Jonathan Greenblatt, director of the Anti-Defamation League, recently I tried to explain the current rise of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish sentiment in the United States as the work of “white supremacists and the Jew-killing alt-right people.” As a keen observer of what is going on politically, I have noticed a multitude of “anti-Zionists on the left”. But I haven’t seen all those “white supremacists” that the ADL fears at anti-Israel and, in some cases, anti-Jewish demonstrations. In my region of south-central Pennsylvania, where evangelical Christians abound, I am amazed at the excess of intense pro-Israel sentiment among these pious residents. The same generous sentiment was expressed in an announcement by fundamentalist Christians Franklin Graham i John Hageepledging devotion to the Israeli cause.

Perhaps the ADL and other left-wing Jewish organizations inhabit a different world than mine. But where I live, the Christian right is not an enemy but a friend of the Israelis. However, for the all-important Jewish left, devout Christians in non-urban areas remain the enemy, while Black Lives Matter, NPR and LGBTQ+ and other people of the alphabet are allies against a ubiquitous Christian conservative adversary.

Even if the reality doesn’t fit the liberal Jewish narrative, one predictable response has been to invent a story to suit people’s emotional needs. The Central Committee for German Jews, which shares the political and cultural vision of our ADL, is striving to ban the Alternative für Deutschland, the only non-woke, non-leftist national party in Germany. The direction of the Central Committee is enraged that the AFD calls for restricting the entry of Muslim migrants to Germany. Although migrants have been attacking Jews in the streets of German cities, the director of the Central Committee expresses fervent solidarity with the anti-fascist newcomers. After all, they are the enemy of the native Germans, who, according to the Committee’s understanding of reality, are teeming with anti-Jewish nationalists (evidence of which seems to be lacking).

All this made me think of an old notion of mine, which continues to be confirmed today. Carl Schmitt, the subject of much of my scholarshipHe was certainly right that friend-enemy relations do much to explain what Schmitt called “the political,” that is, the most intense antagonism affecting human associations. Although we can try to restrict or institutionalize this antagonism, it sometimes erupts in brutal forms, as is happening now in the Middle East.

This belligerence sometimes expresses itself in a particularly strange way, for example, when we begin to confuse friends and enemies. This is exactly what I am witnessing now on the pro-Israel Jewish left in the United States (a category from which I am excluding Jewish conservatives and most Orthodox Jews). These people are driven by a deadly confusion about who is with them and who is against them, and this confusion has become especially problematic as they try to make the current situation confirm their stereotypes.

The facts on the ground are exactly the opposite of what liberal Jews want us to believe. Older Americans, who tend to be devout Christians, are Israel’s staunchest allies. Those who these leftists would like to think are their offshoots are mostly on the other side and he generally seems satisfied with Israel’s enemies and not particularly well disposed towards the Jews as a group.

Yes, I know there are explanations for this strange behavior, for example, that Jews instinctively side with the oppressed, and that Jews suffered under Christian tyranny and are therefore on guard to cede any ground to conservative Christians in America

Unfortunately, none of these things, which are often based on faded popular memories, make sense anymore. The left that Jewish liberals identify with are the race fraudsters, the women who defend late-term abortion, the teachers’ unions who favor gender reassignment for young children, and those lunatics who try to abolish the distinctions entirely of gender The Christian persecutors feared and lamented by Jewish liberals have been dead for generations and have nothing to do with contemporary American Christians who stand for biblical Hebrew morality, not Nazis, and who have joined the Israeli cause.

But attachment to the ideal enemy in this case remains a powerful emotion, however much it may clash with certain facts. Daniel McCarthy has stressed in a recent New York Post column the hard choice liberals—especially Jews—may be forced to make between Joe Biden’s bloody southern border and American support for Israel. According to McCarthy, the more Christian and the older the American, the more likely they are to favor Israel and share the philosemitic sentiments of Christian evangelicals. The more the country looks like what the left is trying to make it, the less confident Jewish liberals will feel about life in America and American aid to Israel.

Let’s ask a blunt question Matthew Boose poses at least indirectly in Chronicles: What should matter more to liberal Jews, a de-Christianized, less white, younger America or all the advantages traditional America has offered American and Israeli Jews?