Far-right Newsmax host Grant Stinchfield has reportedly been temporarily taken off the air after calling Israel the “home country” of US Jews last Tuesday.
According to Business Insider, Stinchfield made the comments during a segment on his show about the recent outbreak of violence between Israelis and Palestinians.
“If you are Jewish and you are a Democrat and you are living in America today, how do you support an administration that turns its back on your home country?” Stinchfield challenged.
The argument that the Republican party is somehow more helpful to the State of Israel or beneficial to Jewish national interests than the Democratic party is a shallow one. It ignores the fact that Washington has had a consistent bipartisan agenda in the Semitic region for decades that aims to maintain full US control over Israel and demands an Israeli withdrawal from significant parts of the West Bank – the cradle of Jewish civilization.
US foreign policy, during both Republican and Democratic administrations, is determined less by the personal views of a sitting president or his voters and more by the interests of the corporations and lobbyists that for the most part own the vast majority of American politicians.
But the larger issue at stake is the fact that Stinchfield’s comments were perceived as “anti-Semitic” because it’s now become wrong to refer to Israel as the country of the Jewish people.
CNN‘s “State of the Union” host Jake Tapper criticized Stinchfield’s comments last Thursday, tweeting that “I don’t belong to any political party but I am Jewish and newsflash: my home country is the United States. To suggest otherwise is bigotry.”
Following several generations of brutal persecution in many Diaspora countries, it’s understandable that Jews in the United States would be hypersensitive to any whiff of suspicion that they might have loyalties that conflict with being “good Americans.” After toiling for over a century to successfully integrate into American society, many US Jews still deeply experience their inclusion into American whiteness as conditional and grow frightened when they feel their loyalty to the United States questioned.
The insecurity many US Jews live with finds many expressions but has most sharply crystalized in the community’s inability to maturely respond to the Jonathan Pollard affair.
Ashkenazi Jews in particular live with a deep sense of vulnerability and constant angst over the historical pattern of anti-Jewish persecution potentially repeating itself – especially if Americans were to see their Jewish neighbors as disloyalty to their host nation.
While Jews connected to their identities and national story can easily feel the tensions present in American Jewish identity, it’s understandable that the younger generation of US Jews – especially university students – often feel unfairly blamed and targeted for Israeli actions. Many of these Jews have already been in the United State for three or more generations and prefer not to be associated with the State of Israel at all.
But the fact remains that the Jewish people as a collective comes from the land of Israel and that Jews are only even in the United States as a result of forced expulsions and other forms of oppression by foreign conquerors like the Roman Empire.
Although today’s US Jews for the most part spent many centuries suffering in several Diasporas between their departure from what’s now the State of Israel and their arrival in the United States, their homeland is undeniably Israel. If any of the Jews making the ahistorical argument that recognizing this fact is “anti-Semitic” were to check with their ancestors only four generations back, they would find that nearly the entire Jewish people spent most of our history believing this “anti-Semitic” trope.
Stinchfield might be weaponizing the Jewish connection to the land of Israel in his political war against the Democrats but he’s not wrong about Israel being the homeland of the Jewish people.
While it’s naive to think the Republican party’s interests align with those of the State of Israel, it’s even more detached from reality to label recognition of Israel as the land of the Jews as “anti-Semitic.” In fact, doing so denies one of the most central aspect of Jewish identity stretching back thousands of years.
