Naomi Zeveloff, in Forward, argues, that Steve Bannon and Breitbart News Can Be Pro-Israel and Anti-Semitic at the Same Time:
Trump’s Jewish supporters have pointed to Breitbart’s Zionist stance to defend the president-elect’s choice of Bannon, who was painted as an anti-Semite by his ex-wife in court documents. Bannon denied making the anti-Semitic comments.
“He was and is and remains staunchly pro-Israel,” said Abe Katsman, the chief counsel for Republicans Overseas Israel, who has written for Breitbart News.
Yet though it would seem impossible to hate Jews but love the Jewish state, these two viewpoints are not as contradictory as they appear.
There is actually “little correlation” between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, according Steven M. Cohen, a sociologist at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. To be sure, anti-Semitism is found among the anti-Zionist left. But it is also found among the Zionist right.
“Many people who dislike Jews like Israel and many people who are critical toward Israel are affectionate toward Jews,” said Cohen....
This duality is a central component of “Trumpism,” said Yael Sternhell, a Tel Aviv University professor of history and American studies. Though Trump has flip-flopped on the Middle East, he has professed an ultra-right view of Israel that would seem to outflank even Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He also has a Jewish son-in-law, and a daughter who converted to Judaism. At the same time, many of Trump’s followers spout anti-Semitism.
“As long as Jews are in Israel fighting the ‘good fight’ with the Arab world as a bastion of American ideals and values in the Middle East, then they are very useful and admirable allies,” said Sternhell. “Once they are home demanding a multi-cultural democracy, demanding that the country accommodate their religion, their belief and their custom that is a different story.”
Some on the alt-right, the emerging group of racist activists who support Trump, oppose the close U.S.-Israel relationship as part of a broader critique of U.S. interventionism abroad. Yet they admire Israel as a “model for white nationalism and/or Christianism,” according to the right-wing online encyclopedia Conservapedia. Some also see Jewish immigration to Israel as helping their cause of a Jew-free white America.
Jonathan Freedland's latest article at CiF - The US will no longer feel like a haven for Jews under Trump - completely by-passes the Guardian commenters. Israel's right-wing isn't it? And hasn't Netanyahu welcomed Trump's election? Well then, all this moaning has to be nonsense. But he's making a similar point to Zeveloff:
To the long list of things that Donald Trump’s election has upended, we should add one more: the way Jews see the world.
For most of the last century, Jews have regarded America as a safe haven. While Europe had inflicted on its Jewish population a history of expulsion, persecution and eventually industrialised slaughter, the United States had given them a place where they could survive, and thrive....
That certainty has vanished in the last week – and the appointment of Steve Bannon as the most senior adviser to the incoming president has deepened the anxiety. For Bannon is the boss of the far-right Breitbart website, which as well as attacking women, Muslims and African-Americans has targeted Jews. A recent column denounced the journalist Anne Applebaum: “Hell hath no fury like a Polish, Jewish, American elitist scorned.” Another slammed the Republican editor of the Weekly Standard as a “renegade Jew”. Of course, one should always be wary of the accusations divorcing spouses make against each other, but Bannon’s ex-wife testified that he once objected to her choice of school for their daughters because “he didn’t want the girls going to school with Jews”. (Bannon denies this happened, pointing to the fact that his wife prevailed in her choice of school.)
If it were just Bannon’s back-catalogue that was at issue, perhaps the concern could be contained. But the problem is that Trump’s campaign trafficked in the full range of antisemitic motifs and tropes. It’s not just that Trump himself retweeted neo-Nazis, or that his campaign put out an image of Hillary that had been lifted from an antisemitic site – depicting Hillary Clinton against a giant backdrop of cash and a six-pointed star uncannily like a Star of David. It’s that last month Trump warned that Clinton “meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of US sovereignty” – a line that could have been lifted straight from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the notorious Tsarist-era forgery that purported to be evidence of a global Jewish conspiracy.
Trump pushed the same age-old canard in his closing TV ad. It featured a gallery of three villains, all of whom were Jews: philanthropist George Soros, the Federal Reserve chair, Janet Yellen, and the Goldman Sachs boss, Lloyd Blankfein. The narrator’s words used as each of those faces appeared came from the lexicon of classic antisemitism. Soros: “those who control the levers of power”. Yellen: “global special interests”. Blankfein: “global power structure”. Trump supporters have taken their cue and bombarded Jewish journalists with the vilest form of abuse.
It’s worth stressing two things. This is not antisemitism of the subtle variety. Nor is this antisemitism of the kind that we have got used to debating in Britain in recent years: an obsessive hostility to Israel that draws on the language or imagery of anti-Jewish racism. This is old-school, hardcore, Jews-are-taking-over-the-world antisemitism. And it is being voiced not by European leftists or Muslims – who, until last week, many American Jews held to be the chief source of modern antisemitism – but by America’s next president and his allies.
Of course some have tried to reassure themselves that there’s nothing to worry about. They point to the fact that Trump is close to his Jewish son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and that indeed Ivanka Trump has converted to Judaism. This is to ignore the fact that antisemites have often exempted those they deem to be “good Jews”, exceptions to an otherwise robust rule. They forget that antisemites frequently boast that “Some of my best friends are Jewish”, that those denouncing Jews will often place a friendly hand on the arm of the Jew in the room and say, “I don’t mean you, of course.”
Others have sought comfort in the fact that Trump has made some positive noises towards Israel, and that Binyamin Netanyahu has given him a friendly welcome. But this is to forget what European Jews learned long ago: that nasty rightwing nationalists can be pro-Israel – for reasons utterly alien to Jews’ own feelings about the country. So ultra-nationalists might admire Israel either because they see it as standing up to those they deem the Muslim enemy or because they like the idea of a country far away that might take the Jews off their hands. Neither of these sentiments makes them pro-Jewish.