The president-elect shouldn’t be given a free pass, but the talk of anti-Semitism in his administration is out of place.
By AMIEL UNGARRepublican presidential nominee Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally in Reno(photo credit: MIKE SEGAR / REUTERS)
WE WILL soon learn whether the dire warnings issued by Jewish liberals in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election victory will be vindicated or whether my pre-election endorsement of Trump – warts, tweets and all – displayed better judgement. The dread of a Trump administration has now produced complaints over the Israeli government’s failure to weigh in on this issue even before Trump has officially taken office. Israel, it is argued, cannot sacrifice the fight against anti-Semitism to diplomatic expediency. This type of handwringing may be appropriate for the EU but it is ill-suited to the current or any Israeli government.First of all, Israeli policy makers need real evidence connecting Trump with anti-Semitism and not something flimsy like the Breitbart-Bannon axis that is dwarfed by the documented case against prospective Democratic National Committee chair Keith Ellison. The talk that Trump is Hitler is reminiscent of Winston Churchill’s warning during the 1945 British general election campaign that Labor under his opponent Clement Atlee would require a Gestapo to implement its program of nationalization. While Atlee can be faulted for his policy surrounding the birth of Israel, he definitely was no Hitler.Perhaps it is a matter of where we sit geographically. Some of the current petition and “resistance movement” organizers cavalierly dismiss the threat to Israel emanating from a sovereign Palestinian state or from a rehabilitated Iran that constantly threatens to wipe us off the map, and are taking active measures to do so. From a safe distance, they preferred to follow the Obama administration’s lead either because they felt Obama’s policies were justified or because they were mesmerized by his personality and his symbolic importance.In the process, they were willing to overlook administration attempts to paint opponents of the Iran nuclear deal as warmongers and Israel-firsters, which also qualify as anti-Semitic tropes. Sometimes it went beyond sins of omission as when Thomas Friedman sneered that the repeated standing ovations lavished on Netanyahu during his speech before the US Congress had been paid for by the Israel lobby.The anti-Semitism did not materialize suddenly with Trump’s victory.At a time when liberals were bleating about the dangers of Islamophobia following terror attacks in the US by those who must not be named as Islamic terrorists, the FBI statistics showed that Jews were far more likely to be victims of hate crimes than Muslims. These statistics do not include the ordeals faced by Jewish students on college campuses, including on their way to Rosh Hashana prayers.On the issue of combating anti-Semitism, we can assure our concerned American brethren that we in Israel will judge President Trump on his policies and their results, the way Trump the businessman expects to be judged. There are no adulatory Donald posters on our bedroom walls that will incline us to give him a free pass. If Jews in America are victimized, Israel will do its best, as it has done for other threatened Jewish communities. We will not throw Jewish critics of Israel under the bus to appease anti-Semites the way Peter Beinart and his crew did when they launched an anti-settler boycott to bolster their creds on the Left.However, do not expect us to criticize Trump administration positions that are part of the Israeli consensus. For example, the general Israeli consensus believes the state should effectively control the immigration process. Free immigration to Israel is not an entitlement, except for Jews under the Law of Return. To make that position stick, Israel has heavily invested in physical obstacles to prevent infiltration by work immigrants. It would be hypocritical to object to similar measures by a Trump administration to secure the US border. For most Israelis, the notion of sanctuary cities for illegals that stymies cooperation between law enforcement agencies is incomprehensible.The people sounding the alarm should be credible across the political spectrum. Daniel Sokatch’s advocacy of Jewish resistance to Trump in The Washington Post is a turnoff because it reminds us that Sokatch’s New Israel Fund has also been resisting our elected government by funding NGOs, including those who question the very legitimacy of Israel. When Prof. Hasia Diner, whose definition of defending Israel is to apply pressure on our country, coauthors a petition of Jewish scholars (where anti-Semitism appears almost as an afterthought) calling for immediate mobilization against the forces who facilitated Trump’s election, we may have doubts about her sense of urgency. The fight against a recrudescent anti-Semitism should unite all Jews – conservatives and liberals, traditional and secular. Even in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, unity proved elusive between the Socialist and Revisionist undergrounds. Attempts at unity will founder, if the fight against anti-Semitism is selective and hijacked to advance an external agenda.Contributor Amiel Ungar is also a columnist for the Hebrew weekly Besheva
if(catID != 151){
var cont = `Take Israel home with the new Jerusalem Post Store