Writing in the American Conservative (June 17, 2025), Hunter DeRensis demonstrates with pristine lucidity the hatred of Israel that underlies much isolationist conservative writing today. Refreshingly absent from Mr. DeRensis’s piece, “Zionism Is Not an American Principle”, is any “nice cop/tough cop” affectation wherein the Jewish nation is admonished to lay down its arms for its own good. He offers no vision of peace in the region if only Israel would withdraw to some former boundary or curb the belligerent propensities of its prime minister.
No, DeRensis tells us that Zionism is not an American principle. Of course, by this he means that Zionism, the movement to create and defend a Jewish homeland, is antithetical to American principles. It is to be abhorred by all real Americans. The Holocaust, as far as DeRensis seems to be concerned, represented no reason for the formation of Israel and the October 7, 2023 attack no justification for her military response. Nazis and Hamas killers are not the villains he is here to denounce.
Now someone might answer that an American sympathy for the founding of Israel is natural for certain reasons. The association of the first migration from Europe to America with the Exodus and journey to the Promised Land is a striking aspect of John Winthrop’s City on a Hill Sermon (1630), from which we quoted on these pages. Peter Beinart vs. Israel and the Jews.
George Washington, in his Letter to the Hebrew Congregation (1790), expressed hope that “the Children of the stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants.” Would that good will not likely extend to supporting a homeland in the place to which the prophet Moses led the Israelites, according to Scripture? Particularly after the culminating disaster of the diaspora in the middle of the Twentieth Century, was American support for the founding of this new nation surprising?
President Harry Truman, one of DeRensis’s targets, found American sympathy for the new Jewish homeland unsurprising. He had a series of ignoble impulses in those years, according to DeRensis: recognizing Israel, over the vehement objection of Secretaries Marshall and Forrestal, and ordering that atomic bombs be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Jews are implicated in this latter atrocity as well (“Today, you’ll find many Zionists defending Truman’s decision to drop nuclear weapons against the civilian cities [as opposed to ‘military cities?’] of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”). Real Americans apparently recognize Truman for the war criminal that he was. But we cannot dwell on this—the Noam Chomsky-Jeremiah Wright-American Conservative view—and will move on.
The Israeli attacks on Iran’s nuclear and military sites were “unprovoked,” says DeRensis. Obviously, the attacks upon Israel by Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis had nothing to do with Iran. It is not as though those groups were Iran’s proxies. The same is true of Hezbollah’s 1994 destruction of a Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires.
And neither Iran’s own drone attacks on Israel nor the mobs shouting “Death to Israel” in Tehran’s streets were provocations. DeRensis himself would take them in good humor, were they directed at him. What matter if the Iranians attained nuclear weapons with the capacity to reach Tel Aviv?
Like so many purveyors of this particular hatred, DeRensis tells us both that no one likes the Israelis these days (“public opinion is changing dramatically [against Israel] among young people”) and that it takes great courage (“patriotic” courage) to attack them. He must be jubilant that so much of the Western world, from Europe to Britain and Ireland, to Australia and Canada, to American universities is imbued with the same strain of heroism. Jews are today reviled everywhere and yet it takes bravery to pile on!
Mr. DeRensis, of course, does not refer to the “Jews,” though he names a few whose presence in government he finds threatening. In any case, it is apparent that persons of that ilk are responsible for all his woes. They, represented by the Israeli prime minister, contrive at the “entrapment” of our leaders. They, as Israelis, threaten “the safety of U.S. soldiers caught in the middle” of their wars of aggression.
The Israelis “maneuvered” the United States into “foreign policy disasters like the Iraq War,” forcing it to “reap[] the blowback of Islamic terrorism.” Which blowback? Were the Israelis responsible for 9/11 and the assassination of Robert Kennedy? Israel’s supporters “poisoned [America’s] domestic politics with loyalty oaths and the suppression of speech” and caused the United States to lose “inestimable trust and respectability with the rest of the world [emphasis added].” Is the reader aware of anyone in this country being forced to sign or recite an oath of loyalty to Israel?
Continuing his indictment, DeRensis warns, “And this latest gamble by Tel Aviv to force the United States into another major war must be the final straw [emphasis added].” The “final straw before what?” we venture to inquire. Since DeRensis published this, the United States, of course, has participated significantly in the destruction of Iranian nuclear capacity without entering another major war.
Now the entire history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, as DeRensis tells it, is the history of Jewish persecution of the Palestinians—genocidal persecution to be compared to Hitler’s. The only mention of the Holocaust in this diatribe occurs in that context. The connection between German Naziism and the Arab antisemitic animus illustrated by the Grand Mufti’s actual association with Hitler and the veneration of the Mufti by the present leader of the Palestinian Authority, Mr. Abbas, DeRensis omits to mention.
Menachem Begin, a fascist, DeRensis assures us, returned the Sinai to Egypt in the Camp David Accords. Again at Camp David, in 2000, Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered to give Arafat a Palestinian state. The result was the Second Intifada. The Israelis withdrew from Gaza lock, stock, and barrel in 2005. The eventual result was October 7, 2023.
Israel is a “rogue nuclear state,” DeRensis proclaims. And yet it has had nuclear weapons since the 1960s and never used or threatened to use them. Is Israel really another North Korea? DeRensis, no doubt, would be eminently confident that the Iranian Mullahs with nuclear weapons would show prudent restraint. Indeed, their having both such weapons and intercontinental ballistic missile capacity apparently would not bother him in the least.
And finally, there is the ritual flair of indignation that anyone would call all this antisemitic. DeRensis invokes the names of Patrick Buchanen and Joseph Sobran in this phase of his argument. Those two eminent gentlemen were victimized by the “phony club of antisemitism,” and DeRensis, no doubt, anticipates experiencing a similar persecution. In the middle of his protest, he favors us with a long quotation in which Mr. Buchanen accuses “polemicists and public officials” of “colluding with Israel” and of seeking “to ensnare our country in a series of wars that are not in America’s interests.”
Is the intimation that the one very small Jewish nation is America’s enemy and that any American caring for it shows disloyalty not intolerance? And if not, what is?
