By Daled Amos
Rabbi Pesach Wolicki is Executive Director, Israel365.com, an Orthodox Jewish institution that fosters better relations between Jews and Christians. He is a regular guest on Steve Bannon’s War Room, providing commentary on U.S.-Israel relations, Middle East policy, and the biblical foundations of Zionism.
Anyone who still thought the conservative movement was unified and the place of the Jews inside the movement was secure was disabused of that notion at AmFest. What is your take on what is going on?
Rabbi Wolicki: Well, look, the American right has its antisemitic wing. Just as the American left has its antisemitic wing. I don't think anyone ever thought that the American right was unified, especially the MAGA movement, which is really the dominant and ascendant political force in American politics over the last decade. It is actually a loose coalition of different factions that agree on certain things. They agree on a kind of hatred of the left-wing establishment.
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| Rabbi Pesach Wolicki. Source: Screen Cap |
But beyond that, there are many points of departure between these various factions. You have libertarians, traditional Catholics, evangelicals, and in terms of geopolitics, you have people who are more isolationist and more traditionally Republican -- all pulling in different directions within that movement. Now, in terms of attitudes about Israel and the Jewish people, there are definitely antisemites. Israel and the Jews have really become one issue.
“Israel and the Jews have really become one issue.”
According to the polling of the 50,000 participants at AmFest, 83% of them see Israel as a friend and ally of the United States. So the perception one gets of anti-Israel sentiment on the right is not exactly correct. I personally found that the people I interacted with were, by and large, very friendly. There was a lot of pro-Israel sentiment there.
That said, among the younger generation, let's say under the age of 25 or 30, what you find there is a perception that Israel has an outsized influence on American politics and foreign policy. There is a resentment of that, especially among the younger generations who feel shut out of the economic system and the opportunities for prosperity that their parents and grandparents' generation had. These are all legitimate gripes. They look at the money going overseas. I've made the argument about why it's all in the best interest of the United States. It just doesn't resonate because, as far as they're concerned, they don't want the US involved in these things.
They see the combination of the aid and the fact that they're fighting a cultural war against wokeness and the progressive forces in society that they feel, correctly, have destroyed traditional American life. And unfortunately, the vast majority of Jews in America identify with the progressive left. This younger generation is fighting these cultural wars, and the people on the other side are so often Jews.
Pick an issue, and the Jewish community is advocating for the progressive left, woke agenda. And if you put that together with the fact that Israel is "officially" the largest recipient of foreign aid--and it's a witch's brew that makes it easy for the antisemites in the influencer community on the right to capture a lot of young people. That said, they're not as successful as we would think from watching social media.
You mentioned Steve Bannon, who has been accused of antisemitism. But your organization, Israel 365, honored him this year as a "Warrior for Israel."
Rabbi Wolicki: We didn't honor him. We were honoring other people that evening. Steve Bannon spoke that evening. I think it was misrepresented in the media. He was the keynote speaker at an event where we honored a bunch of pro-Israel activists.
Other than the few months after the 12-day war with Iran, where he was very much opposed to American involvement, and his interpretation that Prime Minister Netanyahu had manipulated American politics and lied in order to drag America into a conflict—which he greatly resented—other than that, Steve Bannon has been an adamantly pro-Israel voice.
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| Steve Bannon. Source: Screen Cap |
From October 7th until the Iran war, he actually stood out from the crowd in that part of MAGA as being extremely pro-Israel. Most Jews don't listen to his podcast, and they don't know, but when everyone else was buying into the genocide claims and all these things, Steve was not buying it. He was advocating for Israel to finish off Hamas and not to hold back. He's been a very pro-Israel voice.
There is an interesting story I heard from Steve, and corroborated with Ambassador David Friedman. When he was Trump's chief strategist and in charge of the plans for inauguration day during the transition, Steve was pushing that the very first thing the president would do, after taking the oath of office and giving the speech, would be to go straight to the Oval Office and sign an executive order recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and to move the embassy there. He wanted that to be the opening act of Trump's presidency. The State Department people got wind of it, and they pressured President Trump to hold off.
Steve gets lumped in with the anti-Israel crowd because he's critical of Israel. He doesn't like Prime Minister Netanyahu, and that's fine. A good 40% of Israelis don't like Prime Minister Netanyahu either, but I don't know of anything antisemitic Steve has ever said. Steve is not an apologist for Qatar and the Islamists. He doesn't talk about Jewish conspiracies and things like that. This is not where he's coming from.
There are also broader issues. I believe that populist nationalism is a wonderful political ideology. Israel is basically a populist nationalist country, more and more so with every passing year. That's why Israel hasn't had a left-wing government in decades, and that's why the younger population in Israel is more religious and more politically conservative than its parents. I believe in a lot of the same political principles that Steve believes in, and he's also a big advocate for Judea and Samaria—he refuses to use the term "West Bank"; he only calls it Judea and Samaria. Steve is a very pro-Israel guy. You can be pro-Israel and also hate Bibi. So the perception that Steve Bannon is an antisemite is really coming from an ignorance of the man. He's a complicated person; he's not a Hasid. He's not a choir boy, but he's certainly not an antisemite. It's an absurd claim.
Ben Shapiro argued at AmFest for boundaries in the conservative movement. He said that not every voice belonged under the same tent. When it comes to antisemitism or being anti-Israel more generally, shouldn't there be boundaries in terms of who's inside and outside the tent?
Rabbi Wolicki: Ben Shapiro’s speech has been taken out of context by people on our side and people on the other side as well.
For example, he did not advocate for boundaries. If you listen to the speech, he never says anything about canceling a voice or not platforming someone. Instead of talking about canceling people, he talked about the responsibility of those who speak in public for a living, and he laid out 5 responsibilities that he believes they have to their audiences. He called out Candace Owens. He called out Tucker Carlson. He called out Megyn Kelly by name. He called them out for violating these principles of integrity to their audience. He never called for anyone to be deplatformed.
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| Ben Shapiro. Source: Screen Cap |
It was interpreted by everyone as a call to deplatform people. Let's assume that Ben Shapiro did call for people to be deplatformed. Let's assume that we should have boundaries. Here's the problem, as I diagnose it—and I say this as someone who is intimately involved in this political movement, and I see it as my responsibility on behalf of Am Yisrael to be there. There is a difference between what is correct on principle and what is effective, and that's a difficult choice that we have to make. We're sometimes faced with a situation where what is correct on principle, because of the political environment and the playing field that we're in, will backfire. Now, one of the animating ideas of the America First / MAGA movement is a revulsion for anything that sounds like cancel culture. They don't believe in canceling any voice. I'm not saying this to defend them; I'm saying this to explain them.
“There is a difference between what is correct on principle and what is effective—and that’s a difficult choice we have to make.”
Charlie Kirk was a pro-Israel person. He used to have Candace Owens speak at his events before she really went off the rails. And when she started going off the rails with the antisemitic conspiracy stuff, there was a lot of pressure on Charlie to stop having Candace Owens speak at Turning Point USA events, and he did; he stopped having her speak. But from Charlie Kirk's perspective, everything should be allowed in the open marketplace of ideas. Personally, I think he took it too far, but he thought every voice should be heard. The answer is never to say that certain voices shouldn't speak because they say bad things; we should platform everybody and let the open marketplace of ideas do its job. This idea, which to a certain extent sounds noble in theory, is taken way too far in the MAGA movement because it's a backlash against what the left was doing, especially around the time of COVID, where there was active work by social media companies to silence voices.
In our current environment, if we stand up and say we have to have guardrails, that we can't have certain voices speak, that stand may very well be--and probably is--correct on principle. But the way it resonates, the way it triggers the younger part of the MAGA movement, is that it sounds like cancellation. Even if they don't necessarily agree with the voice being canceled, they don't want any part of silencing voices, because it triggers them as part of one of the major political points that the movement was founded on, which is an abhorrence for these limitations on freedom of speech and on the cancel culture that the left put into place. It's not normal conservatism, it has its own culture to it—within the MAGA movement, and we have to be very, very careful as Jews about advocating for the cancellation of voices, even if we are correct in principle.
We need to change the way we advocate and change what exactly we're advocating for. In the lead-up to America Fest in the months before Charlie Kirk was killed, we were talking about his planning to have Tucker Carlson speak. A number of us were upset about that, because we really felt he was going to spew more lies, and it was going to hurt, including Turning Point itself. But we never said "cancel him," because we knew that would not work with the way he thinks. What we were arguing for was to give equal time and equal prominence to people to make Israel's case. Now, I have to say the organizers of America Fest failed in that regard. There was no such speaker. They did not have any session at the conference that really laid out and defended Israel properly. I think they failed.
You have described the current anti-Israel atmosphere as an "organized operation." You have also mentioned that pro-Israel voices are "up against a machine we can't compete with." So what do we do?
Rabbi Wolicki: I think we need to make the Israel issue not about Israel. One of the fastest growing issues in America and in the West right now is the threat of jihadist Islam and what it's doing to Western culture. You see what's going on in Minnesota, with the Somali Muslim community, and you see the various Muslim terror attacks, and what happens in Australia.
What Israel and the pro-Israel community have failed to do effectively is frame our war as a war against these same forces. We need to do that because then, rather than trying to get people to be on our side of our conflict, we are instead framing our conflict in a way that we are on the same side as them in a conflict that they are concerned with.
How do you go about doing that? So there's a number of things that Israel can do differently. Charlie Kirk wrote a 7-page letter to Prime Minister Netanyahu back in April, laying out what he thought Israel should do to tell its story differently. One of the main things that Charlie pointed out is that we need more first-person voices from Israel—young people telling Israel's story, talking about their own lives on social media instead of having the IDF spokesman or Prime Minister Netanyahu being the spokespersons for Israel. We need more young, first-person voices.
In terms of fighting against the machine, the Qatari information machine, we need to keep plugging away. The Jewish people have always been outnumbered. We've always been outgunned; that's the case with this also. We have to hope that, eventually, the truth is going to win out. But I really believe that we need to look at the issues that are of concern to Americans—to young Americans, especially—and tether the Israel issue to the issues they are concerned about.
Let me give you some food for thought. If you look around the world at the political winds and the political changes that have been happening around the world over the last few years, one of the things that we're seeing is an ascendancy of right-wing populist nationalism, right-wing Christian populist nationalism in countries all over the world. To a large extent, this is a backlash to the left and to unfettered immigration—not only in America but everywhere—South America, Europe, and also a reaction to the destruction of Western civilization and the decline of the family.
All of these things have led to this right-wing upsurge among the younger generations in these many, many countries. So you see Victor Orban in power in Hungary, the ascendancy of Wilders' party in the Netherlands, the Vox party in Spain, Bolsonaro--the evangelical Christian leader--in Brazil, and Javier Milei in Argentina, and I can go on and on and on. There are many examples of this—of these populist nationalist, Christian conservatives, or even Le Pen's party in France and Tommy Robinson and his followers in England. As Jews, we have to not romanticize our relationships with people politically. The fact that the parents and grandparents of the people in the Le Pen party were antisemites doesn't mean that the people in that party today are antisemites.
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| Source: Screen Cap |
Young Christian conservative nationalists in all of the places I've mentioned, the Christian conservative populist nationalists on the right everywhere in the world--except the United States--are almost entirely pro-Israel. If you Google pictures of pro-Bolsonaro anti-socialist protests in Brazil that have nothing to do with Israel and look at the crowd shots and zoom in, you will see that one of the things they bring to their demonstrations are Israeli flags. They wave Israeli flags at Brazilian anti-socialist demonstrations because they see Israel as representative of democracy, Judeo-Christian Western civilization, and conservatism. Israelis and Jews need more self-awareness about Israel—the way the rest of the world sees us. We're a very right-wing country, increasingly right-wing, with every year. We're an increasingly religious country—we're an ethnic nationalist, religious state. That's the way the rest of the world sees us, and they're all pro-Israel.
By contrast, the only populist nationalist, Christian conservatives in the world who are not overwhelmingly pro-Israel are in the United States of America. And I believe it's for the reasons I said before: the combination of a powerful, pervasive Jewish progressive left in America, which doesn't exist in these other countries, and the fact that the United States gives billions of dollars in aid to Israel, which is also not the case with these other countries. Add in that the Qataris and the other bad actors have no interest in investing billions of dollars to change the way young Argentinians or young Brazilians think—there's not as much skin in the game there—but changing the way young Americans think, that can pay off for them because America is so powerful.
So if you put all these things together, we have this poisonous mix that predisposes a lot of young Americans to not be pro-Israel because of the other associations. I think that we need to break all of that. Jews need to be very open about advocating for an end to USA aid to Israel. It's actually bad for Israel strategically.
“Jews need to be very open about advocating for an end to U.S. aid to Israel. It’s actually bad for Israel strategically.”
Israel has sold $10 billion of air defenses to Greece and Germany in the last month. We just signed a $35 billion natural gas deal with Egypt. We don't need $3.8 billion from the United States every year, with all the strings attached and all of the leverage it gives the US in our strategic decision-making. We need to openly advocate for an end to the aid. It's bad for Israel. The only reason there is aid is that every time America has wanted to force us to make a security concession, they would compensate us by giving aid. The aid to Israel began when Carter used it as an incentive to get Begin to pull out of the Sinai desert. Then Clinton ramped it up again at Camp David with Ehud Barak to get him to agree to make more concessions to Arafat. Every time the aid goes up, it's a concession, because Israel is willing to swallow some compromise on our national security and make us more beholden to the United States. It's actually bad for Israel. So we have to start being open about advocating against USA aid to Israel, and that will help us politically on the right in America as well.
And Jews have to be more open about the fact that we want nothing to do with these progressive left Jews, because that's who these young conservative Americans are—and I feel for them—they want to have good Christian lives. They want to live in a traditional country that isn't under attack by wokeness. And the Jews are constantly fighting against them. I think it's bad that they lump us all together and don't realize that orthodox Jews are with them. We should start saying openly, "We want nothing to do with the Jewish establishment. We want nothing to do with those people; they're destructive. They're our enemies." I think we should say it plainly, and I think that these are things that will help us win back those parts of the American right who have slid into anti-Israel and antisemitic ways of thinking.
Wednesday, January 07, 2026
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