AMERICAN JEWS ARE ANTI-NATIONALIST BECAUSE AMERICAN:

Conservatives have actually inverted the old libel. Instead of accusing Jews of being overly loyal to a foreign nation, Trump has turned centuries of anti-Semitism on its head by accusing them of not being loyal enough to one--and his followers are happy to echo the charge.

How has this come to pass?

One obvious part of the answer is that Trump and other conservatives are just parroting the sorts of things they hear from Jewish Republicans, who--let's be blunt--tend to see Israel's Jewish critics as a bunch of self-hating secularists who've bought in to leftist anti-Semitism. Not all of them are quite as forthright about their feelings as Shapiro, who charmingly likes to dismiss his opponents as "Jews In Name Only." But the sentiment that liberal Jews are bad Jews is real. And Republicans outside the tribe have clearly picked up on it. [...]

What we're seeing now is also the result of a recent shift in America's political alignment. While there have almost always been critics of Israel on the left, there used to be a rock solid bipartisan consensus on the Jewish state among mainstream Washington politicians, so that accusing Jewish Democrats of "disloyalty" for merely voting for Democrats wouldn't have made a drop of sense. (Those 71 percent of Jews who voted for Hillary were voting for a very pro-Israel candidate.) But in recent years, that consensus has begun to crack, in part because of tensions between Netanyahu and the Obama administration that turned supporting Bibi, at the very least, into a more partisan issue. Plenty of Democrats, like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, are still old-line liberal Zionists. But outside of its top leadership in Congress, the party and its voters as a whole have become less unconditionally supportive of Israel, and more tolerant of radically critical voices like Omar and Tlaib.

Republicans, on the other hand, have become monomaniacally obsessed with Israel and its security. To many conservatives today, the Jewish state is not just an important ally--it is our most important ally. National defense hawks, rightly or wrongly, see it as our bulwark against Iranian aggression in the Middle East. Islamophobes see it as part of a struggle over civilization itself. And an entire generation of evangelical Christian Zionists--like Locke--believe that Israel is part of a divine plan, God's instrument on earth. And to almost all of them, supporting Israel in practice means supporting Netanyahu's conservative Likud government. The devotion is so strong that in a 2015 Bloomberg poll, 67 percent percent of Republicans said they believed that "Israel is an important ally, the only democracy in the region, and we should support it even if our interests diverge." Nobody would say that last part about, like, Great Britain.

When you mix in Trump's personal affinity for the Jewish state--Israel literally named a settlement after him--you reach the absurd yet logical conclusion of contemporary U.S.-Israel politics: Prominent, non-Jewish Republicans now feel free to censure American Jews for being insufficiently supportive of another country. 

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