The White House and Jewish Democratic groups on Monday condemned former President Donald Trump’s claim that Jewish Democrats “hate” Israel.
“I actually think they hate Israel,” Trump told Sebastian Gorka, a former White House aide and conservative radio host. “And the Democrat party hates Israel.”
“Any Jewish person that votes for Democrats hates their religion,” he later added. “They hate everything about Israel, and they should be ashamed of themselves because Israel will be destroyed.”
Trump’s comments came after Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., rebuked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and called on Israel to make “significant course corrections” in their assault on Gaza and hold new elections.
“The Netanyahu coalition no longer fits the needs of Israel after Oct. 7. The world has changed — radically — since then, and the Israeli people are being stifled right now by a governing vision that is stuck in the past,” Schumer said last week.
Schumer responded to Trump’s remarks on social media, warning that making Israel a “partisan issue only hurts Israel and the US-Israeli relationship.”
“Trump is making highly partisan and hateful rants,” he tweeted. “I am working in a bipartisan way to ensure the US-Israeli relationship sustains for generations to come, buoyed by peace in the Middle East.”
To make Israel a partisan issue only hurts Israel and the US-Israeli relationship.
— Chuck Schumer (@SenSchumer) March 18, 2024
Trump is making highly partisan and hateful rants.
I am working in a bipartisan way to ensure the US-Israeli relationship sustains for generations to come, buoyed by peace in the Middle East. https://t.co/uCMvZWZ8rF
James Singer, a spokesman for the Biden campaign, said the “only person who should be ashamed here is Donald Trump.”
“Donald Trump openly demeans Jewish Americans and reportedly thinks Adolf Hitler ‘did some good things,’” he said in a statement. “He has said the only people he wants counting his money are ‘short guys wearing yarmulkes,’ and praised neo-Nazis who chanted ‘Jews will not replace us’ as ‘very fine people.’”
The White House also issued a statement saying that President Joe Biden “has put his foot down when it comes to vile and unhinged Antisemitic rhetoric.”
“As Antisemitic crimes and acts of hate have increased across the world – among them the deadliest attack committed against the Jewish people since the Holocaust – leaders have an obligation to call hate what it is and bring Americans together against it,” White House spokesman Andrew Bates said in a statement. “There is no justification for spreading toxic, false stereotypes that threaten fellow citizens. None. Like President Biden said, he was moved to run for President when he saw Neo Nazis chanting ‘the same Antisemitic bile that was heard in Germany in the 1930s’ in Charlottesville.”
Rep. Dean Phillips, D-Minn., called Trump’s comments “revolting, repugnant, and reprehensible,” according to Axios.
Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., called Trump’s remarks an "outrageous slander against the vast majority of American Jews."
"Luckily I don't know any Jews who look to Donald Trump for advice on how to be Jewish," he said. "After all, this is the guy who saw 'very fine people on both sides' of an antisemitic riot and entertained the neo-Nazi Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes over at his house at Mar-a-Lago for dinner."
Trump has “no religion,” Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., told the outlet. "[He] never goes to church, certainly doesn't know anything about Matthew and the New Testament and less about Jews and their commitment to social justice and Israel."
Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, tweeted that accusing Jews of hating their religion because they might vote for a particular party is “defamatory” and “patently false.”
Halie Soifer, the head of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, noted that surveys have found that 79% of American Jewish voters have an unfavorable opinion of Trump.
“Another day, another depraved antisemitic screed from Donald Trump, who has repeatedly vilified the overwhelmingly majority of American Jews,” she wrote. “He first called us ‘uninformed or disloyal’ in 2019 and essentially repeated it today. The feeling is mutual.”
