These are confusing and confused ideological times. Aside from the hardened ones, few of the ideologised know where they stand on the shifting sands of political loyalties and conflicting pedagogies that have suddenly, in the twin wakes of the Gaza genocide and the Americo-Israeli war on Iran, turned from implacable combativeness to baffled cooperation.
On March 17, Donald Trump’s counterterrorism chief Joe Kent became the highest-ranking administration official to resign over the war on Iran. His words, on X, were: “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”
In his sights were Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his gleefully self-satisfied interventions in the White House, and the deeply-embedded Zionist lobby led by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which funds US legislators with millions of dollars and has been dictating US policy in the Middle East-North Africa (MENA) region for the past several presidencies.
These are targets that the liberals and the left in the US share with a certain section of the right wing: the Christian—or at least the fiercely Christophilic—alt-right, which is audaciously voluble and increasingly influential across social media. Except for a few evangelical Christians, this Christo-right is pointedly not philosemitic.
That it has no love for present-day Israel is not a matter of provenancial mystery, given the mindbending brutality of not just the Israeli State, but the complicity of ordinary Israelis. The American Christo-right, for all its self-positioning on Iran, is antisemitic—as in anti-Jewry—to its bones.
When the liberal-left began sharing Kent’s explosive interviews with approbation, one big irony seemed to have escaped them: that Kent and his alt-right interviewers not only hate Jews, but that they also fundamentally support Trump, who is an intemperate Israelophile. They are all MAGA. They are all anti-immigrant, pro-deportation and for prodigally militarising the border. They have nothing against the extravagant and creative malfeasance of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement or ICE, which Trump’s opposition refers to as his administration’s Gestapo. They are all in favour of oil exploitation, into climate-change denialism and in favour of unfettered artificial intelligence ultra-technocratism. When they applauded Kent’s revelation that 18 American intelligence agencies had advised Trump against attacking Iran, but that he did anyway, they were cementing their conviction that Trump’s ecosystem was fine but his closest coterie was compromised.
Some think Trump should stop engaging expansionally abroad and focus on the domestic. Others, that he should reroute military spending, which he has increased by more than 17 percent this financial year, to salving the economy back home. Yet others, that he should rout the combination of Jewish Zionism and evangelical Christian Israelism as satanic. Still others, that Trump should abandon the sinking ship that’s Israel. Some realpolitik rationalists consider the MENA region as of dwindling significance as alternative forms of energy—all anathema to Trump, who fashions himself after oil barons—take hold globally, especially in China, which Trump considers his bête noire.
But none of them thinks that Trump is in any way wrong by himself—just that he has been misled. They still think that although he is ideologically the cat’s whiskers, he is a soft touch: not just the Israelis, but the entire Jewry has been able to blind him to the obvious—that Israelism is a bad idea. This refrain is echoed across the alt-right ecosystem—from Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, Candace Owens, Nick Fuentes and Stew Peters to Owen Shroyer.
The problem for progressives—the term ‘liberal’ crosses the right-left binary too easily to be precisely usable—is that none of these ultra-rightwingers is wrong about Israel, but that they are wrong about Am Yisrael, the Jewish peoples of a range of ideological convictions ranging from ultra-conservatism to reformism. All-purpose antisemitism is not a digestible response to Israel’s incredible, world-breaking inhumanity. Anti-Zionism and anti-Israelism are.
Progressive ideologues are at that inflection point where they discover that ideologies are increasingly intersectional—just as geopolitics and geostrategy are turning out to be, with States declaring multi-alignment as fundamental to making their way across an increasingly transactional world where ethics, like carbon tax, is negotiable or contractual—but not credentialled or served by long-term overlaps. The sharing of the alt-right’s antisemitic videos in the garb of anti-Israelism and anti-Zionism by atheists, agnostics, believers and secularists alike with no small approbation is disturbing.
Because, once the Israelist issue is done and dusted—as it will be, sooner or later—we will be left holding the can of alignments never intended to be forever, unable to extricate ourselves from ideological appropriation and refashioning, our wills trapped in the rotting corpse of momentary common purpose.
Once the simoom settles in MENA, these very alt-right influencers will turn on progressiveness, minorityism, immigrationism, secularity, internationalism. One common conviction—punctum temporis, a moment in time—could blind us to the larger dangers of annexation to the long-term cause of the right.
Kajal Basu | Veteran journalist
(Views are personal)
(kajalrbasu@gmail.com)