An Outrageous Slander Against Israel, Jews and American Republicans
James Carville, the legendary 79-year-old “Ragin’ Cajun” and veteran political strategist who ran Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, hurled an outrageous smear against Republicans and Israel that deserves condemnation as profoundly antisemitic.
On a recent podcast called Politics War Room, he began by accusing Donald Trump of basing his entire drive for the presidency on racism and “White Nationalism.” This contention produced a question from a listener, read to Carville by podcast co-host Al Hunt. The challenge asked why a party based entirely on racism and bigotry would be so enthusiastic and vigorous in supporting the Jewish state of Israel.
Carville then responded by claiming that the GOP’s pro-Israel posture is actually linked directly to racial prejudice because Jews have a lighter complexion than their Arab neighbors. “It’s really about the misogyny and the racism that drives the thing, and we got to recognize that,” Carville insisted. “It’s not about any policy prescription. And the reason I suspect that most of these people describe themselves as pro-Israel is because the Jews are whiter than the Palestinians. Which I think drives a lot of what they are.”
This analysis isn’t just ridiculous, it’s offensive.
Most obviously, it betrays an appalling ignorance of the nearly ten million people who count as citizens of Israel.
Aside from the Israeli Arabs who make up one-fifth of the national population, the majority of Israeli Jews originated not in Europe but in Middle Eastern nations (including Morocco, Yemen, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Syria and more) and became refugees from vicious persecution that drove them to seek safety in Israel during and after that nation’s war for independence in 1948-9. Anyone who’s spent time in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem will note that the great bulk of these “Mizrahi Jews” are darker in complexion than their fellow citizens of European ancestry. The Jewish communities of the Islamic world thrived for centuries throughout the Middle East, until more than 800,000 of them established new homes in the years following Israel’s modern establishment.
Moreover, American racists of the past and the present emphatically reject the idea that Jews qualify as “white.” The Ku Klux Klan focused their hatred nearly as fiercely on Jewish Americans as they did on Black Americans. Modern neo-Nazis and Ku Kluxers insist that Jews are part of an ongoing conspiracy to erase or replace the “White Race”; has Carville forgotten the message of the torch-bearing mobs in Charlottesville in 2017 who chanted “The Jews will not replace us” when they marched around a local synagogue. No, these were not conservative backers of Israel.
The other fact that Carville either ignores or denies is the historical reality that as Americans, including conservative Republicans, made progress in the 1960s in rejecting racism and segregation, the support for Israel increased dramatically. In other words, Zionist sympathies didn’t depend on white supremacist attitudes but grew more fervent in precisely those years (approximately 1964-1975) that racial bigotry most conspicuously receded.
Most appallingly, Carville’s attempt to associate support for Israel with race-based prejudice totally ignores the real reasons that most Republicans—and most Democrats as well—have consistently supported the state of Israel and its right to self-defense. Israel remains a lonely outpost of democracy, prosperity and individual liberty in a region of the world where those blessings remain extraordinarily rare. The only Middle Eastern nation in which Arab citizens regularly vote, and enjoy the freedom to worship as they choose without governmental interference, is the Jewish state that has flourished for 75 years “between the river and the sea.”
One would hope that some of James Carville’s Jewish friends and admirers would help to educate him to understand that what links so many conservatives to Israel isn’t pale complexion, it’s the enlightened values that the two democracies continue to share.