How Israel Divides the Right

For the first year after the attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, the most profound effect in America of Israel’s war in Gaza was to destabilize the Democratic Party’s coalition. The reaction to the conflict widened an existing divide between pro-Israel Democratic Party elites and pro-Palestinian progressive activists and made unity seem impossible, leaving Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign especially stuck straddling a chasm.

In the second year of the war, the intra-liberal divides are still there, but the fractures on the right are also becoming significant. More so than in the Democratic Party, most Republican elites remain staunchly pro-Israel. But on what you might call the alienated right — younger, conspiracy-curious, anti-institutional and very online — there is a vogue for arguments about malign Jewish influences on Western politics, ranging from World War II revisionism to narratives casting Jeffrey Epstein as a cat’s paw for the Mossad.

This is not yet the kind of open, intraparty conflict that you saw in the Democratic coalition all last year — and writing for Vox, the liberal writer Zack Beauchamp suggests that it need not be, as long as the right sustains what he calls “pro-Israel antisemitism.” This is a perspective, in his telling, that divides the Jewish world into good (conservative or Israeli) Jews and bad (liberal or anti-populist or just anti-Trump) Jews and backs Israel’s right-wing government to prove its anti-antisemitic bona fides, all while maintaining a big tent for anti-Jewish dog whistles and coded bigotry — which signal to the antisemitic fringe that the right is on their side.

I think this description may capture something about the weird coalition politics in far-right European parties like the Alternative for Germany, and certainly Donald Trump divides American Jews, as he divides all groups, into good guys and bad guys, depending on whether they back or oppose him.

But where the larger Republican Party is concerned, I think Beauchamp’s framework underplays a fundamental tension: There’s just no way for mainstream Zionist Republicanism and the anti-Jewish faction on the alienated right to get along.

The most pro-Israel portions of American conservatism are not pro-Israel because of some complicated game of alliances involving support for Likud-style nationalism and opposition to Muslim immigration in Europe. They’re pro-Israel because, if they’re Christian, they’re part of a philosemitic tradition present in American life since the founding era, which intensified after World War II as both Protestants and Catholics reckoned with religious complicity in the Holocaust.