Gaza Herald- At a campaign rally in Des Moines, Iowa, Donald Trump revealed the contradictions at the heart of his political movement. While celebrating his new tax-and-spend legislation, he referred to bankers as “Shylocks,” a term rooted in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and widely recognized as an antisemitic stereotype. The remark drew criticism from the Anti-Defamation League, yet Trump brushed it aside, claiming ignorance of the slur’s origins.
This was not an isolated gaffe. Antisemitism has surfaced repeatedly within the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement. NPR investigations found administration officials with ties to neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers, while Trump’s one-time ally, Elon Musk, has faced backlash for antisemitic outbursts from his AI platform. Yet, despite this trend, Trump has positioned himself as staunchly pro-Israel.
In January 2025, he signed an executive order titled Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism, which critics argue is being used as a pretext to target and deport pro-Palestinian student activists. One month earlier, he had bombed Iran and walked away from nuclear negotiations, following the Israeli military’s lead. Even Musk, amid his controversies, felt compelled to demonstrate his loyalty to Israel during a high-profile visit to the sites of the October 7 attacks.
The contradiction is striking: a movement flirting with antisemitic tropes while fiercely defending Israel. To understand this paradox, we need to look beyond lobbying and theology and into the deeper historical role Israel plays in America’s culture wars.
The MAGA-Israel Alliance: Beyond Lobbying and Religion
Analysts typically explain the MAGA-Israel alliance through two lenses: the influence of pro-Israel lobbying networks and the role of Christian Zionists who see Israel as central to Biblical prophecy. Figures like Mike Huckabee, Trump’s ambassador to Israel, have openly declared that their unwavering support for Israel is tied to their belief in the coming rapture.
But theology and political donations only tell part of the story. The intensity of MAGA’s attachment to Israel is better understood as a cultural and historical project. It is about rehabilitating colonialism, justifying its crimes, and erasing the global decolonization movement that reshaped the post-World War II world order.
To MAGA ideologues, Israel represents more than a strategic ally. It is the last living example of European settler colonialism, a state established through the displacement of indigenous people, defended through military power, and unapologetic in its refusal to decolonize. In this sense, defending Israel is not just foreign policy; it is part of a broader campaign to restore the prestige of empire, deny the crimes of colonialism, and legitimize white, Western supremacy as a civilizing force.
Colonial Nostalgia and the Whitewashing of History
The nostalgia that drives MAGA is not simply for the 1950s “American century,” but for the mid-19th century era when Anglo-American expansion was at its peak. Trump himself signaled this when he hung a portrait of President James K. Polk, who oversaw the Mexican-American War and vast land grabs in the Oval Office. To his movement, Polk’s expansionist policies symbolize strength, order, and destiny.
This longing for empire has fueled efforts to roll back the lessons of decolonization. After World War II, the United Nations enshrined the principle of sovereign equality, outlawing territorial conquest and dismantling empires from Africa to Asia. Yet MAGA rejects this legacy. Instead, it leans on selective memory, glorifying World War II as “the good war” while ignoring the colonial atrocities that killed millions from King Leopold’s Congo to Britain’s Bengal famine to the genocide against Indigenous peoples in the Americas.
Israel plays a central role in this narrative. The creation of a Jewish state after the Holocaust allowed the West to portray itself as moral and redemptive, even though many of those same powers had facilitated or ignored the genocide. This framing cast Israel as a form of symbolic restitution, a way to cleanse the West’s conscience without confronting the far greater crimes of colonialism. By elevating the Holocaust as the singular atrocity of modern history, Western powers deflected attention from their brutal legacies.
Palestine, however, disrupts this narrative. Unlike Algeria, Kenya, Zimbabwe, or South Africa, it remains a colony that never underwent decolonization. Acknowledging Israel as a settler-colonial state would expose the hypocrisy of Western moral claims and force a reckoning with colonialism’s ongoing legacy. That is precisely why MAGA defends Israel so fiercely: its survival keeps alive the myth that colonialism was just, necessary, and even noble.
Israel as the Symbol of a New Imperial Age
The MAGA movement celebrates Israel not despite its colonial nature, but because of it. In Netanyahu’s hardline Zionism, MAGA sees a model of unapologetic settler power—a rejection of multiculturalism, human rights, and the liberal international order born after 1945. Israel is the proof that colonialism can endure if enforced with enough force and conviction.
This explains why MAGA’s defense of Israel aligns with its domestic agenda of banning critical race theory, silencing discussions of systemic racism, and dismantling what Trump derides as the “woke agenda.” It is part of a broader effort to erase the history of oppression and restore a world where white, Western powers dominate without apology.
And MAGA is not alone. Across the globe, similar colonial nostalgias are rising: Putin’s war in Ukraine, Bolsonaro’s praise for cavalry massacres of Indigenous Brazilians, and the embrace of “multipolarity” by figures like Marco Rubio and Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin. All reflect a yearning for a return to imperial competition, territorial conquest, and racial hierarchy.
In this context, Palestine becomes more than a land under occupation. It is the last unresolved case of anti-colonial struggle, a mirror reflecting the truth of Western imperialism. For MAGA and its allies, this mirror must be shattered by silencing Palestinians, criminalizing solidarity, and rewriting history.
Palestine as the Memory of Colonial Crimes
The alliance between MAGA and Israel is ultimately about historical amnesia. It allows the Holocaust to be remembered in isolation while erasing the millions killed in colonial campaigns across Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Israel’s continued existence as a settler-colonial project enables the West to deny its broader culpability in global atrocities and to justify its nostalgia for empire.
Palestine, however, refuses to disappear. It remains a living reminder of colonialism’s crimes, of people dispossessed but still resisting. That is why pro-Palestinian voices are targeted not because they are wrong, but because they remember. And memory, in the face of erasure, is revolutionary.
The struggle for Palestine is therefore larger than the question of borders or sovereignty. It is about whether the world accepts colonialism as legitimate once more, or whether it insists on the unfinished work of decolonization. Supporting Palestinians is not simply solidarity with one people; it is solidarity with every community that has suffered under empire, and with every truth the powerful would rather forget.
