Ep. 108: Huckabee nomination a test for US Jews
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Hello and welcome to Jonathan Tobin Daily. I'm JNS Editor-in-Chief Jonathan Tobin. Thanks for joining me for another discussion on the most pressing issues in the Jewish world. Please like, subscribe, and give us good reviews when you listen to the show. Now let's get started. Nobody seriously believes that the U.S. Senate will reject President Donald Trump's nomination of former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee to be ambassador to Israel.

Republicans managed to get far more controversial nominees such as Defense Secretary Pete Hagseff, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard confirmed. So they should have comparatively little trouble pushing Huckabee, a man without skeletons in his closet, over the goal line. Indeed, it's likely that he will be in Israel, as he predicted by Passover.

But that hasn't stopped the Jewish left from trying to stop his nomination. The political arm of Reform Judaism is publicly opposing Huckabee. So too are the left-wing lobby J Street and the Jewish Democratic Council of America.

The Jewish Council for Public Affairs, an umbrella group of Jewish community relations councils around the country, didn't condemn the nomination outright, but made clear its disdain for him with comments deprecating him as a Christian nationalist.

These views were summed up in an op-ed published in The Hill by Lily Greenberg Call, a veteran Democratic operative who had worked for the campaigns of former President Joe Biden and former Vice President Kamala Harris, and resigned from a post at the Department of the Interior because she felt the Biden-Harris administration was too supportive of Israel after the October 7, 2023 massacre.

Unconditionally supporting Israel actually makes Jews unsafe, and the Jewish state is antithetical to Jewish values, Call asserted. On the other side of the issue, more mainstream liberal Jewish groups like the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee said that they look forward to working with Huckabee. More ardently pro-Israel groups like the Zionist Organization of America and the Orthodox Union endorsed him enthusiastically.

Seen in that context, it's easy to dismiss Huckabee's Jewish critics as outliers or merely predictably partisan. But that would be a mistake. The angry response to Huckabee from the Jewish left echoes something deeply troubling about American Jewry's attitudes towards both Israel and its Christian supporters like the former governor.

And the talk about Christian nationalism reflects a broader backlash among political liberals in general against any expression of faith in the public square. At its heart, liberal Jewish distrust of the strong backing Israel gets from evangelicals and other conservative Christians is a function of three factors. One is simple partisanship. Another is the shocking and quite irrational religious prejudice on the part of some Jews.

The other is the notion that faith should influence public policy. The latter was put on display in the viral comments that former political reporter Heidi Prisbilla uttered on MSNBC in February 2024. Prisbilla condemned political conservatives and Trump backers as Christian nationalists because they believe that the rights of all Americans don't come from any earthly authority, she said.

They don't come from Congress or the Supreme Court. They come from God. That is something that Huckabee believes, but that belief was shared by all of America's founding fathers, not least a non-denominational deist like Thomas Jefferson. It was, after all, the man who would eventually become the third president of the United States who wrote in the Declaration of Independence that it was self-evident that all Americans were endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.

While Prisvola was widely skewered for her ignorant comments, she was reflecting the wide gap that has opened up between people of faith, regardless of their religion, and those who have contempt for traditional religion. Sadly, nothing reflects that divide more closely than attitudes towards Israel. As a Gallup poll published last June suggested, support for Israel in the United States is primarily a function of religious faith.

and declining religiosity is directly linked to growing hostility to Israel. The survey, which tracked opinions about the Jewish state and the Palestinians over the last quarter century, demonstrated that support for Israel was far more prevalent among those who attended religious services regularly, and it declined among those who did not attend a church or a synagogue. The study also provided at least a partial explanation for the general relational differences about Israel.

If younger Americans are less supportive of Israel than older ones, it is to some extent the result of their being less religious than their elders. The fact that people 29 or younger are also more likely to have been indoctrinated in the toxic neo-Marxist ideas of critical race theory, intersectionality, and colonial settler ideology that brands Israel and the Jews as white oppressors, and which is antithetical to traditional faith, is also part of this depressing trend.

That's just as true for younger Jews. Most of them have had the woke catechism of diversity, equity, and inclusion, DEI, which ironically excludes Jews, drilled into them in K-12 schools and again in college. That makes them more inclined to think that a concept is inappropriate if it is antithetical to the principles of equal opportunity and individual rights.

It also makes them more inclined to think a sectarian Jewish state is somehow racist, or that Jews are somehow not the indigenous people of their ancient homeland. That liberal Jews and those organizations that are most influenced by this doctrinaire secularism is also part of their alienation from Israel is unsurprising. The fact that some, like most of those affiliated with the Reform movement,

are valid or religious may seem like a contradiction in terms. But it's easily explained when you realize that they see their religious beliefs, as many liberal Jews do, as not so much a matter of faith in revelation or scripture, but a reflection of their opinions on political issues, which they define as social justice.

Their discomfort with Christians, like Huckabee, who believe that the Almighty has promised that they will be blessed if they bless Israel, may seem counterintuitive. But it is part of an aggressively woke and secular mindset that sees such beliefs as inherently illegitimate. Though many cast most of the blame for a decline in Jewish support for Israel on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as members of his coalition, who are members of right-wing and religious parties,

The truth is it has far more to do with the demography of a community that is rapidly assimilated and the prevailing ideology on the American left. JNS recently reported on Pew data that indicated that 1% of Israeli adults raised Jewish say that they've switched faiths, compared to 24% of U.S. adults raised Jewish.

Of course, partisanship is part of the opposition to Hakebe. In this, the most hyper-partisan moment in living memory, Jewish Democrats can be counted on to oppose just about anyone whom Trump nominates for office. But it's important to understand that the fact that Trump is the most pro-Israel U.S. president since the creation of the modern-day Jewish state cuts no ice with Jews on the political left.

For the most part, even those who are still at least nominally Zionist think of Israel as only legitimate if it reflects their secularism and their ideas about how to solve the conflict with the Palestinians. The fact that in recent decades the Israeli electorate has, for the most part, voted for leaders from the right like Netanyahu is problematic for many American Jews.

And the understandable Israeli support for Trump has caused many of them to see Israel as the moral equivalent of a red state. Unlike their Israeli counter-milk parts, they have little understanding about the rejectionist ideology of Palestinian Arabs. Palestinians have repeatedly refused offers of statehood and independence when it meant that they must live in peace with a Jewish state no matter where its borders might be drawn. This has made little impression on liberal Americans, including Jews.

This disconnect with normative Israeli political views, which have only been reinforced by the horrors of October 7th and its aftermath that made the notion of a two-state solution not so much a bad idea but madness, is made clear when you hear the left's criticism of Huckabee. The idea that Israel needed to be saved from itself, as former President Barack Obama believed, is integral to liberal Jewish attitudes towards Israel.

That anyone would still think that after October 7th, an independent Palestinian state would mean anything but more war and bloodshed for both peoples is hard to explain. But the alienation of American Jews from the realities on the ground in the Middle East is so great that nothing, not even the launching of a genocidal war endorsed by most Palestinians, will dissuade them from their ignorance.

Yet the disdain for pro-Israel Christians, such as Huckabee, who told me in an interview with him on my podcast that the conflict between Israel and its enemies is between good and evil, is not just a matter of politics. It also stems from their sneering contempt for evangelicals. Much like the rest of America, American credentialed elites...

of which they are so representative, liberal and left-wing Jews look down their noses on that broad section of the American electorate that is deeply religious. It's not just that they disagree with them on abortion, gun rights, or any other issue. They have held on to notions about the connection between religious belief and anti-Semitism that may have made sense a century ago, but are now badly outdated.

In the 19th century Europe or early 20th century America, it may have been more reasonable to think that the more religious Christians were, the more likely they would be anti-Semitic. But now it's just the opposite. As the Gallup poll showed, it is people of faith, especially those outside of the shrinking mainline Protestant denominations, who are the most philo-Semitic and supportive of Israel.

Conversely, it is the most aggressively secular and most educated demographic slices of America that are heavily influenced by woke ideology and lingering neo-Marxist hostility to Judaism that are the most anti-Semitic. Yet most liberal Jews on the two coasts still think of conservative Christians as fly-over-country hayseeds who would gladly kill all the Jews but aren't smart enough to figure out how to do so.

Such a murderer's desire is normative among Palestinian Arabs and the bizarre red-green alliance of Marxists and Islamists elsewhere that supports their war on Zionism, but it is not among evangelicals. Still, that fact hasn't dented the consciousness of Jews who instinctively distrust Huckabee and everyone like him.

The argument that conservative Christians support for Israel can't be trusted because of their eschatological beliefs is particularly illogical as well as deeply foolish. Most Christian Zionists do not predicate their love for Israel on the idea that its survival is part of an end-of-days scenario that will lead to the return of Jesus.

But even if all did believe that, why should Jews, whether they are secular or religious, liberal or conservative, care if they don't think that will ever happen? One doesn't have to like Trump or be comfortable with the political views of evangelicals such as Huckabee to believe that the latter's wholehearted support for Israel and realistic views about Palestinian intentions are not only sincere, but a very good thing.

Prior to David Friedman, who served as ambassador to Israel during the first Trump administration, all U.S. ambassadors to Israel treated Jerusalem the way Roman pro-consuls viewed subject peoples. They were primarily there to order Israelis around and impose policies based on failed land-for-peace patinostrums. Their priority was not, as is the case for most American ambassadors to foreign countries, to promote better relations between their hosts and the United States.

Friedman was a powerful advocate for a rational policy based on the realities of the conflict, rather than the conventional wisdom of the experts of the foreign policy establishment, which steered U.S. Middle East policy for decades.

As much as anyone, he deserves the credit for persuading Trump to ignore them and move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in 2018 and steer the president toward diplomacy that would end the ability of the Palestinians to hold the peace process hostage to their intransigent fantasies of Israel's destruction. Haku Bey will be equally supportive of the alliance and of Jewish rights and realistic about the Palestinians.

And, as an evangelical, his presence in Jerusalem can do much to promote better interfaith relations. Yet, for liberal Jews who believe that Israel must make suicidal concessions to Palestinians whose goal is to destroy the Jewish state, and who have no interest in good relations with evangelicals for reasons that have nothing to do with foreign policy, his nomination is anathema.

Attitudes towards the Huckabee nomination are, therefore, something of a test of American opinions about faith, radical ideologies, and whether American foreign policy should aim at strengthening Israel's efforts to defeat enemies or to weaken them. That so many Jews oppose him is a disturbing reminder of the profound problems currently facing American Jewry. Thanks for listening.

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