THE STERN GANG
Jonathan Zasloff FACEBOOK
I have wondered over the last couple of months how anyone could be a Jewish Republican in its current incarnation. And I think I have found part of the answer: Lehi.
Lehi, sometimes known as the Stern Gang, was a radical ethnic nationalist paramilitary group in Mandatory Palestine (it stood for Lohamei Herut Israel — Fighters for the Freedom of Israel). It was more extreme even than Menachem Begin’s Irgun, fighting to create a “new totalitarian Hebrew republic.” Its nationalist focus was pretty exclusive, so it was sympathetic to Italian Fascism — its founder Avraham Stern even studied in Mussolini’s Italy for awhile. (This was common for the Jewish Right: Zeev Jabotinsky helped found a Jewish naval base in Fascist Italy, the Betar Naval Academy). Stern even proposed an accommodation with Hitler: the Jews would fight the British in exchange for the Nazis releasing Jews from camps.
This single-minded ethno-nationalist focus meant that after Israel’s Independence, former Lehi members split ideologically, and some became leftists (especially since after Stern’s death, part of Lehi gravitated toward Stalin). Its most famous alum was former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir.
Now cut to modern America: American Jews who support Trump basically do so for one reason: settlements. They don’t care about Trump’s racism, or xenophobia, or anything else: they think he will back the settlement project, and that is all that is necessary. And this sort of ethno-nationalist focus means that they don’t care about democracy in Israel, either. When confronted with how to reconcile settlements with democracy, Trump’s biggest Jewish backer, Sheldon Adelson, said, “who cares if Israel is a democracy?” That’s what hyper-nationalism can do: we want ours and nothing else matters (this is also why it dovetails well with Republican plutocratic economic policies).
So it isn’t crazy for some American Jews to support Trump: they are following an old Jewish hyper-nationalist tradtion, and are happy to do so because they think Trump will help them create the “new totalitarian Hebrew republic.” Mr. Adelson, meet Mr. Stern.