Anti-Semitism is exposed in the ranks of the right – the honeymoon between the Republican Party and Israel is over

Anti-Semitism took a giant step forward this week on the MAGA platform.

It started on Monday when Tucker Carlson hosted white nationalist Nick Fuentes on his show — MAGA’s largest platform — to discuss Israel and “organized Judaism.” The fallout was immediate, with conservatives hotly debating the acceptability of anti-Semites like Fuentes in the conservative big tent, the growing trend of Gen Z anti-Zionism and more.

And on Thursday, the Heritage Foundation dropped a bombshell when its president, Kevin Roberts, released a video defending Carlson and calling for Fuentes to be discussed, not avoided. Roberts argued that conservatives must put loyalty to “Christ first, America always” before reflexive support for Israel, regardless of the enormous pressure they may receive from the “world class.”

This dog whistle conjured up anti-Semitic images of a parasitic transnational Zionist lobby arrayed against Christian nationalism. Now Fuentes takes a victory lap, flanked by the leading MAGA analyst on one side and the leading MAGA think tank on the other, and his toxic brand of anti-Semitism is poised to take off into the conservative mainstream.

Heritage seems to have taken a sudden and astonishing turn; For more than a year, the organization has sought to make its way to the front lines of the war against anti-Semitism, which it has associated exclusively with the pro-Palestine left.

In October 2024, Heritage released Project Esther, an authoritarian playbook that closely resembles Project 2025 (from which it derives its namesake) and calls on the Trump administration to “disrupt” and “weaken” pro-Palestine advocacy using the full force of the state. Once in office, Donald Trump moved quickly to achieve many of his goals, locking up activists like Mahmoud Khalil, powerful universities like Columbia, threatening advocacy organizations with lawsuits, terrorism designations, revoking their nonprofit status, and more.

When Project Esther was launched, its supporters rejected any need to include the fight against right-wing anti-Semitism in its mandate, arguing that the left represented the only real threat to Jewish safety. Many have flatly denied the hypothesis that anti-Semitism exists within the conservative movement. “I refuse to admit it [antisemitism] He is part of the conservative movement and that [white supremacists] “They’re my problem, because white supremacists are not my problem, because white supremacists are not part of being conservative,” James Carafano, leader of the Heritage Task Force on Anti-Semitism, told Jewish Insider.

Now, many Jewish supporters of Project Esther are singing a different tune. Rabbi Yaakov Minkin, head of the far-right Alliance for Jewish Values, a partner in Project Esther, lamented X, saying: “Heritage has chosen to stand vocally with an anti-Semite…and the consequences will be far-reaching indeed.”

Christian Zionists are also sounding the alarm. “It is disappointing to see, although unfortunately not surprising,” Luke Moon, president of the Christian Zionist group Philos Project and co-chair of the Anti-Semitism Heritage Task Force, admitted in an email to supporters. Leaders like Moon are deeply concerned that their days of influence are numbered. Since the attacks of October 7, 2023, criticism of American support for Israel through the MAGA movement has deepened.

For decades, the Israeli, American Jewish and Christian right formed what seemed like a tough alliance. In the service of defending Israel and fighting anti-Semitism, they have tirelessly defended the supposedly shared “Judeo-Christian” values ​​of “Western civilization” that underpin the “special relationship” between the United States and Israel.

The Esther Project is a latecomer in a crowded bipartisan pro-Israel anti-Semitic landscape, dotted with American Jewish groups like the Anti-Defamation League, Christian partners like Christians United for Israel, and militant groups like StopAntismism, Canary Mission, and Betar. These groups have relied on an excessive and weaponized conflation of legitimate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, shredding free speech rights and shielding unfair Israeli policies from accountability in the process.

If conservatives really wanted to fight this battle, they would turn first to their own camp. Anti-Semitism can certainly arise on the left, but it finds its natural home on the right, where it fits comfortably with anti-black racism, xenophobia, homophobia, and all other kinds of bigotry.

Data show that far-right actors have committed the majority of extremism-related murders in the past decade, while “the center of anti-Semitic attitudes is young people on the far right,” as a 2022 study put it. White nationalists like Fuentes imagine a Jewish conspiracy at the heart of progressivism, US support for Israel, and everything else they hate. These fever dreams have been repeated by extreme nationalist movements for more than a century, and they form an essential part of today’s authoritarian toolkit.

Right-wing Jews may be surprised, but the rest of us are not. Progressive analysts have long recognized that a strategy of alliance with Christian nationalists would backfire. At the same time, the relentless push to equate Jewish identity with defense of the Israeli state’s indefensible actions ultimately fuels the fires of the anti-Semitism it seeks to combat. Now the cynical side of the right’s positions, and the short-sightedness of the Jewish establishment in enabling its authoritarian agenda, has become clear to everyone.

Right-wing defenders in Israel are falling silent. They had long been accustomed to only looking to the left for the next threat, and their necks turned painfully. Conservative Catholic columnist Rod Dreher recently reported that all of his right-wing Jewish friends now view Tucker Carlson as the most dangerous anti-Semite in America.

This is no coincidence. It’s here to stay. At a Turning Point USA event in Mississippi on Wednesday, Vice President J.D. Vance was sharply criticized by college students who insisted that Israel is “controlling” Trump and that Judaism is “judging” Christianity. These future right-wing leaders are not going anywhere; They will soon take over, and there is little room for “the Jew” in their vision of the Christian West.

In hindsight, the obsessive focus on exposing and rooting out the supposed crisis of anti-Semitism on the left will prove to have been a radical and short-sighted miscalculation. In fact, Jewish right-wingers were complicit in a much greater threat, putting not only Jews but democracy itself at greater risk in the process. As their dreams become increasingly discredited, we must work to wake up from the nightmare they helped create.

Ben Lorber is a senior fellow at the Policy Research Foundation, a research and strategy center that helps pro-democracy activists understand and confront authoritarian movements. He is co-author of Safety Through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Combating Anti-Semitism.