Steve Bannon has given an old antisemitic trope a fresh ‘pro-Israel’ spin

Contributing Columnist
Emily Tamkin
February 25, 2025

Steve Bannon, ally and former White House advisor to President Donald Trump, knows who Israel’s main enemies are: American Jews.

“People in Israel gotta understand something: The number one enemy to the people in Israel are American Jews that do not support Israel and do not support MAGA,” Bannon said in a weekend interview. “Okay? MAGA” — short for “Make America Great Again,” Trump’s long-standing campaign slogan — “and the Evangelical Christians and the traditional Catholics in this country have Israel’s back. They have the Jews’ back. The single biggest enemy to the Jewish people are not the Islamic supremacists. The biggest enemy you have is inside the wire: progressive Jewish billionaires that are funding all this stuff.”

To be clear, this is a new twist on an old antisemitic classic: Insisting that Jews are enemies from within, perpetual foreigners, outsiders even when we’re insiders, incapable of belonging and of loyalty to a society.

This insidious trope of Jews as the enemies from within — a separate, although related, conspiracy from the idea of dual loyalty, which suggests Jews are more loyal to Israel (or a secret Jewish agenda) than their own countries — shows up in conspiracies like the Great Replacement Theory, or the notion that Hungarian-born billionaire philanthropist George Soros is flooding the United States with migrants.

Why would a Jewish person try to reshape their society for ill, degrading and corroding it from within, if they cared about it? The antisemites’ answer: Because they don’t care about it. Because they’re Jewish, so they can’t.

The same idea cropped up in Germany after World War I, in the form of a conspiracy theory that Jews had betrayed their own country, stabbing it in the back. It wasn’t that Germany had lost outright, promoters of this smear said; it was that disloyal Jewish citizens had undercut the war effort.

And it was there ahead of World War II, when the U.S. resisted taking in Jewish refugees for fear that they might be “fifth columnists,” lurking in the ranks ready to sabotage and undermine.

It arose again in the Soviet Union, where many intellectuals — most of them Jewish — were smeared as “rootless cosmopolitans,” who belonged nowhere and to nothing, and were therefore fine and fair to target as part of anti-cosmopolitan campaigns.

Bannon’s version — Jews are the real enemies if the don’t support his own particular political movement, which the vast majority do not — is a new twist on this old classic. Yes, it’s relatively new for Jews to be accused of being the enemies of the Jewish state. But the message is fundamentally the same: Jews — wandering, diasporic, rootless, cosmopolitan, “progressive” — are the true enemy to any nation.

That Bannon linked support for Israel with support for his own reactionary, nationalist cause, mere days after doing what he denied was a Nazi salute, drove the message home. The only difference is that he was saying it under the cover of being pro-Israel.

It’s worth noting that what Bannon said isn’t so dissimilar from what, say, Ron Dermer, Israel’s former Israeli ambassador to the United States, said several years ago when he asserted that Israel should prioritize the support of evangelicals over that of American Jews. But Bannon’s specific spin on the matter is offensive or antisemitic.

That was made clear by much in Bannon’s interview. There was the knock on Jewish billionaires, provided those billionaires support progressive causes. That’s a play on tropes about Jewish money and Jewish influence, and the conspiracy that both have a deleterious, nefarious effect on society.

There was the conflation of support for Israel with support for Trump’s political movement, a conflation Trump himself repeatedly articulated during the campaign — even though, as Halie Soifer of Jewish Democratic Council for America has noted, most American Jews simultaneously consider themselves supportive of Israel and did not support Trump last November.

And there was the classic division of Jews between the supposed “Good Jews” — the ones who vote the way they’re supposed to, and are therefore seen as understandable and worthy of support and loyalty as Jews — and “Bad Jews,” who do not.

But mostly, there was the premise, in Bannon’s telling, that American Jews who don’t support MAGA — which, again, is most of us — are the enemy. This is an old, tired, antisemitic trope. It is also dangerous. In the conspiratorial mindset, what can’t one say about or do to an enemy? What is an enemy but to be defeated, whatever the cost?

What Bannon was really saying was this: Jews who sign up for his and Trump’s ethnonationalist vision are safe. The rest of us are to be considered out as disloyal — in fact, as singular enemies — to the nation-state.

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