Trump’s pro-Israel stance alienates far right as it ramps up antisemitic attacks

Unity has begun to crack over ex-president’s support for Israel in its military operations across the Middle East
Ben MakuchWed 16 Oct 2024 07.00 EDTLast modified on Wed 16 Oct 2024 07.01 EDTShareAs the presidential election season unfolds, the Trump campaign has increasingly leaned on xenophobic rhetoric born out of racist chat boards – even receiving the tacit help of neo-Nazis attempting to seed their own policy interests into the mainstream.
But one campaign issue where the Maga world and the extremists of Telegram and other fringe social media sites have diverged, is the former president’s support for Israel in its several military operations across the Middle East.
The ideologies of the far right and Donald Trump have for the most part been in agreement since he took the reins of the Republican ticket at the RNC convention in July.
While supporters waved ultranationalist “MASS DEPORTATION NOW!” signs, Trump gave a speech mixed with hate, in a nomination that was roundly approved across the rightwing political sphere.
That sense of unity, however, has begun to crack under the weight of antisemitic attacks aimed at Trump for commemorating the anniversary of the 7 October attacks. On the day last week, he appeared alongside the conservative talking head Ben Shapiro at the gravesite of an Orthodox rabbi in Queens.
“Use my vote from the last time,” said one post with thousands of views on a neo-Nazi Telegram channel, with a picture of Trump wearing a traditional Jewish kippah beside a Hebrew tombstone. “Entire campaign has been nothing but sucking Jewish dick and losing WHITE people. Pray to your satanic faggot rabbi bitch.”
Trump was visiting the tomb of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, a holy figure among followers of the Hasidic Chabad movement in New York, where he prayed for the release of the remaining hostages held by Hamas. The site has become something of a campaign fixture for the Trump family during election season, with his son-in-law Jared Kushner and his daughter Ivanka, both having made an appearance there in the past.
“This is who Zion Don is commemorating and praying to today,” said another post on a Telegram channel linked to a designated terror group, referring to Schneerson. Another adjacent channel, offered up the suspicion that Trump had secretly “converted to Judaism” in 2017.
“In the context of the far right, antisemitism is the driving force,” said Wendy Via, the co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (Gpahe) and expert on far-right extremism. “But they are absolutely willing to set that aside for their own interest, right? They’re either willing to amp it up or set it aside for their own interest.”
Extremists on the far right are always willing to abandon political candidates they have previously supported, according to Via.
“You have to look at everything they say, through the context of what is going to help them achieve what they think they need,” she said.
Before Schneerson’s death in 1994, the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, personally knew and revered him as a sort of spiritual adviser during his time as the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations in the 80s.
Far-right extremists picked up on that association as a conspiracy holding that Schneerson prophesied that “Netanyahu had been picked by God to hasten the Messiah aka the Antichrist.”
The same far-right channel, with over 5,000 subscribers, continued: “Netanyahu’s aggressive ethnic cleansing of Gaza and push for settlement of the West Bank is clearly an attempt to fulfill the prophecy of the ‘coming of the Messiah’ in Israel.”
Nick Fuentes, a more mainstream and infamous white nationalist who once publicly dined with the former president, seized on Trump’s visit to preach to his so-called Groyper movement. He posted to X, formerly Twitter, that he considered the Hamas attack as “staged” to “justify Israel’s unfolding war to destroy Iran and its proxies”.
“His second term is going to be BASED!” he sarcastically posted, damning Trump for his full backing of the Israel Defense Forces in Gaza and Lebanon.
Via said she thought it was “Nick Fuentes, being Nick Fuentes” and that “the idea that anybody is going to be supportive of the Jewish community is completely anathema to him”.
Polls have shown the war in Gaza is mostly unpopular among a plurality of Americans.
And the anti-war position, whether for Republicans or Democrats, could become a key deciding factor in states like Michigan where a significant Arabic diaspora is seen as a political weakness for both Trump and Harris.
One of Trump’s first acts as president was to institute a “Muslim ban” on immigration from countries where Islam is the leading faith. Harris, meanwhile, continues to suffer from her association with the Biden administration’s steadfast and continued arming of the IDF in the face of alleged war crimes.
Finding strange bedfellows among neo-Nazi extremists and anyone opposing the state of Israel, on the other hand, isn’t a new phenomenon.
As early as October 2023, an anonymous neo-Nazi writer on a website founded by members of Atomwaffen Division, a designated terrorist group in several countries, wrote: “I for one only support cases such as Hamas’s struggle in Palestine.”
The Jewish community of New York has also become a point of fixation among rightwingers.
In January, when the world headquarters of the Chabad movement was caught illegally digging tunnels in Brooklyn streets to create more prayer space, neo-Nazis used the incident to spin antisemitic propaganda they still refer to today.