Sunday, Nov. 27, 2022 | 2 a.m.
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Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., was a featured speaker at the Republican Jewish Coalition’s Annual Leadership Meeting last weekend at the Venetian. After being elected as Republican Leader on Nov. 15, McCarthy now needs to strengthen his position to get the votes to become House speaker. To do so, he needs to show the far-right of his party that he can disrupt President Joe Biden’s agenda.
Israel’s new, right-wing government is offering McCarthy an opportunity to do just that.
Two of Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition partners, Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, are extremists who have advocated mass expansion of settlements and deportation of Israeli Arab citizens. The Biden administration has indicated that it won’t engage with Ben Gvir or Smotrich if either receives a cabinet position. Republicans will seize this inevitable confrontation as an opportunity to accuse the administration of being both anti-Israel and antisemitic.
McCarthy and Republican hypocrisy is almost comical. In 2018, McCarthy posted and then deleted an antisemitic tweet about Jewish money in politics. He never apologized and doubled down in refusing even to admit it was antisemitic. His Republican colleagues responded not by rebuking him, asking him to resign or stripping him of committee assignments but by electing him House minority leader. (In that same election cycle, at least six Republicans ran ads featuring Jews clutching cash.)
McCarthy’s obsequiousness to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., accentuates his hypocrisy. Greene, whose list of antisemitic statements is so long there are stories written about them and who has expressed support for political violence, was stripped of her committee assignments by the House but McCarthy has promised to lift the ban on her serving on committees despite her unapologetic history of antisemitism.
In contrast, Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., whom McCarthy has promised to remove from the House Foreign Affairs Committee, apologized for saying she was referring to AIPAC after she tweeted on Feb. 10, 2019, “it’s all about the Benjamins baby.” Omar was responding to a tweet from journalist Glenn Greenwald, who said, “GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy threatens punishment for @IlhanMN and @RashidaTlaib over their criticisms of Israel. It’s stunning how much time U.S. political leaders spend defending a foreign nation even if it means attacking the free speech rights of Americans.”
“Benjamins” is slang for $100 bills. In Omar’s comments, some Jewish and political leaders saw the suggestion that Jews were controlling U.S. foreign policy with money, a classic antisemitic trope (so classic that Donald Trump has said so repeatedly). Others saw nothing nefarious, pointing to AIPAC’s influence in foreign policy, which is obtained at least in part by fundraising.
Dozens of Democratic members of Congress, including Democratic leadership, strongly condemned Omar, and she apologized. Since then, Omar has stayed faithful to her word and hasn’t repeated any such comments, even when similar situations have arisen, including AIPAC’s endorsement of 109 Republicans who refused to affirm Biden’s election and AIPAC PAC’s expenditures of millions of dollars to defeat progressive Democrats in primaries and the general election.
Omar voted for a resolution condemning antisemitism in February 2019. A month later, she voted for another resolution condemning antisemitism. And on May 14, 2019, she wrote an op-ed with Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., condemning antisemitism and white nationalism, arguing that attacks on Jews and Muslims are “two sides of the same bigoted coin.”
Last month, after white nationalists unfurled a banner supporting Kanye West over a Los Angeles freeway, Omar tweeted: “This is sickening antisemitism. This toxic hate is a direct threat to our Jewish neighbors and families. We all have a responsibility to call out and condemn such blatant hate. We need to open our hearts, learn from past harms and lead with love.”
Omar is a strident critic of Israel and has taken positions with which we disagree. But on the bottom-line issue of Israel’s right to exist and the need for a two-state solution, we agree. So do a majority of Jewish Americans.
But McCarthy is not concerned with the majority of Jewish Americans. He knows they overwhelmingly vote Democratic and won’t turn against Biden. So instead, his strategy is to peel off a few Democratic members of Congress and disrupt Biden’s legislative agenda. And, as he has in the past, he will employ false accusations of antisemitism to win them over.
McCarthy may succeed in stripping Omar of her committee assignments, but he is unlikely to win over any Democrats. When Republicans tried to single out Omar in 2019, Democrats united around a resolution that condemned all forms of hatred. It passed by a vote of 407 to 23. The 23 no votes were all Republicans.
As for Omar’s position on Israel, the Jewish community is not afraid of challenging debates. The makeup of Israel’s new government almost guarantees such disputes. We should not try to shut them down by labeling them “antisemitic.” That may be McCarthy’s cynical tactic for raising money or manipulating political support. But it’s not the smart way to support Israel or fight antisemitism, which is increasingly finding a home in the Republican Party.
Steve Sheffey is a Democratic strategist, author and publisher of the Chicagoland Pro-Israel Political Update. Jonathan Jacoby is the director of the Nexus Task Force, which is affiliated with the Center for the Study of Hate at Bard College.
