The GOP: Wrong on Settlements, White Nationalism and Anti-Semitism
By Steve Sheffey
The GOP is the party of anti-Semitism and white nationalism. Trump’s presidential campaign trafficked in anti-Semitic tropes, including Jewish money in politics and other anti-Jewish stereotypes. In October 2018, Trump promoted an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory on Twitter. Trump accused Jews of dual loyalty at the 2018 White House Hanukkah Party and in April 2019 in Las Vegas. Trump said in August 2019 that American Jews who vote Democratic — that’s about 80% of us — are either ignorant or “disloyal.” When asked to clarify, he said he meant “disloyal to Israel.”
In December 2019 Trump again invoked anti-Semitic tropes about dual loyalty and Jewish avarice that Jewish groups denounced. Trump’s record pre-dates his presidency: A 1991 book that Trump admitted was accurate quoted him saying that “The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.”
It took Republicans 16 years to speak out against Rep. Steve King (R-IA), but dozens of Democratic members of Congress, including Democratic leadership, immediately condemned anti-Semitism from within their party in early 2019.
Republicans didn’t condemn Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) for posting an anti-Semitic tweet about Jewish money buying the election in October 2018. They elected him House Minority Leader. They elected Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA), who described himself as “David Duke without the baggage,” as the #2 House Republican.
Rep. Max Rose (D-NY) and 39 colleagues asked Pompeo why the State Department has failed to include certain overseas violent white supremacist groups on the Foreign Terrorist Organization list. No Republicans joined them. Rose said “It’s curious to me that the Republican Party, for the better half of this year, are claiming they’re against anti-Semitism. Here they have an opportunity to label it, but they’re not willing to stand against it.”
White House Senior Adviser Stephen Miller is a white nationalist. The ADL joined 60 other organizations demanding his resignation. The Jewish Democratic Council of America (JDCA) demanded his resignation. More than 100 members of Congress — none Republicans — have demanded Miller’s resignation.
On December 20, 25 Jewish members of Congress, led by Reps. Brad Schneider (D-IL) and Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL), called on Trump to fire white nationalist Stephen Miller. The only Jewish members of the House who did not sign the letter were the two Republicans, David Kutsoff (R-TN) and Lee Zeldin (R-NY), once again putting party before decency. Trump and the GOP seem fine with Miller. He’s still there.
At the impeachment hearings on November 21, in response to a question from Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL), Fiona Hill said that the conspiracy theories pushed by Republicans linking witnesses testifying against Trump to George Soros were anti-Semitic. As if to prove her point, Glenn Beck invoked Soros as a puppet-master. The ADL explains the anti-Semitism behind the Soros conspiracy theories.
The anti-Semitic right has found a home at the highest levels of the Republican Party that the anti-Semitic left has not found in the Democratic Party. The question is when the 20% of Jewish Americans who still vote Republican will wake up.
Pompeo’s statement on settlements will hurt Israel and weaken U.S. credibility. On November 18, Secretary of State Pompeo announced that “the Trump administration is reversing the Obama administration’s approach towards Israeli settlements.” Pompeo then went on to falsely charge that it was John Kerry who reversed decades of policy on settlements in 2016.
J.J. Goldberg documents that of the 13 U.N. Security Council resolutions reiterating that the Fourth Geneva Convention is applicable to Israel’s rule in the territories it captured in 1967, which makes civilian Israeli settlements illegal, “the United States voted yes on six (two under Reagan, four under Bush Senior) and abstained seven times.” Obama’s in 2016 was the seventh abstention. Reagan said settlements were not illegal, but that’s not how he voted at the U.N.
Pompeo started his history lesson with Jimmy Carter’s declaration that settlements were illegal, but the Johnson administration held the same view in 1968, which the Ford administration reiterated in 1976.
The Trump administration now says that “the establishment of Israeli civilian settlements in the West Bank is not per se inconsistent with international law.”
Trump’s policy reversal is tantamount to an okay for unilateral annexation, which would weaken support for Israel in the U.S. and put a two-state solution further out of reach.
It doesn’t matter if Pompeo is right about the law (he’s not). The green light that the U.S. is giving the next Israeli government on annexation and further settlement growth, as Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) and other members of Congress said, “undermines the safety of both Israelis and Palestinians and undercuts any prospect for a two-state solution.” Rep. Andy Levin (D-MI) and over 100 other members urged Pompeo to reverse this decision.
Those speaking out against Pompeo’s decision are pro-Israel. Ami Ayalon, a former commander in chief of the Israeli Navy and former director of Israel’s Shin Bet security service, said on Friday that “Continuing the occupation is the single greatest threat to Israel’s safety, and to our existence as a democracy…Don’t listen to those who hysterically charge that it is ‘anti-Israel’ for American leaders to oppose the occupation or warn against annexation. Today, it is among the most pro-Israel things the United States can do.”
Gilead Sher and Daniel Cohen explain that unilateral annexation would lead Israel to an unprecedented crisis of delegitimization, enhanced demonization and isolation. If you speak out against annexation, that’s what you are speaking out against. Trump’s foreign policy is bad for Israel.
If you understand Marty Lederman’s analysis of Pompeo’s remarks and the arguments for and against the legality of the settlements, you’ll understand that pro-Israel advocates lose credibility by arguing that settlements don’t violate international law and how mistaken and misguided Pompeo’s pronouncement was.
Pompeo alluded to Obama’s December 2016 abstention on U.N. Security Council Resolution 2334, but as J.J. Goldberg wrote, the resolution “broke no new ground and said nothing that the council hadn’t said many times before. If there was anything surprising about it, it was the fact that by abstaining, the Obama administration broke its own record as the only administration since 1967 that hadn’t permitted a single anti-Israel resolution from the Security Council.” Obama left Israel with the largest security package in history and the negative effect on Israel from the resolution has been nil.
Updated on December 20, 2019.
Steve Sheffey is Strategy and Policy Adviser to the Jewish Democratic Council of America (JDCA) and the publisher of the weekly Chicagoland Pro-Israel Political Update. Sign up for his newsletter here. The views expressed here are his own.
