotherhood offshoot.

The Washington-based Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), headed by Yigal Carmon, a former advisor to Israel's West Bank and Gaza occupation authority and Prime Ministers Yitzhak Shamir and Yitzhak Rabin, has harped on this theme for the past two decades.

A MEMRI brief published as Mr. Boehler met with Hamas described Qatar as an “evil regime.”

In an apparent effort to needle Israel in return, Qatar called on the international community to force Israel to join the Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and accept the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) monitoring of its nuclear facilities.

The Middle East’s only presumed nuclear power, Israel, is the only regional state that is not an NPT signatory.

Israel has never publicly acknowledged that it possesses nuclear weapons but is believed to have around 90 in its arsenal, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

Credit: SIPRI

In a statement, Qatar’s foreign ministry quoted the country’s IAEA ambassador, Jassim Yacoub Al Hammadi, as noting “the need for the international community and its institutions to uphold their commitments under resolutions of the UN Security Council, the UN General Assembly, the IAEA, and the 1995 Review Conference of the NPT, which called on Israel to subject all its nuclear facilities to IAEA safeguards.”

Dr. James M. Dorsey is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, and the author of the syndicated column and podcast, The Turbulent World with James M. Dorsey.