How aid to Israel fell victim to the cult of Trump
Once a ‘third rail’ for conservative politicians, voting down aid to Israel is now just another prop in the MAGA carnival
U.S. Representative Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) after failed Republican votes in the House on Tuesday, including for a standalone Israel aid package. Photo by Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
Contributing Columnist Jay Michaelson February 9, 2024
The circus that is the MAGA-led Republican party hit new levels of tragic farce this week, as Republicans sacrificed conservative priorities — aid to Israel and immigration reform — on the altar of politics.
It’s one thing for Republicans to undermine liberal proposals; that’s what parties do. But support for Israel is particularly strong among conservatives — as well as American Jews across the political spectrum — and the border crisis is often ranked atop Republican voters’ list of concerns. This is the MAGA movement throwing its own constituents under the bus.
When Israel most needs its Republican friends in Washington, those friends are out to lunch.
On Tuesday night, after voting down a bill to fund Israel, Ukraine and measures for American border security that Republicans themselves put together, the GOP-led House voted down a proposed $17.6 billion in aid to Israel, put forward as a standalone measure. This should have been an easy issue for the GOP to “win,” if only because Democrats have fumbled the issue so badly. President Joe Biden’s support of Israel has managed to alienate young, Muslim and Black voters, while some Democrats’ criticisms of Israel have pushed away many moderate Jewish ones.
Yet bipartisanship has become so anathema to the MAGA back-benchers in Congress that they would rather hang Israel out to dry in the middle of its most contentious and costly war in two generations — risking their own political backlash— than achieve something together with Democrats.
This isn’t the first time in recent memory that Jewish priorities have been used as a political tool by Republicans.
The GOP’s successful efforts to oust the presidents of Harvard and Penn were ostensibly about those institutions’ failure to combat antisemitism. (Does anyone still believe that the Claudine Gay resignation was really about plagiarism?) But in reality, as we now see from the GOP’s follow-ups to that affair, those efforts were part of a broader assault on higher education, “wokeness,” diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, critical race theory, and all the other social-issue bugaboos that former President Donald Trump’s Republican party are obsessed with.
The very real phenomenon of antisemitism — and the very real trauma that American Jews are still experiencing — was exploited, weaponized and pressed into the service of an unrelated Republican crusade.
Even worse, that campaign is itself directed at a bunch of phantoms.
No one can even agree on a definition of “wokeness.” Diversity, equity and inclusion programs tend to do very few of the things that Republicans say they do. As a result, real antisemitism and real Israeli military needs (whether one agrees or disagrees with Israeli policies) are being used as props in a quixotic crusade against imaginary threats.
The House Freedom Caucus, composed of hardcore MAGA-ites, opposed the aid because it wouldn’t be “paid for” by offsetting spending cuts — in other words, because the aid package doesn’t include slashing social spending and other items on the far right’s domestic agenda. Aid to Israel has, in a surprisingly short period of time, gone from a Republican “third rail” that no one would ever question to a bargaining chip a powerful minority of them are using to advance their social agenda.
To be fair, some Democrats have also played politics with the latest package of aid, calling the standalone aid package a “trap” and refusing to support it unless it’s coupled with aid to Ukraine. But Democrats aren’t the ones proposing and then torpedoing aid packages in the House and the Senate.
Needless to say, this carnival is not restricted to matters of Jewish concern. The same patterns have defined the MAGA crowd’s denial of 2020 election results and its revisionist history of the Jan. 6 insurrection; its shocking love affair with Vladimir Putin and its abandonment of the 43 million Ukrainians whose country he invaded; and its sudden reversal on funding strict new measures to address the border crisis just at the moment when Republicans’ long-held demands were met by reluctant Democrats.
That last episode is perhaps the richest in irony, as Republicans opposed the very package they themselves put together, because passing it might give Joe Biden a victory. Keep the border in disarray, said Trump — it’ll get me some votes. Like aid to Israel, the actual crisis at the border is a mere pawn in the game.
This shuk-like atmosphere of chaos and commerce should dismay those American Jews who have long regarded the Republican Party as the best available friend to Israel and the Jewish people.
The increasingly powerful MAGA factionalists are not dependable people; they are unreliable, unpredictable and transactional. (Even Christian Zionists’ support of Israel stems from the role they believe Israel is to play in the End Times.) Of course, the political world is built on marriages of convenience, but those only work when both spouses can be counted on.
Proverbs 11:14 teaches, “For lack of wise advisers a nation falls, but it is redeemed by an abundance of counsel.” Take an honest look at the extremists calling the shots in today’s GOP. Do you really see wisdom there?
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