By Harry Storm
The election of Donald Trump and Israel’s actions since a ceasefire that Trump helped initiate collapsed have brought about a new virulence in anti-Israeli activity that now has taken in many in the West until now supportive of the Jewish state.
Signs of this are all around us – the absurd threats by supposed allies UK, France and Canada; the willingness of many in the punderati, such as Piers Morgan, to agree that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza;, the leader of a leftist Israeli political party and a former IDF deputy chief of staff saying that Israel “kills babies as a hobby”; and the resulting – and increasing – violence against Israelis and Jews worldwide.
Nor have North American Jews been inoculated against the slanders and lies regularly hurled at Israel. Currently joining the “asaJew” longtime anti-Israel chorus are left-leaning Jews, hitherto supportive of Israel, but swayed by Hamas propaganda swallowed whole by Western media and politicians, and even more so by their deranged hatred of all things Trump, including his apparent support for Israel (despite this being less obvious since his recent trip to the Middle East).
One such individual is Eric Alterman, a very well credentialed academic and journalist. Alterman fancies his views on Israel to be balanced because he’s been attacked by pro-Palestinians as pro-Israeli, the same reason that allows BBC and other media to convince themselves they’re being objective, and for his stance against BDS. But in reality, since at least 2020, Alterman’s views have been trumpeted by the fiercely anti-Israel site Mondoweiss. For example, he has written articles stating, among other things, that:
- Three democratic presidents – Clinton, Obama and Biden, worried about their second-term chances if they supported Palestine.
- Israel’s conduct is responsible for antisemitism
- Young Jews abandoning Judaism because Jewish institutions support Israel
- Zionism is at odds with Liberalism.
Alterman’s disenchantment with Israel results from his disappointment with how Israelis vote: namely, for right-wing parties. In Alterman’s world, as in the worlds of so many other so-called liberals, being right-wing is anathema. Which brings us to the second and, I would say main, object of Alterman’s hatred: U.S. president Donald Trump.
In his recent article in the New Republic, “The Coming Jewish Civil War over Donald Trump,” Alterman’s view is that Jews are split over what’s more important: Trump’s crackdown on antisemitism (on campuses, for instance) and support for Israel vs. his supposed “dismantling” of institutions broadly supported by American Jews. In the course of describing this split, one would expect serious criticism of Trump, and one wouldn’t be disappointed. However, one might not expect searing criticism of Israel from his first paragraph onward.
Alterman kicks off by noting that Israel’s campaign after Oct. 7, 2023 was against “a terrorist organization it has previously promoted by facilitating Qatari funding for the group in order to weaken the Palestinian Authority and thereby lessen pressure on Israel to allow the creation of a genuine Palestinian state.” That statement may or may not be true, but to put it in the opening paragraph of an article about Jews and Donald Trump reveals more about the author’s headspace than it does about anything else.
To end the opening paragraph, he says that Israel’s campaign in Gaza “has since killed well over 50,000 Gazans, a majority of whom were women and children.” The 50K number comes from the Hamas “Ministry of Health,” whereas the “majority women and children” comes from the UN Human Rights Office, neither of whom are remotely credible . (Interestingly, in a later section of the article, Alterman claims that statistics from the Anti-Defamation League [ADL] are “corrupted by its ideology.,” all the while presenting Hamas and UN stats uncritically.)
The second paragraph notes that Israel has “seen fit” to cut off water, power and food in Gaza, and “as if that weren’t enough,” he notes that the IDF has recently launched attacks in the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran, without even a mention as to why those attacks took place (in Lebanon, Yemen and Iran, at the very least, the “attacks” were responses to unprovoked aggression from those countries).
He goes on to call Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government “deeply unpopular” – which is odd, given that Israel’s pure proportional representation system ensures representation of the majority – and says it is “attempting to destroy the nation’s democracy from within,” all without providing an iota of evidence.
The Gaza war, he says, has exacerbated the split between “red” Israel and “blue” American Jews. And legacy Jewish organizations, he laments, are supporting Trump “and a political movement shot through with neo-nazis” because he supports Israel and claims to fight antisemitism. By doing so, he says, they are causing a Jewish “civil war.”
Alterman’s Trump Derangement Syndrome gives him leave to repeat debunked claims in support of what he calls Trump’s “pro-Israel antisemitism,” such as the “fine people on both sides” canard, while also claiming that Trump is dismantling the traditions and institutions that Jews value.
To support his argument, Alterman has no problem quoting Peter Beinart, who just a few paragraphs earlier he had called “the most eloquent expounder” of the anti-Israel views held by Jewish groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace , If Not Now, and Jews for Racial and Economic Justice. Alterman describes Beinart as “an observant Jew” who now calls himself a “cultural Zionist” – whatever that is – and supports the establishment of a single binational state to replace Israel. According to Beinart, young American Jews outside established Jewish institutions will need to create Jewish ones independent of what he terms “the worship of Israel” or assimilate entirely into secular American life.
Alterman even dismisses the call by more moderate left Jewish voices who believe that if Israel moves back the centre and supports the creation of Palestine, it can reconnect with American Jewry. “Evidence, alas, for even the hint of such a transformation anytime soon would be microscopic, were it to exist at all,” Alterman writes. “Far more likely is Israel’s continued embrace of illiberalism, corruption, and the same general disdain for what Thomas Jefferson called “the good opinion of mankind” that one sees in Donald Trump.”
Ahh, Donald Trump. In the end, that’s who Alterman is really taking aim at. “Indeed,” he says, “it is Trump who is helping to unshackle whatever boundaries Netanyahu and company had until recently respected.” He quotes a New York Times “explainer” which observed that Trump’s election has resulted in “a prime minister unleashed, with fewer guardrails to constrain his actions in Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria.” He adds that the “Trump-era Netanyahu is all the more likely to succeed in his campaign to destroy Israel’s own fragile democratic institutions.”
Alterman’s views on Israel are nothing new. When Jamaal Bowman defeated Eliot Engel in the Democratic primary in 2020, Alterman described the victory as a victory for liberalism over Zionism, implying that the two ideologies were now incompatible, which allowed the fiercely anti-Israel Mondoweiss web site to announce – not incorrectly in this instance — that Alterman had abandoned liberal Zionism.
In addition to galvanizing Jews who already had abandoned Israel, the war in Gaza has created new anti-Israel adherents, including one (nondemoninationally ordained) Rabbi, Jay Michaelson, who recently announced that Israel is, indeed, conducting a genocide in Gaza.
Given his resume – in addition to holding a Ph.D. in Jewish Thought from Hebrew University, Michaelson is a “field scholar” at the Emory Center for Psychedelics and Spirituality, and previously held positions at the Center for LGBTQ Studies in Religion At UC Berkeley, and was a visiting scholar this year at Harvard University Law School – one might be surprised to learn that Michaelson says he supported Israel’s actions in October 2023 and that critics were wrong to claim that Israel’s actions in 2023 constituted genocide. But apparently having seen the light, he now says they are right in 2025.
I can’t help but wonder if Michaelson expects a salute for not calling Israel’s actions in Gaza a “genocide” in October 2023, which, let’s remember, was just after the Oct. 7 massacre; Israel’s invasion of Gaza had only just begun at the end of the month.
Repeating talking points by Hamas, pro-Palestinians and, most recently, by the governments of the UK, France and Canada, Michaelson points to what he says is “a two-month suspension of humanitarian aid, which has, in the words of an Israeli-American memo, caused Gazans to ‘endur[e] extreme deprivation.’ He also claims it is Israeli military strategy to starve 800,000 of Gaza’s population of 2 million.
According to Michaelson, “none of these policies are justified by the moral and strategic imperative to rescue the remaining hostages.” Aside from the fact that rescuing the hostages shouldn’t be and isn’t a “strategic imperative,” though it is a moral duty, he also conveniently omits Israel’s other war aim, which is to destroy Hamas so it can never repeat Oct. 7.
Resorting to emotionalism, he notes that Israeli bombs do not distinguish between Hamas supporters and innocent Palestinians, and despite protestations by the Israeli government and others, he has swallowed whole the entirely unproven claim that Israel is using “mass starvation” as a military tactic, This, he claims, “is beyond inhuman. It is genocide.”
Which is why, h says, he doesn’t blame Beinart or Avraham Burg (the son of former Israeli minister and leader of the National Religious Party Yosef Burg) for “leaving the Zionist camp entirely.” He does, however, blame Netanyahu and his cabinet for rejecting ceasefire offers that he says would have “ended the war.”
He maintains that in October 2023 he was – and still is, he insists – “struck by how quickly some of Israel’s critics leapt to the most incendiary and extreme characterizations of its military operations in the wake of Hamas’s brutal massacres, rapes, and invasion of Israel. Those broken bonds may never be repaired.”
But not struck enough, apparently, to consider that the information he’s basing his recent conversion to the genocide camp might be based on false or misleading. No, according to Michaelson, “May 2025 is not October 2023.”
He now complains – without a shred of evidence or common sense – that “we’re long past Israel’s legitimate security needs,” and that this is now a “war of choice, not a war of necessity.” “Unlike in 2023,” he says, “there are now ample statements by Israeli ministers, military leaders, and former military leaders, that the strategic aim of the continued destruction of Gaza is, simply, to destroy Gaza and force much of its population to leave.”
He claims “hundreds of thousands of people are starving in Gaza because of the avoidable, unnecessary, and genocidal actions of the Jewish state. What a terrible, morally repugnant tragedy.” Michaelson apparently is quick to swallow Hamas propaganda whole, especially when it comes an imprimatur from the UN, NGOs automatically hostile to Israel, and a legacy media obsessed with pushing a woke oppressor/oppressed agenda in place of facts.
This is evident most recently in reports about dozens of Gazans being killed attempting to access food aid being provided by Israel and the U.S. to bypass Hamas, which has been accused of stealing food aid when it was distributed by the UN. Many of the reports uncritically accept the “Gaza Health Ministry’s” account and number of deaths and barely mention, if at all, Israel’s claims that aid was delivered without incident. It’s impossible to know the truth without more facts, but common sense would dictate that Hamas, which has already been accused of firing on its own citizens and hoarding food aid, would not be happy about Gazans getting that aid in a way that prevents such thefts and loosens their control of Gaza’s civilians.
But common sense appears to have taken a long holiday for the Michaelsons and Altermans of this world, who, rather than research and attempt to learn the truth for themselves, have opted to believe Hamas and its many governmental and media enablers and to discount Israeli claims because of their dislike of Netanyahu and Trump.
And neither these two men nor any of Israel’s critics have ever sought to answer what is, to me, an obvious question: namely, why Israel is expected or obligated to feed the population of the enemy that attacked and brutalized it on Oct. 7, or even worse, supply electricity that will surely be used by its enemies to produce weapons?
After all, Hamas has explicitly said it will do Oct 7s, again and again. Given that, it would be suicidal for Israel not to take Hamas at its word and allow it to continue to exist. And since Hamas’ style of fighting is to embed itself in its civilian population and put its weapons depots and command centres in, under or near hospitals, schools and residences, and given that it doesn’t allow its civilians to flee areas that will be bombed, or allow citizens into its tunnels (It’s never built a single bomb shelter), Hamas has effectively forced Israel to choose between Hamas killing Israeli civilians or Israel killing Gazans.
Like any country or people intent on self-preservation, the Israeli government, which is tasked primarily with protecting its own citizens, has weighed the only two options Hamas has allowed, and chosen the latter. I would do the same. Any sane person would.
Photo credit: By editrrix from NYC – Eric Alterman @ BBF, CC BY-SA 2.0.
