As a friend has reminded me several times in recent weeks, it was always only a matter of time before the MAGA movement decided to follow the course of its own festering antisemitism to its logical conclusion—namely, demanding an end to traditional US support for Israel. “Give it five years,” this friend told me, “and MAGA will have done a complete about-face on this issue.” It now appears he was right about everything except the timing. MAGA is already making the pivot he anticipated, except it’s happening now; not five years from now.
The mainstream media may not have noticed it; in part because it is confined to those online corners of the evolving MAGA-sphere that most people try to ignore, in the hopes it will exhaust itself and go away. If you had only been paying attention to Trump himself, after all, you would not have concluded that any major policy realignment was afoot. Apart from a few characteristically bizarre and controversial quips (about Hezbollah being “smart,” e.g.), Trump has mostly hewed to the conventional Republican line of attacking Democrats from the right on this issue.
We have to recall, though, that MAGA has often outstripped the former president who created it, forcing him to catch up. Remember Project Warpspeed? Trump was still pro-vaccine at a time when his followers had already fully embraced public health denialism. Now as then, the bleeding edge of MAGA influencers—the real “thought leaders,” to butcher a phrase—are already pursuing Trump’s right-wing extremism to conclusions that its founder has so far eschewed. In this case, specifically, they are moving in a direction that will soon make the movement’s antisemitic subtext into explicit prose.
It's not really so surprising, is it? We should have seen it coming. Trump’s “America First” slogan is, of course, lifted straight from an antisemitic political movement in the 1930s, organized to foil U.S. involvement in the struggle to defeat Hitler. That alone should have sent warning lights flashing as soon as Trump uttered it. Even if we interpret the slogan generously, though, as a mere expression of the foreign policy of “isolationism,” it is obvious that such an ideology—if taken seriously—would eventually compel the United States to abandon one of its most significant foreign alliances—the one it has maintained with Israel.
The first signs of someone actually making this shift came from Elon Musk, who is probably more influential among the very-online hard core of MAGA supporters and disaffected alt-right bros than the former president at this point. Take a glance at his “X” page and you will see an odd amalgam of pro-Putin talking points about the war in Ukraine, memes criticizing U.S. foreign policy, and the occasional jab at Israel and the Anti-Defamation League. Two themes predominate: a coy flirtation with antisemitism, and another, closely-related, and quite similar affinity for Vladimir Putin.
One of the videos that Musk recently reshared on his timeline features a Tucker Carlson interview of Vivek Ramaswamy. It was not widely reported in mainstream news, as major outlets try not to give Carlson any more oxygen than he can claim on his own, but it may turn out to be an early sign of one of the most significant ideological realignments in recent history. This was the interview in which Vivek took the logic of “America First” to its inevitable conclusion: calling for an end to the U.S. alliance with Israel, and invoking antisemitic tropes (specifically, the old canard about Jewish control of U.S. politics) to do it.
The brewing antisemitism of the MAGA cause has of course been obvious for a long time. There was Trump’s craven flattering and encouragement of conspiracy theories like QAnon that borrowed freely from antisemitic canards; there was his open endorsement of anti-Jewish bigots and Holocaust deniers like Kanye West. But these signs of increasingly overt antisemitism from Trump—or at best of his complete acceptance and tacit endorsement of it among his followers—was always complicated by his administration’s simultaneous embrace of the policies of Israel’s expansionist far-right.
There are signs, though, that the recent Hamas terrorist attack is forcing an ideological realignment on multiple fronts. This is most evident on the left, of course. It has certainly affected many of my own views. I don’t mean to say that I’ve abandoned any of my human rights concerns about Israeli policy in Gaza and the West Bank; I have not. But Hamas’s wide-ranging pogrom, massacring Jewish civilians in cold blood, destroyed permanently any notion I might have had that the Israeli military enjoyed a decisive advantage in any conflict. It has therefore forced me to reassess my attitude to U.S. military aid to Israel’s defense.
What’s clear to me now is that Israel is in fact in a vulnerable position, just as the Israeli government has been saying all along. They are indeed surrounded by hostile forces who wish to kill Jews, and who will act to do so if given a chance. They have the right to defend their own citizens and residents, and the United States has an obligation not to abandon them to the hands of their enemies. This should not be controversial, even among those of us critical of Israeli policy—not even among those of us who still see a one-state democratic solution as the most realistic and morally tenable way to end the conflict.
Indeed, those of us who long for a one-state resolution should be more vocal than anyone in denouncing Hamas’s terrorist atrocities. The whole possibility of Israelis and Palestinians one day peacefully sharing political institutions, after all, depends on a faith that neither side will abuse a numerical advantage to exterminate or expel the other. If the people who falsely consider themselves “pro-Palestinian” cannot even bring themselves to denounce an antisemitic pogrom—a mass murder of 1,400 Jews—happening now, in real time, not in some hypothetical future—how can anyone trust that they would actually oppose the ethnic cleansing of Jews that opponents of the one-state solution most fear would result from a unitary state?
I for one still think that a single democratic state, with the equal enfranchisement of the entire population, is the only way to end the state of effective apartheid in the West Bank without simultaneously forcing the expulsion of Israeli settlers from the territory—which would be a kind of ethnic cleansing in its own right. It seems to me that mass displacement and violence would immediately result from a two-state partition, and I’m surprised that so many people see it as the less radical of the available proposals to resolve the conflict. A single state, by contrast, would preserve Israeli democratic institutions while resolving the single most glaring flaw in these institutions.
But to make a peaceful, multiethnic, democratic state remotely possible, it is essential that antisemitic terrorist organizations that aim explicitly at the mass murder of Jews be eliminated from political power. Hamas is the largest single obstacle to peace; and anyone who still denies this has simply not paid attention—or has willfully blinded themselves—to what transpired earlier this month. Israel does have the right to act militarily to remove Hamas from power, in response to an act of overt aggression, and the U.S. should aid it in this fight. Such support should come, as I’ve said before, with human rights conditions. The U.S. should not yet again be a party to the collective punishment of Gazans. But the aid to Israel should come nonetheless.
I suspect I’m not the only person on the liberal-left who has changed his mind sufficiently to reach this conclusion, in the wake of the Hamas attack. Indeed, I thought more people would follow me. I have been thoroughly dismayed by the number of people on the left who instead seemed to double down on endorsing the worst kinds of terrorist violence and to excuse the slaughter of innocents.
Of course, the left has been saying for decades—and it is no doubt true—that criticism of Israel should not be equated to antisemitism or to endorsement of Hamas. But, however true that may be, defending or excusing a pogrom of Jewish civilians is antisemitic. And describing Hamas as part of a heroic “anti-colonial resistance” is endorsing Hamas. And all too many on the left have been doing both in recent weeks.
Left-wing antisemitism is thus a very real problem; so much so that I think left-wingers protesting Israeli policies have the burden at this point of showing that they are motivated by good faith human rights concerns, and not disguised anti-Jewish sentiment. The presumption of bad faith can be rebutted; but protesters ought to recognize that the presumption is there for a good reason—there truly are a lot of leftists who, from the way they have been talking about this issue, seem like they genuinely wouldn’t object to an ethnic cleansing of Jews in Israel, and like they genuinely don’t oppose the massive pogrom that already occurred on October 7.
But as if this were not all depressing enough, we must now add the ideological realignment identified above. I really do think we are witnessing a recalibration of the whole MAGA movement on this issue. If the Tucker Carlson-Vivek Ramaswamy-Elon Musk nexus has already turned against Israel, it seems only a matter of time before the rest of the American far Right follows them. If they really mean what they say about “isolationism” and “America First” and their other dog-whistles, they will eventually dump any support for Israel. Worse still, they will start to become increasingly open about their antisemitism.
Plus, Putin’s Russia voted against the pro-Israel resolutions at the UN this past week. And since MAGA, Tucker, Musk, J.D. Vance, Trump, Ramaswamy, and the House GOP "freedom caucus" seem to take their orders directly from Moscow at this point, surely it is only a matter of time before they fall into line and start opposing Israel’s existence too, to the extent they have not already done so.
And if what I have said above about left-wing critics of Israel facing the burden of showing they are not motivated by antisemitism is deserved, then surely we should demand even more of right-wing “America First” critics of Israel. Whatever valid human rights criticisms of Israeli policy there may be, after all—and there are many—surely none of them can be what’s motivating the “America Firsters”—since it is an article of faith among them not to care about the human rights of foreigners. Nor can it be opposition to militarism that motivates them, since many are currently calling for a war with Mexico. All we’re left with is antisemitism and sheer love of Putin.
Then the circle will truly be complete. The extremes will have met. The pro-Putin Left—the Greenwald faction, let us call them, who favor U.S. adversaries on all issues and oppose everything the United States does, no matter how benign, including supporting our traditional allies in their struggle for existence against naked aggression—will then have merged fully with the MAGA Right, with whom they have long been engaged in a flirtation. Then they can all see eye to eye on the big issues of our time. They can all say in unison: We hate Israel! We hate Ukraine! We love Putin! We love Hamas! How simplifying it would all be.
The only problem is that, with a faction of the far left and a major faction of the far right (and it is the faction at that, let us recall, most associated with the former president and most likely to head the GOP ticket next November) both embracing isolationism, the forces left fighting for an internationalist U.S. foreign policy that cares about our allies and the fate of other people abroad will be dangerously hollowed out. Even more worryingly, with significant segments of both the left and the right flirting with outright antisemitism, the number of people left in American politics willing to stand up to anti-Jewish bigotry will be fatally diminished.
What happens then? Do people think the worst cannot come? Do people think the Holocaust could not happen again? Do people think history never repeats itself? What, if that were true, are we to make of the fact that the slogan “America First,” having spent decades in well-earned disgrace and odium in the American political consciousness—recalled, rightly, only as a symbol of craven toadying to fascism—suddenly emerged as a rallying cry for the Right again in the second decade of the twenty-first century? What are we to make of the fact that major segments of the American right now openly describe themselves as “nationalists” without a flicker of conscience? If these things can be repeated, what else might be repeated?
Must we really doubt that the worst of the past can indeed come again? Do you need to be told, as T.S. Eliot once wrote, that whatever has been can still be?
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