There are vast gaps between the American far Right’s and left wing’s perceptions of Israel and the reality, author and political commentator James Lindsay said after his visit to Israel, explaining that he had seen in the country a culture of life that could serve as a template for solving some of the problems roiling American society.
Lindsay explained to The Jerusalem Post that he didn’t have a clear perception of Israel before coming on a late-October trip with a Herut delegation, on which he toured around the country, met politicians, visited the October 7 massacre sites, and spoke to common Israelis.
He had assumed that there must be sizable grains of truth in what has been reported about Israel in the media, a truth somewhere in the middle of the ideas and conceptions held by American political wings. Yet he found a wide gulf between the Israel that had been sculpted out of newspaper ink and keystrokes and the Israel he experienced.
The American far Left’s Israel is part of a wider “settler colonialist narrative,” said Lindsay, in which there is “tremendous tension between Jews and Muslims in particular” and “general tension between Jews and Arabs,” but he found that neither seemed to be the case. There are certain regional groups, be they in the Palestinian territories, Lebanon, or Syria, that have hostile intentions toward Israelis that are being rebuffed, but Lindsay’s impression from the diversity of Israelis that he engaged with was that they were open to those people who weren’t engaged in such belligerency. He noted that those Israelis living in the Gaza border communities had sought a relationship with Gazans, which was ultimately abused to facilitate intelligence gathering ahead of the October 7 massacre.
“The Left is completely making up this story, like the Jews are these evil, hardline colonizers who are oppressing all these people,” said Lindsay. “It just doesn’t match reality on the ground at all, especially having gone down near the Gaza envelope and hearing the attitudes of the people there that they had prior to October 7, with regard to the Palestinians in Gaza. It seems like they had a very open conception of the relationship there. They got taken advantage of, as a matter of fact, to very tragic consequences. And so the Left is completely wrong.”
The American far Right views Israel as a warmonger, causing Middle Eastern wars and attempting to drag the United States into the conflict to have the American military fight as its champion. Lindsay found that every Israeli he spoke to had no interest in having Americans or any other actor fight on their behalf.
Israel doesn't want American boots on the ground
“Obviously, there’s the arms arrangement between the United States and Israel, but they don’t want boots on the ground. They don’t want to drag people into wars. They don’t want to start wars. They just want to defend themselves and the territory that they’re in from particularly hostile forces,” said Lindsay.
The idea that Israel was treating Christians as second-class citizens and Jewish Israelis regularly abusing them seemed absurd to Lindsay, who had been to the Old City with obviously Christian delegation members.
There was little truth to be found by Lindsay in the political narratives being established by different sets of propaganda in the West, which he found shocking.
“It seems as though both the Left and the Right in America have invented an Israel that doesn’t exist, or two different ones, whole cloth, and they just run their mouths about it as a complete fabrication,” said Lindsay. “It doesn’t represent reality in the region at all.”
Ignorance explained much of the reason that the false Israels were being perpetuated, but Lindsay attributed part of their amplification also to foreign common enemies and malign domestic actors that sought to demoralize and leverage the relationship between Israel and the United States for their own ends. The foreign aid aside, the author said that Jerusalem and Washington are strategic partners against both jihadism and Chinese expansionism, and both groups need that relationship severed to advance their objectives. Malign actors sought to undermine the American conservative movement by creating divisions on Israel, which also advantaged a political Left that some entities sought to restore to power.
“Narratives are being seeded by enemies that are common to Israel and the United States. The exact people that are trying to attack Israel are feeding narratives into the American political space, both feeding the Left in their preferred ideological framing and feeding the Right in their preferred ideological framing. These narratives about what it’s like in Israel, and in that ignorance, people are running with those narratives. Also, probably people are being paid to run with those narratives or to push those narratives, by whether it’s Qatar, Iran – Russia and China are likely involved as well.”
Domestically, a radical wing of the American Right was attempting to use Israel as a scapegoat to tap into the frustration and resentment that had developed among young Americans, according to Lindsay. Extremist movement leaders such as Christian white nationalist Nick Fuentes can blame Israel for the lack of affordable houses because of foreign aid to Israel or on high interest supposedly controlled by international Jewry’s finance sector.
Part of the appeal of people like Fuentes is also the breaking of taboos, which often includes the long-standing US-Israel alliance, the legacy of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, or conspiracies about Jews. Many young Americans came of age during a time of extreme censorship regimes over the COVID-19 pandemic, Lindsay explained, and a culture in which they were shamed into silence and obscurity if they were the wrong ethnicity or demographic. Truth often lay outside this restrictive atmosphere, a truth that could only be obtained by transgressing politically correct boundaries. Transgressiveness in the face of these regimes created an association with “truth telling,” even if the transgressiveness explored false radicals. Breaking taboos granted a sense of liberation for disaffected American youth, said Lindsay, and being hailed as a truth teller creates an addiction to praise among transgressive figures.
“You’re not supposed to blame Jews, you’re not supposed to blame Israel. We’re supposed to be allies, and so – especially in conservative circles – it’s not been something that is considered fair or reasonable to do in many decades. So he’s [Fuentes] breaking that mold, because we have a lot of frustrated conservatives who don’t know why their lives haven’t gotten better and, in fact, in some ways have gotten worse. And he can sell them on these narratives,” said Lindsay. “You’re not supposed to like [Soviet Union leader Joseph] Stalin, you’re not supposed to like Hitler, you’re not supposed to wish for the rape of women. You’re not supposed to support Sharia law or Hamas or whatever. You’re not supposed to blame Jews for everything. So he’s violating taboo after taboo after taboo after taboo, because these frustrated young people that he’s speaking to want to have that feeling of liberation. It’s completely incidental to Israel itself.”
Fuentes himself was likely caught in false narratives himself, according to Lindsay, copying from Mein Kampf and Nazi ideology, but didn’t actually know much about what it was like in Israel. The far-right commentator appeared to believe that he couldn’t go to Israel or else be assassinated by the IDF. Lindsay said that discussing Israel was less about reality, and more about Fuentes’s brand.
Guiding the far Left and Right beyond the narratives they had established about Israel would be difficult, according to Lindsay. For the Left, there is a deeper belief structure that casts Israel as existing to “oppress the poor Palestinians or Muslims in the region.” The radical Right has also made the issue a shibboleth.
Demonstrating in a concrete manner that foreign actors are proliferating the perceptions of the fake Israels, such as sponsoring influencers, would undermine those voices and the narratives they have been building. Americans generally perceive foreign attempts to covertly influence them as hostile, Lindsay explained. At the same time, creating videos with succinct refutations of the talking points that define the false narratives would also be helpful.
“A lot of Americans literally believe that what the United States is doing is writing Israel a check for $4 billion a year, and Israel just can do whatever it wants with it, most of which is start wars with people that it doesn’t need to. So it’d be very, very easy to just kind of put together a short refutation of claims, explaining [that] the vast majority of the foreign aid is actually through military contracts. And so what’s happening is the United States is giving Israel money to buy weapons from America. That’s over 80% of the aid, which turns out to be $4b. a year. That turns into almost $20b. in profit for American companies employing 15,000 Americans to operate in that business environment,” said Lindsay. “And that’s happening specifically to fight terrorists who chant things like ‘Death to America.’ So it’s in our interest in a multitude of ways, but this is not what the average American right-winger believes. They believe we’re cutting a check to Israel for Israel to just go do whatever they want with, and that if American kids were getting that money instead, they’d be able to buy a house.”
Lindsay also advised that others have to see the real Israel that he had seen – conversations with Israelis, their everyday life. Seeing the daily life of young, Gen Z, English-speaking Israel would show the true Israel. Such materials couldn’t be created or sponsored by the government, Lindsay warned, as otherwise it would be propaganda. Such outreach has to be organic.
Israel has the opportunity to position itself as an example of how to create a culture of strong fathers and loving families with religious children, according to Lindsay. Offering to help Americans figure out how to integrate such cultural features into American life would have appeal to young conservatives. There are many American leaders attempting to figure out how to save their younger generations, and anything Israelis could offer in terms of advice, mentorship, or opportunities would be beneficial to that mission.
“I think there’s a huge opportunity, in fact, to showcase how family oriented and yet like masculine and courageous you have in the men of the IDF,” said Lindsay. “I think the connection between family and religion, especially in the more observant and Orthodox sectors of the society, would also be very charming for people to see how it looks in reality. The focus on children and being a good parent, though, I think would really shine through and resonate.”
The author was struck with how Israeli culture is focused on family and life, even in little ways that are often invisible to the fish swimming in the Israeli current. One example shared by Lindsay was how, when introductions were made at every meeting, Israelis would introduce themselves not by their title and achievement, but primarily with details about their family, such as how many children they had. It is a culture of life which Israelis are ready to defend on the borders of Gaza and Lebanon, and come home to have a Shabbat family meal. This “culture of life” was a chief focus during Lindsay’s November 3 New Discourses podcast, titled “Am Yisrael Chai.”
There are still a lot of Americans who support Israel and Jews, said Lindsay. When the goal is to drive a wedge between two countries or peoples, it takes both sides to give up on the relationship. It would require Americans to become skeptical and angry at Jews, explained Lindsay, but would also require Israelis to turn around and surrender America as an ally because of those sentiments. It would be a “terrible mistake if both sides decide to step into that enmity, when the fact is that the majority of conservative Christians in this country [the US] are still strong allies to Israel, still love Israel, still recognize the difference between civilization and terrorism, and to know which side to stand on.”