Astonishingly, in America and Britain, the vilification and scapegoating of Israel through an agenda of malice and mendacity—and with undertones of something even darker—has become a key driver of political life.
U.S. Vice President JD Vance has ramped up his attacks on Israel by channeling anti-Jewish tropes of covert manipulation and warmongering.
TIME magazine has revealed that Israel funded an influence campaign organized by U.S. President Donald Trump’s former presidential campaign manager, Brad Parscale.
Vance told podcaster Joe Rogan: “When I open up the pages of TIME magazine, and I see that there’s a literal foreign influence campaign being funded to tank the very deal that I was pursuing, and many of the people who were receiving that money were attacking me in completely dishonest ways, my response to that is, go to hell.”
Parscale denies this interpretation, saying that his campaign was intended to prevent young conservatives from drifting away from Israel but not to turn opinion against Trump’s objectives in the war with Iran.
An anonymous senior U.S. intelligence official told TIME: “We’re talking about American influencers who are being paid by a foreign country, then trying to build momentum to change the president’s view or the views of others around him.”
Not only is there no evidence in the article for this recycled Jewish conspiracy theory, but Vance himself is reportedly close to lobbyists for the Iranian regime. Two years ago, he addressed the Quincy Institute, which Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) has described as a “hotbed of pro-Iran lobbying.”
In April, Lee Smith wrote in Tablet magazine that the group of officials, journalists and think-tank experts who formed the Obama administration’s notorious “echo chamber” to give a favorable spin to the 2015 nuclear deal, which would have allowed Iran to develop nuclear weapons with only a few years delay, were trying to pull the same stunt again—this time with “structurally aligned” Vance as America’s lead negotiator pushing things their way.
The more obvious reason for the criticism of Vance is that he’s responsible for a stupid, gullible and dangerous strategy that’s now gone belly-up. He tried to negotiate with a regime whose goal of destroying America and Israel is totally non-negotiable. Vance has chosen to mask his humiliation by the time-dishonored ploy of dumping on the Jews.
For Britain’s incoming prime minister to use such an anti-Jewish dog-whistle—and as a priority—is an ominous signal indeed.
This disgusting tactic was also deployed last week by someone who is not only a Jew himself but who uses his father’s record as a Jewish resistance fighter in pre-Israel Palestine to assert his devotion to the State of Israel. He has a strange way of showing it.
In a speech at Tel Aviv University, Rahm Emanuel, the former chief of staff to former President Barack Obama, blamed Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the fact that Israel had become an international “pariah.”
Netanyahu, said Emanuel, had “sparked a regional war,” denied food and medical relief to innocent Palestinians suffering in Gaza, and presided over a coalition that believed it could “burn Palestinian farmland in the West Bank and terrorize Palestinian families without consequence.”
These were monstrous distortions. Obviously, the war was sparked not by Netanyahu, but by the Hamas-led slaughter of 1,200 people in southern Israel and the kidnapping of 251 others on Oct. 7, 2023, which launched a seven-front war against the Jewish state to wipe it off the map.
Israel has not denied food and medical relief to Gaza’s civilians but delivered vast amounts of aid, much of which was stolen by Hamas. As for terrorizing Palestinian Arab families, this is a real problem that has been vastly exaggerated and distorted as yet another weapon to demonize and delegitimize Israel.
Such terrorism is being carried out by a few hundred, mainly delinquent boys, out of the 500,000 or so overwhelmingly peaceful Israeli residents in these territories—attacks, moreover, that are vastly outnumbered by the thousands of murderous acts of violence by Arabs on these Israeli residents, which Emanuel doesn’t even mention.
That’s because he himself has a fanatical hatred of these Jewish “settlers.” In his speech, he equated “greater Israel” with the chant of “from the river to the sea.”
He thus obscenely equated Jewish residency in the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria, which Jews alone have the legal and historical right to settle, with the genocidal aim of writing Israel itself off the map.
Telling Dan Senor on his “Call Me Back” podcast that he only had Israel’s best interests at heart and that the status quo was not an option, Emanuel came up with the same old “two-state solution.”
Refusing to acknowledge that, after Oct. 7, the vast majority of Israelis have rightly concluded that a Palestinian state can never be tolerated because endemic Palestinian Arab hatred of Jews would ensure even more deadly attacks, Emanuel blithely asserted that the solution lay in telling all 21 Arab states to deliver a state of Palestine that posed no threat.
The most charitable thing to say about this is that it’s utterly deluded.
Both Vance and Emanuel have now crossed a number of red lines. They have both suggested that the Israelis only ever want to kill people.
Ignoring Israel’s multiple peace deals with Arab states and its many offers to the Palestinian Arabs of a state of their own, Vance observed about Israel to The New York Times that you “can’t just kill your way out of solving every single national-security problem that you have.”
Instead of acknowledging the obsessional and insane nature of the lies being told about Israel, Vance and Emanuel have actually regurgitated them.
The ugly reality of a Democratic Party that’s now dancing to an anti-American, anti-Israel, pro-Islamist tune was on display this week with another visitor to Israel, the possible 2028 presidential candidate Rep. Ro Khanna of California.
In an outrageous PR stunt cooked up with radical Israeli anti-government activists, Khanna made an unauthorized visit to a sensitive area of the “West Bank,” where he claimed to have been detained, harassed and even threatened by Israeli security forces who sided with violent settlers.
As video footage subsequently revealed, there was no violence and no harassment. It was a stunt designed to further the agenda of turning Israel into a pariah state—a situation that Emanuel blames on Netanyahu but which has actually been created by a poisonous narrative of lies to which both Emanuel and Vance have contributed.
This unconscionable onslaught is now the driver of politics on the Wwestern left and in parts of the American right.
In Britain, Andy Burnham, who next week will become prime minister after a bloodless coup in the governing Labour Party, made a point of threatening further punishment of Israel over Gaza as his first statement on foreign affairs.
This week, he went one stage further. Having refused to spell out to the British public his intentions for government, Burnham gave an interview to podcaster and former sports broadcaster Gary Lineker, who left the BBC after sharing a post about Zionism that depicted a rat—a Nazi image for Jews. When Lineker referred to the “genocide” in Gaza, Burnham conspicuously failed to challenge him.
For Britain’s incoming prime minister to use such an anti-Jewish dog-whistle—and as a priority—is an ominous signal indeed.
The surreal prominence of the Israel issue in domestic politics is due to a poisonous cocktail of factors, including Islamist influence, the dominance of the intersectional left and the West’s loss of its own cultural bearings, including the notion of objective truth.
What’s becoming ever more apparent, however, is that political leaders are scapegoating Israel because things are going wrong for them, both at home and abroad, and they cannot understand why. Refusing to acknowledge what they’re up against, they blame the Jews.
Israel, America’s indispensable ally, is now making plans to develop its own independent weapons supplies and nurture other alliances against the danger of a possibly hostile future U.S. administration.
Emanuel came to Israel to lecture it that it was in danger of losing America. In fact, with the iron having entered the soul of the Jewish state as a result of Oct. 7, America is in danger of losing Israel.
