Former US president Donald Trump has once again been condemned for “antisemitism,” after publication of an interview series with Israeli journalist Barak Ravid. Trump told Ravid, “It used to be that Israel had absolute power over Congress and today I think it’s the exact opposite.” He continued, “I think Obama and Biden did that. Yet in the election they still get a lot of votes from the Jewish people, which tells you that .. the Jewish people in the United States either don’t like Israel or don’t care about Israel.”
His comments generated a storm of controversy and renewed accusations of antisemitism from news outlets and commenters, from The New Yorker, to New York Magazine’s Intelligencer, to The Black Wall Street Times. On Twitter, ADL chief Jonathan Greenblatt stated that “insinuating that Israel or the Jews control Congress or the media is antisemitic, plain and simple.”
Whether or not President Trump exaggerated Israel’s past influence, that Congressional support for Israel has declined is without question—and something no antisemite would state with regret. CJV Managing Director Rabbi Menken commented that this was another example of partisans “losing their collective minds” about Trump, and issuing meritless condemnations that do nothing but mask the real problem of antisemitism flourishing on the Left.
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Trump’s core point, as already mentioned, was that American Jews continued to back Obama and Biden even as they took antagonistic positions towards Israel, while evangelicals were much more supportive of Israel’s security needs. This same point was made by the former Israeli Ambassador to the U.S., Ron Dermer, in an interview earlier this year. But no one accused Dermer of being antisemitic for saying it.