thanks, that was january, what have you done for me lately?

It may be so that, as Vlad Vexler put it a few weeks ago, the ‘antisemitic dispositions’ of the current White House occupant ‘are contingent, they can actually be turned off or turned on depending on the context.’ Even allowing that, though, there really isn’t anything nebulous about the antisemitism the guy displays. (He is of course notoriously the sort of antisemite who keeps ‘his Jews’ close.)

Supporters of the politics now well established under present leadership in Israel, its period of strongly ‘illiberal’ (as a left-identifying U.S. Democrat might characterize it) rightward slide, can be found insisting that troubling though it is, this expression of venerable (if generally non-dominant) Christian-American character in power is nevertheless entirely consonant with what should be understood today as ‘good for Israel.’

How long is this likely to be widely convincing, this idea that Trump represents vis-à-vis his Democrat predecessors a somehow yet indefinitely greater extension of credit for policies of Israeli government in the Netanyahu mold? Perhaps not as long as we’d have supposed as Trump was re-entering office in January, suggests Yousef Munayyer, talking with with Jeet Heer in a podcast conversation published Sunday: