The Coming Jewish Civil War Over Donald Trump

Lately, AIPAC has also directly entered the money fray, after decades of pretense otherwise, with its own political action committee: one that specializes in raising money from wealthy Republicans and funneling it into Democratic primaries to ensure that the more “pro-Israel” candidate wins the race. In 2022 and 2024, it set all-time records for its primary contributions, though, ironically, its advertising rarely mentioned Israel. AIPAC’s website brags that the group spent a $70 million investment to help defeat 24 candidates whose support for Israel did not meet its exacting standards. As a result, as Matt Duss, formerly the top foreign policy adviser to Bernie Sanders, explained, “AIPAC scares the shit out of members of Congress.” If you vote against or even speak overly critically of Israel in a public forum, Duss explained, “AIPAC will take you down,” and it has “any number of means at its disposal.” While J Street does raise money for more progressive candidates, albeit nowhere near as much as AIPAC, its true value lies in its “pro-peace, pro-Israel” umbrella’s ability to protect those under attack.

In recent times, the ADL’s relentless attacks on Israel’s critics led to the perception among insiders that it had overtaken AIPAC as the most influential member of the presidents’ conference. Once identified with civil rights struggles and the fight to maintain a separation of church and state, it has downgraded virtually all efforts save those involving attacking Israel’s critics wherever they may appear. (“Anti-Zionism is antisemitism, full stop,” Greenblatt insists.) In the past, it was AIPAC’s job to root out those unfriendly to Israel anywhere in the presidential bureaucracy. But in March, when Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s director of national intelligence, felt forced to deny the Israel critic Daniel Davis an important post that would have put him in charge of managing briefings for the president, The New York Times’ account of the internecine fight credited the ADL, which had called the appointment “extremely dangerous.” (Davis had called U.S. support for Israel’s Gaza war a “stain on our character as a nation.”)

As enormous as the imbalance of power is inside the Jewish lobbying groups, it’s even greater within the Jewish media. The right dominates here as well. Obama deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes said he found “striking” during his time in the White House the degree to which “the drivers of opinion on foreign policy come almost entirely from the right.” Right-wing Jewish billionaires and multimillionaires have invested heavily in websites, daily email blasts, and thick policy journals. It would take a lot of space to list all of them, but among the most important are Jewish Insider, which acts as a tribal drum for right-wing Jews, often pounding the same targets as Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post but with greater depth and fewer fireworks. Bret Stephens uses his New York Times column to defend whatever Israel does and is also blessed with his very own Jewish policy journal, Sapir, funded by a dark-money foundation called the Maimonides Fund, which refuses to identify its donors. It’s a remarkable state of affairs for a newspaper that seeks to avoid even “the appearance of conflict of interest.” The Free Press, founded by Stephens’s former mentee, Bari Weiss, is obviously all in for Israel. Tablet is another extremely well-funded right-wing outlet that frequently traffics in Trump-style conspiracy theories and personal attacks on those Jews who resist them. Ditto The Algemeiner, a New York newspaper widely read by Hasidic Jews.