Legend has it that back in the 1980s, ballot counters in an Arab village found a vote for anti-Arab racist Meir Kahana.
News spread and all suspected a local resident who wasn’t fully in touch with reality, a suspicion that was soon validated because when asked “Are you the one who voted Kahana?” the man happily confirmed. And after hearing the follow-up question, “Why?” he gave an answer no one could dispute: “Only Kahana promised to take care of the Arabs.”
Kahana didn’t mean to be misunderstood this way, unlike Donald Trump’s intention this week when he effectively said, “I will take care of the Jews.”
Millions indeed ask now whether – as he claims – Trump will be good for the Jews, failing to realize that there is no way of being simultaneously bad for America and good for the Jews. And Trump will be bad for America.
WHAT Trump said in his oafish attempt to woo Jewish voters is a case in point. To suggest that Jews who vote for the Democrats “hate Israel, [in fact] hate everything about Israel” and, for good measure, “hate their religion” is of course factually absurd, but that’s not the point. The point is that such a statement is itself un-American.
The American way is to respect adversaries, certainly not to besmirch, defame, and libel them, least of all about their faith. This is, of course, besides the fact that a certified transgressor of “you shall not commit adultery” and “you shall not lie one to another” is unfit to judge anyone’s religiosity.
And if this statement is only “a matter of style,” as Trump’s Jewish apologists claim whenever he shocks with a new profanity, the Republican candidate just said that had he been president now he would tell Benjamin Netanyahu “to finish it up” in Gaza.
Trump would not have more patience for the Gaza war than Biden
In other words, Trump would have no more patience for the Gaza war than Joe Biden. Yet the question of what Trump would do vis-à-vis Israel is immaterial, because an un-American president is bad for the Jewish state, just like he is bad for the Jewish people and the Jewish faith.
To be good for any of these, an American president must be blessed with patience; patience to listen, learn, and think. Trump, like a child craving candy, doesn’t have patience for anyone or anything, least of all for briefings filled with details, complexities, and dilemmas.
That is why he lost an astonishing battery of aides, advisors, and cabinet members, including secretary of state Rex Tillerson, secretary of defense James Mattis, national security advisors Michael Flynn and Herbert McMaster, White House chiefs of staff John Kelly and Reince Preibus, communication director Anthony Scaramucci, health secretary Tom Price, and the list goes on.
Nothing can be managed in such a way, least of all a superpower, and that is only the technical reason Trump’s return would be bad for America. And this technicality – that the man can’t manage – dwarfs compared with Trump’s agenda, which is as immoral – and thus as un-Jewish – as his personal conduct.
INTERNALLY, Trump is out to divide the American people by pitting the working class against the middle class, and the undereducated against the media and the courts. Externally, Trump is out to use the American immigration problem to fan bigotry, the way he did this week when he said some of the illegal immigrants converging on the American border were “animals.”
So, to paraphrase Trump, do Jews who vote for a candidate who confuses man and beast love their religion – which says all humans were created in God’s image – or do they hate their religion? Moreover, looking at Jewish scripture and recalling Jewish trauma, can a Jew vote for a man who speaks, spreads, and embodies hate?
A second Trump presidency would be ruinous, not only from this general Jewish perspective but also in terms of the Jewish people’s American experience.
America’s embrace – captured by Jewish poet Emma Lazarus’s lines adorning the Statue of Liberty – was the most blessed welcome the Jewish people ever encountered in their wanderings. The opportunity, freedom, and dignity America offered its newcomers were what made America great; great for everyone, but particularly for the Jews.
Do these fond memories mean that immigration should be unchecked? Of course not, otherwise what is sovereignty about? But the fact that immigration must be controlled and that some are out to breach the borders is no reason to dehumanize people who look up to America as a promised land of freedom, opportunity, and humanism. Jews looking at the people Trump just called “animals” don’t see animals; they see the shiploads of Jews who once arrived at Ellis Island.
And just like respecting immigrants’ dignity is Jewish, so is respecting the law. Jews who love their faith can’t respect – let alone vote for – a man who, after losing an election, ignited an insurrection. Nor can they back a man who – according to his own vice president – baselessly accused, and still accuses, “the system” of having sabotaged the vote he lost.
The system sabotaged nothing, but Donald Trump is out to sabotage everything, level after level: America’s social solidarity, political cohesion, institutional pillars, moral convictions, and mental peace.
Writing from the depth of her Jewish heritage, Emma Lazarus contrasted the old colossus, “the brazen giant of Greek fame/ with conquering limbs astride from land to land,” and the new colossus, the “mighty woman with a torch” who tells the world “Give me your tired, your poor/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
It takes no poet, just an ordinary Jew, to judge which of these two statuesque inversions resembles Donald Trump.
MiddleIsrael.net
The writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is the author of the bestselling Mitzad Ha’ivelet Ha’yehudi (The Jewish March of Folly, Yediot Sefarim, 2019), a revisionist history of the Jewish people’s political leadership.