Trump’s loyalty test

It would be difficult to count the number of lies told in these three minutes:

But if you get tired of them, fast forward to 2:45 where the President of the United States says that the 70% (or more) of American Jews who vote for Democrats are “disloyal.” He either means they are disloyal to the United States or to Israel. Not clear which, but either betrays a profound misunderstanding of the majority of American Jews, who support the United States but not Trump and Israel but not Netanyahu.

The President’s misconception is not surprising. Trump knows people in the 30%: Sheldon Adelson, Abe Friedman, and Jared Kushner. They are all strong supporters of Prime Minister Netanyahu and of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, including the Jewish settlements there. They are opponents of a two-state solution. They want a greater Israel with Arabs, who would constitute the majority if that state included the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel, treated as second-class citizens in an explicitly Jewish state. This is an extremist idea that many critics would like to call apartheid, a formalized system of unequal rights within a single country.

Most American Jews recoil at that idea because they are committed to America’s founding ideals, including equal rights, and wouldn’t want apartheid in the United States, which is the object of their first loyalty. We are not Israelis any more than Trump is German. We have varying degrees of sympathy with Israel and Jews worldwide, but most of us are Americans first, albeit not in Trump’s sense. Jews are not being disloyal either to Israel or to America when they vote for Democrats, which I imagine we will do in an even larger percentage in 2020 because of Trump and his accusation of disloyalty.

Trump won’t care much about that. He isn’t really interested in the relatively small number of American Jews in the electorate. I don’t imagine there is a single state where they could tilt the margin of victory, especially since the largest number lives in New York, which will vote overwhelmingly for any Democrat. What Trump wants is to cement his relationship with Christian evangelicals, who believe the state of Israel marks a transition towards the return of the Messiah and conversion of the Jews to Christianity. This is a profoundly anti-Jewish concept held by a surprising number of Americans, perhaps by the one quarter who regard themselves as evangelicals.

Most American Jews dislike Christian evangelical aspirations for conversion at the rapture. We may also not like everything Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib say and do, but we support two states (Israel and Palestine) and oppose settlements that make that outcome more difficult. We think all members of Congress (and for that matter all US citizens, including Palestinians) should be allowed into Israel and Palestine without preconditions.

Fanning the flames of prejudice and anti-Jewish evangelicalism will not get our votes. We don’t care that Trump’s son-in-law and daughter are Jews, or that Netanyahu likes Trump. We’ll vote for whom we want, regardless of his loyalty test.