Special relationships can lead to special breakups.

Much of the blame for the rupture in US-Israel relations is owed to short-sighted politicians like Netanyahu who took the alliance for granted.

As you may have heard Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin is withholding military aid at the request of President Biden to Israel that was recently approved in an appropriations bill that also covered other packages destined for Ukraine and Taiwan. Conditioning future foreign aid disbursements, once the domain of the Democrats' left flank, is now a proposal being taken up by the most centrist mainstream ones such as Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ). Among the Jewish American establishment there must be a mood right now that resembles the bridge of the Titanic as the ship began to sink: Absolute panic and disbelief that the total disaster they had insisted could never happen in America is indeed happening. I certainly share some of the concern that they have, albeit I think that it is their "leadership" and that of their Israeli counterparts that led to this moment. In 2019 I wrote a blog post called the "Independence Manifesto" advocating for the sunsetting of US foreign aid to Israel, making the case that it was inevitable that if public opinion trends continued in the same direction, eventually the "special relationship" would sour and the military aid to Israel would be a political liability. Progressively fewer elected officials would be willing to risk their career to defend it. Some of the signs I was noting were blatant such as the rise of the new "Justice Democrats" led by the Squad, a group of at the time four members of Congress who took ideologically anti-Israel positions. But other indications were only visible if one was paying attention to alternative news and political spheres. This was when the "groypers", a subculture of young mostly Catholic traditionalists were disrupting meetings of mainstream conservative events like CPAC and Turning Points USA speaking engagements. I was confident that both of these movements and other smaller ones that don't fit neatly into any one box would lead to the erosion of support for Israel in the rest of America's political sphere, but I didn't know whether it would take two or twenty years. Today, as college campuses are engulfed in turmoil over the Gaza War, Biden and other Democrats zigzag between condemning "anti-Semitism" and rubbing elbows with some of the worst Jew hating regimes in the world, and conservative commentators like Tucker Carlson peel off and declare they are reconsidering their previous support for Israel amid recent events, I think we are there.

This isn't just an "I told you so" article. I got some things wrong too. I was looking mainly at issues happening here in American settings and merging them with other core topics that have been of my concern like American intervention in the Middle East and elsewhere, online censorship, and the rise of new populist and heterodox political movements. But these were not the reason that things changed so fast, they only fed off of the event that did help accelerate the change which is the October 7 attacks by Hamas against Israel. After a brief period in the wake of the bloody incursion when there was an upsurge of sympathy from many directions if not all, reality asserted itself. In many sectors of western civilization such as media, academia, entertainment, and high tech there is a larger proportion of people hostile to Israel, often as a result of their progressive education. Representatives of Israel's government and supporters of them have often been incompetent in explaining its perspective and defending its record. This week one such spokesperson, Avi Hyman who works within Prime Minister Netanyahu's office, was obliterated in an interview by Piers Morgan. Why? Because he only went on the program to deliver his message, he didn't prepare to answer the questions of the person interviewing him like the basic one of how many civilians Israel believes have been killed in its invasion of the Gaza Strip, if not the figure supplied by the Gaza Ministry of Health.

Given the fact that the governmental relationship between the US and Israel has been very close for so many years but the media atmosphere has always been ambivalent toward Israel and now is increasingly hostile, it is remarkable that so many Israel "advocates" rely on old narratives, failed strategies, and uninteresting deflections when engaged in a debate or a tough interview. This is the AIPAC/ADL formula: focus on soundbite length cliches, moral grandstanding and if necessary fearmonger. For some groups like the ADL the answer has been to lobby for the censoring of viewpoints as anti-Semitic not because they are, but out of a desire to squelch public debate that they are too lazy to undertake. This approach has caused immense damage. Just two years ago the ADL rode the outrage over comments by NBA player Kyrie Irving and rapper Kanye West in order to pound the table about rising Jew hatred in the USA. A wiser path would have been to recognize those episodes for what they were, celebrities with eccentric personalities who can garner a lot of attention with their strange opinions but have no power beyond that. If they were so dangerous, I doubt that Irving would have been traded to the Dallas Mavericks despite their owner Mark Cuban being a big critic of his opinions. This is not to say that the things that Irving and West said were not newsworthy or at all, but the reaction was so out of proportion to their importance that it actually magnified their reach and persuasive effect. West suffered financially in the short term, but this year seems to have recovered and released a Billboard 200 No. 1 album. It is reminiscent of how the outrage over derogatory portrayals of Jewish characters catapulted Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ into the box office stratosphere in 2004. Prior to Oct. 7 one of the most absurd contrived "anti-Semitism" scandals was the prosthetic nose used by Bradley Cooper in portraying composer Leonard Bernstein in 2023's Maestro which cultural critics labeled "Jewface".

But in the wake of the attacks and the Gaza War, we have to confront a new reality. Institutions like the ADL had failed to win the war on anti-Semitism, which was predictable given similar results from the wars on drugs, poverty, and other social maladies that are regrettable but a part of the human condition. But now we are entering an era where Jew hatred is much more acceptable in the public conversation. Old landscapes in media and education are crumbling amid a shift from the generations that watched TV and read newspapers to people who consume their news through brief video clips often shared on peer-to-peer messaging services. Censorship has proven to be an ineffective tool against hateful content spread this way; the true haters will always find a platform of some shape or form to use and those that are not ideologically motivated will be frustrated when they are tripped up by the same speech restrictions. Ironically both end up becoming radicalized, the extremists by their echo chamber of like-minded kooks and the "normies" by the perception that they are being prevented from knowing or sharing the truth. Those of us engaged in the arguments on these platforms ought to learn from the lessons of the past. We should study opponents' arguments, identify contradictions and inaccuracies, and address the substance of the problem. Not lament over how this is 1930s Berlin all over again, because that does nothing to help. JAFFA aims to go down that lane and show the way for others in the spirit of liberty and free expression. More to come, friends. ✌️