On the third anniversary of October 7, at a panel at the first edition of Yoram Hazony’s National Conservatism conference in Israel, four prominent MAGA Right speakers laid out how the rising generation of the MAGA Right views Israel. This is the most important discussion for understanding the future of America, the land of God’s “almost chosen people,” and the future of America’s Jews, which has been held since Gazans, organized by their Hamas rulers, launched their genocidal attack on Israel. For Zionists, gentile or Jewish, the message was harsh: Israel, to that younger American generation, is just another foreign country with whom American interests sometimes coincide and sometimes do not. Labeling that view as antisemitic will accomplish nothing, the speakers argued. Hostility to the rhetoric and practice of Jewish defense in America means that even labeling actual antisemites and actual Nazis as antisemites and Nazis will no longer accomplish anything for Jews or Israel.
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Do not blame these four messengers. Those of us who came to the conference to hear that message did not. Many in the days and weeks to come will try to parse what this shift in opinion means for Israel, for America’s Israel policy and for Israel’s American policy in the post-Trump, post-Christian Zionist era that will soon be upon us.
More important, in my view as an American emigrant to Israel and as a religious Zionist, is understanding what this shift means for America and America’s Jews. We Israelis will do what we can, and we will suffer what we must, but ultimately what we will suffer will be decided not by the American people and the officials responsible to them, but by God.
The French Revolution aspired to realize “the rights of man and citizen,” where both are understood as having no loyalty except to the Republic, which those citizens form. The American covenant is different: the American commitment to each other’s God-given liberties demands that Americans in their unity and diversity obey the law and pay their taxes and support their government against all enemies, foreign and domestic. It has never, as a matter of law or shared understanding, demanded that Americans renounce all other commitments of faith or belonging as the price of American citizenship. It has demanded that Americans renounce all political allegiance to “any foreign prince or potentate.” Americans themselves, as individuals and as citizens, have to navigate their own complex loyalties without taking orders from foreigners—or even from a native-born American Pope.
Two thousand years of Jewish history teach us that Jews who distance themselves from the claims of Jewish peoplehood and from the hope of redemption in Zion have sold their birthright in the future of the Jewish people. Rising and future generations of gentile Americans may move away from their historical understanding of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament in favor of ecclesiastical orthodoxies or “historic confessions” whose origins and authorities are not, ultimately, American. The Jews of America, if there are Jews in America, will retain their loyalty to the Jewish people and their identification with the Jewish commonwealth of Israel. This is not a matter of support for this or that Israeli or official Jewish community policy or even institution—it is a matter of willing a shared fate and a shared hope.
Jews have been present in America and have died for it since its beginning. Except by giving America living witness to the truth of Scripture, we did not, until the 20th century, play a major role in the American story. The enemies of the Jews have also been in America since its beginning. Because of the careless importation of un-American hatreds and ideologies, in which Jews and historically Jewish institutions like HIAS have had a large and regrettable role, these enemies are now more powerful in academia and in the electorate than they have been since December 11, 1941, when Hitler, the enemy of the Jews, declared himself the enemy of the United States.
The American compact requires not only that Jews risk dying for America, but it also requires that Americans risk dying for America’s Jews. This is not a matter of dying for Israel or fighting Israel’s wars: it means to be willing to pay any price and undertake any burden to protect the natural and constitutional rights of American Jews as well as all other Americans against those who would murder them for their faith or for their loyalties.
Until 1776, every gentile ruler or people regarded the protection of Jews and their rights in their own dominion as a contingent matter, to be undertaken when the cost was not too great and dropped when popular or religious hostility or political expediency made it too great. America, from its beginning, offered something else to American Jews. It treated America’s Jews as citizens without expecting them to break their covenant with God by abandoning their commitment to their fellow Jews. Jews could be treated as fellow citizens while retaining the understanding of America as a place of exile, like Babel, Spain, China, and England. America’s Jews could keep their shared hope for a return to Zion and an ingathering of the exiles, both from the places where Jews are enslaved and the places where they are free.
If Jews remain in America until then—and they may not—they will remain as they did in Europe, “a people apart.” Unlike the French Revolutionaries, the American Founders from Washington on down expected nothing else. The question for American gentiles is whether they will continue to extend to American Jews the protections of citizenship, relying on our record of sharing those burdens and benefits, and without imposing a loyalty test, which America’s leadership previously understood should not be demanded and which their own understanding of the Bible as an inspired and historic Scripture forbade.
The deepest questions about America and Israel are not questions of foreign policy. They are questions of America’s own self-understanding and the place in that understanding of America’s Jews. America’s covenant with the Jews in America made Jews equally, but not exclusively, American. By enabling Jewish flourishing in America, that covenant facilitated America’s rise to greatness. America’s Middle East policy has seen costly successes and costly failures. America’s Jewish policy is based on guarantees of equal liberty under law that might, if her immigration policy continues to be mishandled as it was before the Trump Administration, prove no less costly.
Nobody is going to draft American boys into a war for Israel. They and their parents have understood, up until now, that they might be drafted to protect the worshippers of Beth Israel off of Main Street from those who would murder Jews for their faith and their identification with their fellow Jews in the Jewish land. If that obligation is no longer shared and understood, America will just be another temporary place of Jewish exile, in which the presence of Jews will be contingent and, in the fullness of time, ultimately tragic.
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