Three things from our pod with author and WSJ columnist Walter Russell Mead (and actually, none of them are Kanye):
Antisemitism has never gone away completely, but during times of trouble, it often rears its head.
For an all-powerful minority, Jews have been shockingly powerless in America.
Israel isn’t strong because of America’s friendship; America is friends with Israel because the Jewish state is strong.
If it weren’t so awful, it would seem like a joke: A Republican, a Black rapper and a white supremacist named Fuentes go to dinner… But of course, it is so awful. Across American cities, ubiquitous on college campuses, among Congressional Democrats and Republicans, hating on the Jews is big. Antisemitic crimes have skyrocketed, and not just in the United States. Across Europe too.
Sometimes, antisemites mask their hatred of Jews as anti-Zionism; sometimes, antisemites focus on the the State of Israel to the exclusion of all other nations. That is the story at the United Nations, more concerned with what it calls apartheid in Israel than it is with the human rights of a million Chinese Uyghurs. Sometimes, there are echoes of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, that antisemitic Czarist forgery that is at the root of claims that a nefarious Jewish power controls the media, banking… you name it.
But as Walter Russell Mead makes clear in his outstanding new book, The Arc of a Covenant:: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People, it is not the Jews who have cemented America’s relationship with Israel. And it is not America’s Jews who have shaped the nation’s commitment to the Jewish state. Far from it. We can’t do the book’s thoughtful and meticulously researched arguments justice in one short substack, but one small note lays bare just how irrelevant Washington was to Israel’s early survival: Josef Stalin was more instrumental to Israel’s victory in its war of independence than Harry Truman.
Like so many other truths about semites, antisemites and the “special relationship,” all too many are determined to believe what they want to believe, reality be damned. But as Jews are once again targeted around the world, perhaps it’s time for all of us to stand up and be counted as supporters of the rights of the Jewish people and the State of Israel.
HIGHLIGHTS
Let’s talk about tropes regarding secret Jewish power in the United States…
WRM: I look at the history and if the Jews ran the United States, if this were true, okay, I look at the 1930s when Hitler is rising in Germany and the Jews are being increasingly persecuted and the all powerful Jews can't even get the US State Department to give good treatment to German Jews trying to get out of Hitler's Germany. Not only that, they can't go to Congress and say, "Just let the Jews out."They couldn't really get the US to do more than write a couple of diplomatic notes to the Germans. They couldn't get a boycott of Nazi German goods. They couldn't get American companies to disinvest for Nazi Germany.
Then comes World War II, and again, the supposedly all powerful Jewish leaders come to Franklin Roosevelt begging him to just release a few aircraft to bomb the rail lines leading to Auschwitz to slow down the mass murder. And they can't get that. But then suddenly in 1947, 1948, they […] say, "Aha, the all powerful Jews force Harry Truman to override the State Department and impose a pro-Israel policy on the United States." So somehow between 1944 when they can't bomb the rail lines to Auschwitz in 1947, when they're forcing Truman hands, the Jews conquer America. But then amazingly, in 1952, when Eisenhower is elected, these all powerful Jews lose control. I don't know what happened. Did a plague wipe them all out? I don't know. But the Suez crisis comes. Eisenhower sides with Egypt against not only Israel, but France and Britain, and all during the Eisenhower administration, when Israel is poor, when Israel could really use some help, the United States is actually siting with Nasser.
So Jews aren’t all-powerful in America? But isn’t the US essential to Israel’s survival?
WRM: I would say that you look back at some of the Jewish lobbying Zionism in the forties and you realize these people really were very bad at the job, had absolutely no idea.
There are a couple of reasons I think why Israel plays such a large role in American Middle East policy today. One of them has to do with foreign policy. One of them has to do with domestic. In foreign policy, the thing is that Israel and the United States, we disagree about a lot of things, and I'm sure we're going to disagree about more. But there's one bottom line thing we both agree on. And that is that neither one of us wants to see any power other than the United States strong enough to potentially stop the flow of oil from the Middle East to the rest of the world. Now we want that because we want the stability of oil markets
There was a time when we did need Middle Eastern oil in the United States. Today we don't. But we need for Japan and Europe, for example, to be able to get in Middle Eastern oil on predictable terms at a reasonable price, or their economies will crash, which would mean our economy would crash. So anybody who can stop the flow of oil in and out of the Middle East can sort of hold the world to ransom, we don't want that to happen. And from Israel's point of view, any power strong enough to that is strong enough to threaten Israel's existence, whether it's an internal power like Iran or maybe in the future Turkey, or whether it's an external power like Russia or China. It threatens Israel's independence if any country dominates the Middle East. So on that fundamental question, Israel and the United States are joined at the hip strategically, and I think that fundamentally accounts for the modern relationship between the two states.
Why did Barack Obama seem so… unsympathetic to Israel?
WRM: [H]e didn't grasp the strategic realities of the Middle East. If you had said to somebody in January, 2009, when George W. Bush was leaving — war in Iraq, war in Afghanistan, America unpopular everywhere, a democracy agenda that is driving our friends and foes crazy in the Middle East. No person, no foreign policy observer would say eight years from now, America will be less popular and the Middle East will be in worse shape. But that's what happened during the Obama years. American prestige was higher when George Bush left office and American popularity was higher.
Why did Obama get the Middle East so wrong?
WRM: Several reasons. One is that I think Obama never understood the dynamics of the region in the sense he thought, well, the way to make peace is to make peace. And I am going to, I'm going to overcome the division between America and Islam. I'm going to hug the Sunni Muslims, the Sunni Arabs, and I'm going to hug the Shia Iranians and everybody will see what a great country America is and what a great person I am.
And the trouble is that many people in the region perceived him as tilting away from the Arabs, not away from the Israelis toward the Iranians, but away from Arabs and toward the Iranians. And so there was this sense of budding outrage, especially as the war in Syria got worse and worse, where Iranian backed militias, in alliance with Russia ultimately and the Syrian government, were committing the worst crimes against Sunni Muslims that the world maybe has seen since the time of the Mongol invasions.
And during all of this time, Obama is opening to Iran without really, I think fully understanding the corrosive impact of that on his standing with the Arab world. You actually got to a point where the Arabs and the Israelis werecitingagainst the Obama administration'sdefense of Hamas in Gaza during the Gaza war of his administration.
Then you look at what happened in Egypt with the quote, democracy revolution where Hosni Mubarak, America's longtime friend was overthrown. Basically, the Obama administration not only pushed him out, but pushed him out in a particularly undignified way. This convinced all of our traditional friends in the Middle East that America is a wonderful ally as long as you don't need allies.
But the moment you actually need help and you're in trouble, the Americans will turn on you like a wolverine and throw you away, throw you under the bus.
But didn’t Obama’s policies pave the way for the Abraham Accords?
WRM: Without the kind of self-defeating measures of Obama foreign policy, the Abraham Accords would not have been possible. But again, we can't call the Abraham Accords a triumph, sort of a vote confidence in Donald Trump. They were still a vote of confidence in the United States.
How do you explain the resurgence of antisemitism in America today?
WRM: I had to look a lot at American history working on this book and at the history of antisemitism, and there were two things that struck me. One is that over time, antisemitism has always been present in the United States, but never at quite the levels that it would achieve from time to time in Europe. It's a little bit like we have a kind of a COVID vaccine, not the kind of vaccine that keeps you from catching a disease, but it keeps you from getting the worst possible case of the disease. But also what I see is that it's at moments of economic and social stress that antisemitism really flares. So in the 1880s and 1890s, the industrial revolution is happening, we have a series of major depressions and upheavals, massive immigration. So you get this populist antisemitism, this is William Jennings Bryan's famous speech that everybody says, oh, it's a beautiful speech. It's an anti-Semitic dog whistle.
"Thou shalt not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold."
And then again, in the 1930s with the depression, when you have a lot of people losing faith that the American system will ever work. You get people on the right and the left. You get like Father Coughlin, the radio priest, Gerald LK Smith, who was an associate of Huey Long, of course Henry Ford. You have these surges of antisemitism.
[Y]es, antisemitism, which is found in the Ivy League and in the trailer parks, which is found in the far left and the far right. You think of the Ku Klux Klan and the Nation of Islam, two groups that have very little in common, but Jew hatred is one of them.
But ultimately, if America gets on track, if America is working, then antisemitism and hatreds of all kinds fade. We are not a people who are raised to hate. The American nation is multi ethnic, multi religious, multi racial, everything. And most of the time we're getting along or we're trying to learn how to get along a little bit better.
Full transcript here!*
*No shownotes this week….