Feb 5, 2025
Yesterday, Trump hosted his first foreign leader: war criminal and international fugitive Benjamin Netanyahu.
As Netanyahu beamed, Trump made the shocking announcement that he expected the 1.8 million Palestinians in Gaza would leave permanently (or be removed) — “ending the death and destruction and, frankly, bad luck.” His reference to 15 months of genocide as “bad luck” revealed his posture of humanitarian concern as an obvious farce.
As NPR observed: “Whether or not it is a viable vision, the once-fringe Israeli idea of “transfer” — expelling or encouraging the emigration of Palestinians to other countries so Israel can take over their land — has quickly moved further into the Israeli mainstream with Trump’s comments in recent weeks about relocating Gazans.”
Trump continued, promising to turn Gaza into “the Riviera of the Middle East.”
To complete this ethnic cleansing, Trump suggested the U.S. military could possibly “take over” the besieged enclave.
As Trump has been cementing his commitment to the U.S.-Israel relationship, Netanyahu has been making a goodwill tour to a who’s who of the American Right.
Netanyahu goes to Washington
The first person Netanyahu met with after he landed in the U.S. on Sunday was billionaire antisemite and Trump’s right-hand man Elon Musk, who only a few weeks ago was giving Nazi salutes at an inauguration rally.
On Monday, Netanyahu met with over a dozen evangelical Christian leaders. They included ambassador-hopeful Mike Huckabee, who embraces the Israeli government’s dispossession of Palestinians because he believes it’s a prerequisite to armageddon, and televangelist John Hagee, who once remarked that the Holocaust was part of God’s plan to drive the Jews to Israel.
The far-Right is the largest purveyor of antisemitism and violence against Jews. So why did the Prime Minister of Israel spend the days leading up to his meeting with Trump courting far-Right extremists?
The answer is simple: Maintaining U.S. support for Israel was never about Jewish safety — and both Israel’s backers and the far-Right are intent on using fears of rising antisemitism to advance their shared agenda.
Pretending to fight antisemitism = The new McCarthyism
Trump’s first actions as President have been to issuea host of executive orders targeting and dismantling protections for nearly every marginalized group in the U.S. At the same time, he issued an Executive order “to combat antisemitism,” by instructing the State Department to revoke student visas from any student known to have organized ceasefire protests over the past fifteen months.
There’s no good reason that a racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-immigrant, Islamophobic government, its highest ranks populated with virulent antisemites, would suddenly be concerned about Jews facing identity-based discrimination. Yet the new administration has positioned itself as though it cares about combating antisemitism.
In reality, the far-Right is weaponizing false accusations of antisemitism as a cudgel to both defend Israel’s genocide and lay the groundwork for trampling on all of our fundamental rights and freedoms.
Just look at Trump’s sham executive order to “combat antisemitism,” which would lay the groundwork for deportations of non citizen student activists.
This executive order is pulled directly from the pages of “Project Esther”: the far-Right’s plan to destroy the Palestine solidarity movement. It is a scare tactic: a transparent attempt to shut down criticism of the Israeli government, and does nothing to keep Jews safe.
Criminalizing criticism of Israel — an aim the far-Right shares with Israel’s extremist government and its backers — is the entryway for the Right to completely dismantle fundamental rights and freedoms.
Israel, U.S. dominance, and the far-Right’s agenda
The U.S.-Israel alliance is at the center of the Trump agenda.
Piggybacking on 15 months of Biden administration policy, Trump is reportedly requesting congressional approval on a billion-dollar weapons shipment to the Israeli government. The package would include hundreds of millions of dollars worth of armored bulldozers and 1,000-pound bombs.
U.S. support for Israel is driven by long-standing material interests on both sides, interests that transcend the partisan political divide. That’s because Israel serves an important role in ensuring U.S. dominance over the region. In exchange, the U.S. provides Israel with the weapons and political support it needs to maintain an indefinite military occupation over millions of Palestinians — and pose a constant military threat to its neighbors.
This was true when Biden was president, and it’s true now that Trump is president, despite his ultra-isolationist, America-first agenda. Though he issued an executive order freezing U.S. foreign aid last week, the Trump administration elected to maintain military funding for only two states: Israel and Egypt.
The destruction of the international rules-based order brought on by 15 months of genocide is music to Trump’s ears. Though Biden claimed to care about the international system, his policy of funding and enabling Israel’s daily atrocities in Gaza have made a mockery of international law, and contributed to a climate of impunity that directly enables Trump and the rest of the far-Right.
Finally, pretending to care about antisemitism and Jewish safety gives the far-Right convenient moral cover for their bigoted, anti-democratic agenda. It is in the name of combating antisemitism that the far-Right is gutting freedom of speech on campuses across the country and threatening to deport student activists.
Attacks on our movements are the blueprint
The U.S.-Israel relationship is clearly at the top of the Trump administration’s agenda. It remains core to the United States’ status as a global hegemon, and the far-Right and Israel’s backers are teaming up to gut civil liberties under the guise of combating antisemitism — all with the aim of maintaining unwavering U.S. support for Israel.
But while the far-Right may be exploiting fears of rising antisemitism as an entryway to dismantle the Palestine solidarity movement, they aren’t stopping there. During his first weeks in office, Trump launched attack after attack on marginalized communities: From ramping up ICE raids and waging an all-out war on trans rights, to scrubbing LGBTQI+ resources from government websites. Criminalizing criticism of Israel was the blueprint, but all of our fundamental rights and freedoms are under threat.
In order to beat the far-Right, we must recognize that our struggles for liberation are intertwined — and move in solidarity with one another. U.S. support for Israel is an increasingly right-wing project, one that is core to carrying out a bigoted agenda that puts all of our communities at risk. Far from being siloed, the Palestine solidarity movement is actually on the frontlines of the fight against the far-Right. None of us will be free until Palestinians are free.
Published at www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org
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