No matter what Trump does for Israel, he is so obviously no friend of the Jews, and I would never trust any Jew who defends Trump because of his Israel record or because his daughter married the son of that righteous among nations, Charles Kushner - and yes, there are literal millions of Jews who do it just in this country, let alone in Israel. But neither are most of the leftists who cry crocodile tears every time there is right-wing antisemitism and yet turn a thousand willful blind eyes to what goes on in their political circles' own back yard. Any Jew who goes after Israel as a unique violator of human rights over and above the 100 other countries who violate human rights as or more flagrantly is equally unworthy of other Jews' trust, and quite possibly the trust of gentiles as well. Being anti-Israel does not make anybody an antisemite, but you are antisemites' fellow travellers, and you enable it no less than 'the white moderate.' When Jews do not strike an integrated balance between the absolute universal rights of humans and the special particularity of Jews (not chosenness), many Jews will die. Jews forced each other to take sides in Greece, in Rome, in Germany, in Russia, and the results speak for themselves. Those Jews who are discredit to us will die alongside those who are a credit; and when Jews die in conspicuous quantities, it's usually a sign everybody else will too.
We are just about the last ethnic minority Trump would order into camps, but he does want us scared, just the way he wants everybody else. If a few more Jews die the way they did in Pittsburgh, that's no great tragedy to him. He knows that the mutual hatred in the Jewish community is as plentiful as every other part of this country. There are plenty of Jews that think the deaths of Jewish liberals are simply what is coming to them, and you can't tell me that there aren't plenty of liberal Jews who wouldn't take schadenfreude in the deaths of frummies - I know so much better than that, and so do you.
We must neither segregate nor assimilate, we must associate. There's a 60-90ish% chance we don't have a special destiny. But through a series of historical accidents, we are conspicuously different, the rules of our history do not apply to other peoples, and that is not up for debate. Living as a Jew means living in a permanent state of insecurity, and sometimes that means dying as a Jew.
Jews particularly don't have to fear Trump, but Trump is becoming more and more a past tense figure. We have to fear what comes after Trump, because no matter whom it looks like the next generation will go after, precedent indicates that when powerful countries with lots of Jews run into trouble, they turn their oncoming fire on the one scapegoat that is simultaneously powerful enough to bare responsibility for the current state of affairs, and powerless enough to lose that power in an instant.
Whatever Jews appear to you to be, we are not that. Whatever country we're in, our existence depends on your clemency, and when you withdraw it, there is not a single thing we can do except go to the home you're not very happy to have us in - a home perpetually threatened with annihilation where you think we shouldn't ever have been. Meanwhile, we can't go anywhere else without fearing the exact same cycle of affairs that's existed for 2000 years.
Yes, Trump defends Israel, but without defending Jews in your own country, defending Israel is meaningless. Without defending Israel, defending Jews in your own country is meaningless. We finally have the best chance we've ever had to break our history of continuous tragedy, and so many of you want to make it as hard for us as it can possibly be.
Antisemitism comes in different forms. If the term means anything at all, then it does not just mean the hatred of Jews, it means the hatred of Judaism with all its accompanying longings for Zion. It's true, Israel has veered into authoritarianism, but so has the rest of the First World in regions that are far less threatened. And it's true, Israel has conspicuous issues of racism, but so does the rest of the first world - places where the reciprocal hatred of powerless toward the powerful is so much weaker than in Israel.
Nothing exposes hypocrisy quicker than people's attitude toward Jews. If you do not understand that existence in the world is a catalogue of nuances, exceptions, conditional statements, beliefs that the world is something other than the quid-pro-quos that populate Jewish history from beginning to end, you are going to run into dozens of problems with Jews. There is no such thing as a provable belief that does not account for thousands of exceptions, and the proof of that is that Jews are still here when the world's conspired to kill us so many times. We will also survive the attempts of your movements, but as ever, only a fraction of us will make it.
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