The Jewish community has good reason to be disturbed by Trump’s assertion that the Jews who vote Democratic and not for him (the vast majority) are “disloyal.” We can only imagine how his comments will affect nationalist wingnuts who already think Jews are “replacing” them.

But the allegation by many Jewish organizations and individuals that Trump is echoing an antisemitic European trope of the disloyal, transnational Jew, rings hollow. Trump has no idea about that history. Trump has heard that Jews who criticize Israel are disloyal from his own dear Jewish friends, rightwing Zionists, everyone from Sheldon Adelson to David Friedman to Elliott Abrams to Alan Dershowitz.

If there’s a trope here, it’s the Zionist claim that Jews must be loyal to Israel, no matter where they live.

Bari Weiss says so directly in the NY Times: “If you’re pro-Trump or Trump-curious,” she allows, “you’ll generously hear an assertion that Jews should be loyal to Israel.” She hastens to add, “If you’re anything like me, you can’t help but hear echoes of the sinister charge of dual loyalty.”

But Weiss has just made my point for me, generously: It’s a good thing to say that American Jews should be loyal to Israel.

Weiss stated the same principle in a forum after the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre last year. We are all one, Am Yisrael, the people of Israel– from leftwing Jews to rightwing Israeli Jews.

Our values are other things than civil rights… Our values are also the fact that we are alive for the Jewish return to political sovereignty– the idea that we would celebrate that! … Even among the Jews who were showing up [in Pittsburgh] for [leftwing groups] IfNotNow and Bend the Arc and protesting Trump– you better believe they liked the fact that Ron Dermer and Naftali Bennett showed up… It’s sending a message that we are all one, Am Yisrael.

The young Jews of IfNotNow promptly scoffed at Weiss’s claim; they felt no affinity to rightwing Israelis Dermer and Bennett. But Weiss just laid out a central tenet of Zionism. There is a Jewish nation. We are loyal to the countries that we live in but we have a higher loyalty to the Jewish one. And by the way, the center of Jewish life is Israel, where the Jewish nation regained sovereignty in the 20th century.

Elliott Abrams, a Trump foreign policy aide, laid out the same principle in 1996:

Outside the land of Israel, there can be no doubt that Jews, faithful to the covenant between God and Abraham, are to stand apart from the nation in which they live. It is the very nature of being Jewish to be apart–except in Israel–from the rest of the population.

Melvin Urofsky laid out the same idea– American Jews must be loyal to the Jewish state– in his Zionist history, “We Are One! American Jewry and Israel” (1978).

An old Hebrew maxim holds that Klal Yisrael arevim zeh lazeh–All of Israel are responsible for one another– a statement which affirms the unity of the Jewish people, a sense of historical oneness transcending temporal or spatial differences of nationality, language and customs. In the United States, this old saying has taken on a new form: “We Are One!” … [I]t celebrates those ties that bind, those patterns which have emerged not only out of four thousand years of Jewish history and culture and tradition, but also out of the twentieth-century struggle for Jewish survival and for the re-creation of a Jewish state in its ancient homeland.

Let me inject that all these Zionists extol Zionism because it will keep Jews from marrying non-Jews. Urofsky:

There has been and continues to be hope that Israel will provide the ballast keeping Judaism in America stable, an anchor holding fast against the strong currents of assimilation…

Bari Weiss calls assimilation “self-mutilation”:

We are increasingly a people apart. Which self-mutilation, so many of us wonder, is worse? Abandon the universal values our community has always championed? Or abandon the particularism without which we cease to be Jews at all?

The main thrust of this ideology, though, is what Trump is saying: American Jews need to support Israel in the United States, because Israel depends on the U.S. as a lifeline.

And if you don’t support Israel, you’re a self-hating Jew, or a bad Jew. As I noted yesterday, Alan Dershowitz smeared an eminent South African Judge, Richard Goldstone, as an “evil, evil man” and a “moser” — a traitor– because he had accused Israel of war crimes. Goldstone was then pressured not to attend his own grandson’s bar mitzvah, because his community in South Africa was so angry.

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