Posted by: John Phoenix
What October 7 Exposed — and Why the Center Cannot Hold
By Rima Najjar
Global Research,
Author’s Note: The alliance is cracking. Christian Zionism, Israeli supremacy, and U.S. strategic containment of Palestine have long masked and juggled their contradictions. October 7 exposed the scaffolding — and made the contradictions impossible to ignore. This essay names them.
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Introduction: The Fracture and the Alliance
The alliance between Israel and the American right is fracturing. According to Tikvah Ideas — a Jewish conservative pro-Israel think tank — antisemitic tropes are re-emerging within the very coalition that has long defended Israeli supremacy and militarism. These are not fringe provocations. They are mainstream narratives: claims of Jewish dual loyalty, skepticism toward Jewish-Christian alliances, accusations that Israel manipulates U.S. foreign policy, and even Holocaust revisionism. The ideological scaffolding that once framed Israel as a moral fortress is cracking. The cost of that fracture will not be rhetorical. It will be strategic.
To understand the fracture, we must first understand the alliance.
For decades, Israel’s most reliable international ally has been the American right. Evangelical Christians, conservative media figures, and Republican lawmakers have offered unwavering support — military, diplomatic, and cultural. This alliance has been framed as theological, strategic, and moral: a bulwark against terrorism, a fulfillment of biblical prophecy, and a defense of Western civilization.
But beneath this alliance lies a contradiction too deep to ignore. The American right’s support for Israel has never been rooted in Jewish pluralism or historical accountability. It is an unholy alliance — a convergence of Christian eschatology, nationalist militarism, and geopolitical convenience. Evangelicals support Israel not to protect Jewish life, but to advance a theological narrative in which Jewish return to the Holy Land precedes Christian redemption. As Pastor John Hagee, founder of Christians United for Israel (CUFI), declared: “The coming of Jesus Christ is tied to the Jews returning to Israel.” For many evangelicals, Jewish survival is instrumental — not sacred. Their support for Israel is not a defense of Jewish dignity — it is a staging ground for Christian prophecy.
And Israel, in turn, exploits this alliance with strategic precision. It welcomes evangelical support, because it delivers political cover, financial aid, and ideological insulation. Israeli officials appear at CUFI summits, echoing Christian Zionist language while advancing policies that erase Jewish dissent and criminalize Palestinian existence. The alliance is not mutual recognition — it is mutual instrumentalization. Evangelicals use Israel to fulfill prophecy; Israel uses evangelicals to shield apartheid. The result is a coalition that sacralizes supremacy, not solidarity.
And beneath the theology lies something older and more dangerous: a logic of supremacist utility. The American far right’s embrace of Israel is not grounded in religious solidarity — it is grounded in a shared architecture of power. The glorification of force, the myth of civilizational purity, the instrumentalization of Jewish life for nationalist ends — these are not theological convictions. They are ideological scaffolds. And while distinct from Nazism in form, they echo its emotional grammar: purity, prophecy, and militarized redemption.
White supremacists, including neo–Nazis, have long weaponized antisemitism — yet many now paradoxically express admiration for Israel. Not for its Jewish character, but for its ethnostate logic, its militarized borders, and its unapologetic use of force. They see in Israel a model of exclusion, not inclusion. A state that defines belonging through blood, land (albeit stolen land), and religion — mirroring their own supremacist fantasies. This is not solidarity. It is projection. And it reveals the alliance’s deepest fracture: the very coalition that defends Israeli militarism is also reviving antisemitic tropes, glorifying Nazi ideology, and threatening Jewish life in the countries to which thry belong.
And now, as antisemitic rhetoric re-emerges within the very coalition that claims to defend Israel, the cost to Israel (and the US along with it) of its perverse and cynical strategy is becoming impossible to ignore.
And where are the Palestinians in all this? Erased. Managed. Recast as threat or obstacle. The alliance between Israel and the American right is not just built on theological fantasy or strategic convenience. It is built on Palestinian absence. Their dispossession is the silent premise of the alliance. Their erasure is the condition of its coherence.
In the Christian Zionist imagination, Palestine is not a homeland — it is a biblical stage set. The land is sacred, but the people on it are not. Palestinians are either invisible or cast as antagonists to prophecy. As Hagee declared, “God gave the land of Israel to the Jewish people forever. It belongs to them. Period.” There is no room in that sentence for a Palestinian child, a village, a memory. The theology demands disappearance.
In conservative American politics, Palestinians are framed not as a people with rights, but as a security threat. The language is clinical: “terror tunnels,” “human shields,” “Hamas strongholds.” The humanity is stripped away. When Gaza is bombed, the alliance rallies — not to mourn the dead, but to defend the bombs. Palestinian grief is not just ignored. It is preemptively discredited.
And in Israeli strategy, Palestinian existence is the problem to be managed. The alliance with the American right allows Israel to delay justice indefinitely. It provides cover for occupation, impunity for war crimes, and silence for apartheid. The cost of that alliance is not just ideological. It is human. It is Palestinian.
This is the fracture that must be named. Not just the re-emergence of antisemitism among Israel’s defenders, but the foundational erasure of Palestinians that made the alliance possible in the first place. The alliance is cracking — not because it has rediscovered moral clarity, but because its contradictions are no longer containable. And in that tremble, there is an opening. Not for pity. For justice.
Tikvah’s Warning: The Fracture Named
Tikvah Ideas has named the fracture. In a 2024 editorial, the conservative pro-Israel think tank warned that antisemitic tropes were re–emerging within the American right — not on the margins, but in its mainstream. These include claims of Jewish dual loyalty, skepticism toward Jewish-Christian alliances, accusations that Israel manipulates U.S. foreign policy, and even Holocaust revisionism. The warning was not aimed at the left, where criticism of Zionism is routinely framed as antisemitic. It was directed inward — at the very coalition that has long defended Israeli militarism.
October 7 intensified the fracture. The Hamas-led attack and Israel’s subsequent military campaign in Gaza triggered a wave of rhetorical escalation across the American right. But that escalation revealedideological incoherence. Some conservative voices doubled down on support for Israeli force. Others began questioning the cost of “foreign entanglements” — a phrase that often veils antisemitic suspicion. The alliance, long treated as sacred, began to splinter.
Nick Fuentes, a far-right influencer who openly praises Hitler and denies the Holocaust, continues to attract young conservative followers. He has declared that “Jews have too much power in America” while simultaneously claiming to support Israel’s “right to defend itself.” In 2022, Fuentes dined with Donald Trump. In 2024, he hosted livestreams during the Gaza war that blended pro-Israel rhetoric with antisemitic conspiracy theories — accusing Jewish elites of orchestrating media narratives and war profiteering.
Tucker Carlson, before his departure from Fox News, aired segments that echoed isolationist tropes about foreign entanglements and “dual loyalty.” In one 2021 broadcast, he asked: “Why are we still funding foreign governments that don’t share our values?” — a question that, in context, referred to Israel’s military actions in Gaza. After October 7, Carlson’s successors on conservative platforms like The Daily Wire and BlazeTV amplified similar rhetoric, questioning the cost of U.S. support for Israel while platforming guests who trafficked in antisemitic dog whistles.
Candace Owens, a prominent conservative commentator, criticized “blind support for Israel” in a 2024 podcast episode, suggesting that “American Christians are being used.” Her framing echoed historical tropes of Jewish manipulation. In November 2023, she reposted a tweet from British rapper Zuby that read: “I support peace. I don’t support genocide. I don’t care who’s doing it.” The tweet was widely interpreted as a critique of Israel’s actions in Gaza. Owens defended the post, accusing critics of “weaponizing antisemitism to silence dissent.”
On platforms like Gab, Telegram, and Truth Social, antisemitic memes circulate freely. These include caricatures of Jewish media control, accusations that Israel orchestrated 9/11, and claims that the Holocaust has been exaggerated for political gain. Some of these accounts also post pro-Israel content — revealing the ideological incoherence at the heart of the alliance.
Even within institutional conservatism, cracks are visible. The Claremont Institute, once a bastion of pro-Israel thought, has published essays questioning the moral clarity of World War II and suggesting that American interventionism — often linked to Jewish intellectuals — was a mistake. In 2024, one Claremont fellow wrote that “the postwar consensus was built on guilt, not truth,” a line that many Jewish scholars interpreted as Holocaust minimization.
Many commentators and activists now insist they are being muzzled by a powerful “Israel lobby” and that defending free speech obliges them to oppose what they call censorship of criticism of Israel. That claim is partly sincere: journalists, podcasters, and donors have faced deplatforming, advertiser pressure, and social sanctions for amplifying extreme views or conspiracy theories.
A significant number of Jewish individuals hold ownership and executive power across major media platforms. This is not incidental — it reflects both Jewish cultural emphasis on literacy and achievement, and a widespread identification with Zionism as a core part of Jewish identity.
Before October 7, Jewish media figures like Shari Redstone (Paramount Global), Michael Bloomberg (Bloomberg LP), Haim Saban (Univision), and Jeff Zucker (CNN) already shaped mainstream news and entertainment. After October 7, their influence became more visible and more politically mobilized. Robert Kraft launched campaigns through his Foundation to Combat Antisemitism. Jewish-led nonprofits like CyberWell partnered with tech platforms to flag and suppress content deemed antisemitic, which often meant antizionist — including Palestinian advocacy. Pro-Israel donors and Jewish lobbying groups pressured TikTok and X to moderate or remove posts critical of Israel. These actions are not conspiratorial in the globalist sense — but they do constitute a coordinated effort to control how Zionism and Palestinian resistance are represented. And because these platforms are public-facing and serve diverse populations, the use of concentrated Jewish influence to enforce Zionist narratives provokes backlash — not just from antisemites, but from journalists, activists, and ordinary users who see ideological gatekeeping masquerading as content moderation. The backlash is not irrational. It responds to real harm: the erasure of Palestinian voices, the framing of resistance as extremism, and the use of media power to justify military violence. Unlike Jewish doctors or scientists, who are overrepresented but not politically mobilized, Jewish media actors often wield their influence to shape public opinion in ways that serve Zionist goals. That difference matters. It explains why the visibility of Jewish media power — especially when used to suppress — is not just a trope. It’s a structural reality with ideological consequences.
And this reality is not confined to Jewish actors. Rupert Murdoch, one of the most powerful media moguls in the world, is not Jewish — but he has long used his empire to defend Israeli militarism and suppress Palestinian narratives. His outlets — Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, The Times — reach hundreds of millions and consistently frame Israel as a bulwark of Western civilization. Murdoch’s editorial stance mirrors Christian Zionist logic: Israel as sacred, Palestinians as threat, and Western media as a battleground for ideological defense. His complicity shows that the campaign to control narrative terrain is not about Jewish identity alone — it is about strategic alignment. When Jewish actors and non-Jewish allies converge to suppress Palestinian voices, the result is not just bias. It is structural harm.
But the grievance is also weaponized. Leaders from Fuentes to mainstream conservative hosts mix legitimate free‑speech complaints with dog whistles and conspiratorial claims, turning a principled argument about open debate into a shield for antisemitic tropes and for rhetoric that blames Jews or Palestinians rather than confronting state policy. The result is a double movement: a real dispute about speech norms and platforms, and a parallel campaign that reframes institutional pushback as proof of undue Jewish power — a framing that further deepens the alliance’s ideological incoherence and drives wedges between defenders of Israel, critics of its conduct, and those who conflate the two.
Tikvah itself is not without contradiction. The organization has historically conflated leftist critique of Zionism with antisemitism, and has defended Israeli policies that many Jewish thinkers — especially those aligned with justice movements — have condemned. Tikvah’s contradiction becomes emblematic: they once weaponized accusations of antisemitism to silence leftist critique, but now they’re forced to confront antisemitism within their own coalition. That reversal is not just ironic — it’s existential. The alliance they helped build is turning on itself.
The alliance between Israel and the American right was never built on shared values. It was built on faith-based opportunism and supremacist utility. And now, as antisemitism becomes culturally acceptable within the very coalition that sustains Israeli impunity, the cost of that alliance is becoming impossible to ignore.
The Strategic Bargain: Short-Term Gains, Long-Term Peril
Israel’s alliance with the American political right has delivered concrete strategic victories. The United States provides Israel with over $3 billion in annual military aid, routinely uses its veto at the United Nations Security Council to block critical resolutions, and relocated its embassy to Jerusalem, lending political weight to Israeli claims over the city that Israel has illegally annexed. Conservative media reframes Israeli military dominance as moral necessity and shields the government from international accountability.
A. The Engine of Impunity: Evangelical Politics
Evangelical Christians form a motivated voting bloc that shapes Republican foreign policy. Their theological belief in Israel’s role in biblical prophecy translates directly into political pressure that secures sustained U.S. defense of Israeli actions. This pressure produces predictable diplomatic cover and a pattern of impunity that has been engineered, not accidental.
Israel’s standing in Washington is reinforced through a mix of organized lobbying, partisan political pressure, campaign finance, and information operations that flow from conservative media into congressional action.Pro‑Israel organizations and allied far‑right groups organize lawmakers’ trips to Israel, bringing members of Congress to meet with Israeli officials and military figures and shaping their firsthand impressions; these delegation trips are a frequent tool for influencing votes and framing legislative priorities. Groups with evangelical bases and conservative networks mobilize grassroots pressure — phone campaigns, targeted emails, and large voter blocs — that translate into constituency pressure on Republican members to defend Israeli policy.
Money and electoral leverage follow the messaging: lobbying and donor networks fund campaigns, primary challenges, and political advertising to reward supporters and punish critics, creating a strong disincentive for members of Congress to break with the pro‑Israel consensus. Inside Congress, this pressure appears as bills that lock in aid, amendments that limit congressional oversight, and votes blocking sanctions or restrictions; leadership often moves quickly to enshrine support in appropriations and foreign‑policy authorizations, making reversal politically costly.
On the diplomatic front, the U.S. executive branch has translated this domestic pressure into concrete policy moves: the embassy relocation to Jerusalem under the Trump administration signaled to allies and adversaries alike that political supports could secure major diplomatic rewards, while successive vetoes in the UN Security Council and diplomatic shielding during congressional debates demonstrate how domestic political alignment produces international impunity. Conservative media ecosystems amplify these wins, framing them as moral imperatives and reframing legal or human‑rights critiques as partisan attacks, undercutting the space for rights‑based scrutiny.
These mechanisms — immersion trips and briefings, grassroots mobilization, campaign finance and electoral enforcement, congressional legislation and appropriations, paired with a reinforcing media ecosystem— work together to convert far‑right political energy into durable policy outcomes that protect Israeli military action from sustained congressional or international accountability.
B. The Paradox: How Antisemitism Reinforces the Alliance
Antisemitism on the American right can paradoxically strengthen political support for Israeli state policy by narrowing who counts as a legitimate Jewish voice: far‑right actors circulate conspiratorial tropes about Jews domestically while exempting and praising the Israeli government, which turns the state into a political instrument, marginalizes progressive Jewish critics, and silences and erases Palestinian voices and rights in public debate; this selective exemption is reinforced by expanded definitions of antisemitism, curated congressional trips, campaign pressure, and a conservative media ecosystem that delegitimizes dissent.
This reinforcement is now fracturing: as antisemitic tropes increase among far‑right influencers, some of those actors have begun publicly criticizing Israel for tactical or ideological reasons, alienating liberal and pluralist backers and exposing splits within the coalition — what once secured protection is now a source of strain and potential withdrawal by parts of the right.
C. The Cracks in the Foundation: A Transactional Alliance
This utilitarian partnership creates significant long‑term risks for Israel.
- Moral incoherence. When allies back Israel because of prophetic belief or ethno‑nationalist solidarity rather than universal human rights, the alliance loses moral credibility and becomes easy to portray as sectarian and interest‑driven.
- Strategic instability. Transactional allies remain reliable only while interests align; demographic and theological shifts in the U.S. could quickly remove diplomatic shields and leave Israel exposed.
- Reputational contamination. Alignment with far‑right movements that advocate racial purity and ethnostates attaches exclusionary politics to Israel’s brand, narrowing space for neutral mediation and legal defense.
D. The Inevitable Blame Game
When this alliance fractures significantly, Israel will face a severe legitimacy crisis. The collapse does not merely remove the last layers of political insulation; that insulation has allowed Israel to hide its nonexistent moral and legal claims behind diplomatic cover.
Concrete effects will follow quickly: fewer vetoes and blocking votes at the UN; diminished amplification of defensive narratives in conservative media; renewed traction for independent human‑rights findings, UN inquiries, and International Criminal Court processes; a greater willingness by foreign parliaments to condition or postpone aid; and pauses or reductions in intelligence, arms‑transfer, and technology‑sharing arrangements. Each of these shifts converts prior political protection into practical vulnerability.
Independent monitoring recorded a sharp global rise in antisemitic incidents after October 7, 2023. Israel’s retaliatory campaign — marked by heavy bombardment, widespread civilian casualties described as genocide, mass displacement, and attacks on civilian infrastructure and medical facilities in Gaza — generated widespread international outrage and provoked backlash. Multiple incident databases documented spikes in harassment, threats, and assaults against Jewish communities, and analysts have linked the scale of civilian harm and the visibility of the campaign to increased extremist mobilization and heightened tensions in many countries.
The rising antisemitism and diplomatic shifts resulting from the fracture will still hit Palestinians first and hardest, because the dominant public frame — promoted by far‑right influencers and some liberal Zionists — that blames Palestinian resistance for global antisemitism will continue to justify repression, criminalize solidarity, and shut down accountability. That narrative channels public anger into securitized responses: expanded arrests, harsher policing of protests, restrictions on humanitarian access, and legal measures that target Palestinian organizing and speech.
Nevertheless, the withdrawal of unconditional support would also deepen Israel’s practical isolation. Without allied lawmakers and partisan media to refract and minimize abuses, independent human‑rights reports, UN inquiries, and international legal avenues gain purchase; foreign parliaments and donors acquire political space to attach conditions to aid; intelligence sharing, arms transfers, and joint research partnerships become politically fraught; and diplomatic protection in multilateral forums grows harder to secure.
The result is asymmetric: Palestinians will be scapegoated and suffer repression in the short term, while Israel — exposed by sustained evidence of rights violations and stripped of the political insulation that long obscured contested moral and legal claims — would confront reputational damage, operational setbacks, and intensified legal and diplomatic consequences.
Naming the Reckoning: Beyond the Fracture
The alliance between Israel and the American right is fracturing. Antisemitic tropes are re-emerging within the very coalition that defends Israeli militarism. Evangelical theology instrumentalizes Jewish life. Far-right influencers glorify Israel as a model of ethnostate power while attacking Jewish dissenters who challenge Zionism or affirm pluralism. Their support is not for Jewish life — it is for a state that mirrors their own supremacist ideals. The scaffolding is cracking.
But the reckoning cannot be limited to Israel. It must include the United States.
The U.S. government is not a passive observer. It is a co-architect. It funds Israeli militarism, vetoes UN resolutions, defends occupation as security, and frames Palestinian resistance as terrorism. It treats Israeli violence as defense, and Palestinian grief as threat. And when these policies are challenged, it invokes antisemitism — not to confront hate, but to silence critique. It claims to oppose antisemitism while using that opposition to shield apartheid, erase dissent, and delay justice.
This contradiction is not just moral. It is strategic. The U.S. claims to uphold human rights, pluralism, and democratic legitimacy — yet it defends a regime that enshrines Jewish supremacy in law, land, and citizenship. The 2018 Nation-State Law, which defines Israel as the exclusive homeland of the Jewish people, codifies exclusion. And the U.S. defends it — not just through rhetoric, but through institutions:
- Congressional mechanisms deliver annual aid packages and bipartisan resolutions affirming Israeli “self-defense.”
- Legal frameworks like the IHRA definition of antisemitism conflate critique of Zionism with hate speech, silencing Palestinian advocacy.
- Cultural institutions — media outlets, think tanks, universities — treat Palestinian grief as dangerous, illegible, or antisemitic by default.
And now, in October 2025, the U.S. and Israel are enacting a new phase of strategic delay. The Trump-brokered ceasefire agreement promises an end to fighting, the release of hostages, and humanitarian aid. But beneath its language of resolution lies a logic of containment. The plan does not confront the root causes of the war — occupation, apartheid, and Palestinian dispossession. It manages grief. It postpones reckoning. It delays justice by delaying even the acknowledgment of harm.
Israel agrees to withdraw troops, but not to dismantle the siege. Hamas agrees to release hostages, but not in exchange for sovereignty. The U.S. frames the deal as peace, but it is not peace — it is procedural silence. It treats Palestinian suffering as a logistical problem, not a political indictment. And in doing so, it reinforces the very scaffolds that made the war inevitable.
Why must the U.S. confront these contradictions? Because they are no longer containable — and they are beginning to corrode its own foundations.
- Globally, the U.S. loses credibility. It cannot claim to uphold human rights while shielding apartheid. Its strategic alliances look less like diplomacy and more like complicity.
- Domestically, the contradictions fuel polarization. As more Americans — especially young, Black, Indigenous, and Muslim communities — see through the scaffolding, the gap between policy and principle widens. Trust erodes.
- Institutionally, the U.S. risks entrenching supremacist logic in its own governance. By defending a regime that defines citizenship through exclusion, it normalizes ethnostate thinking at home.
To confront this contradiction, the United States must do what it has long refused:
- Disentangle itself from supremacist alliances. This means refusing unconditional support for Israel, a state that defines belonging through exclusion — whether racial, religious, or national.
- Stop weaponizing antisemitism to silence Palestinian critique. Antisemitism must be opposed — but not used to justify apartheid.
- Center Palestinian justice in foreign policy. This means recognizing Palestinian rights not as a threat to Jewish safety, but as a condition of shared dignity.
- Redefine strategic partnership. Partnership cannot mean impunity. It must mean accountability — to law, to pluralism, to the people whose lives are adversely affected by American power.
The U.S. must stop shielding Israel from scrutiny. If Israel enacts apartheid, it must be named. If it delays justice, it must be challenged. Strategic alliance cannot mean moral exemption.
The reckoning is overdue. The alliance is cracking — not because it has rediscovered moral clarity, but because its contradictions are no longer containable. That’s what October 7 exposed — not just violently, but corrosively. It forced the scaffolding to speak. And in that speech, the fracture became visible.