Just another annoying bit of truth casting doubt about U.S.’s relations with Israel. From Kamal Alam at majallah.com:
Prominent conservative journalists and politicians have broken ranks to call out Israeli crimes against Arab Christians. The effects continue to ripple through Donald Trump’s support base.
US President Donald Trump’s inner circle and his wider MAGA (‘Make America Great Again’) movement can at times appear to be tearing themselves apart over the thorny issue of US support for Israel, which some of his supporters think has committed genocide in Gaza since October 2023.
Trump’s unquestioning support for Israel is increasingly causing him political problems, yet those problems are not coming from the progressive or liberal left, as might be expected, but from the heart of the United States’ deep south, home to millions of Christian conservatives, many of whom listen to journalists like Tucker Carlson, an American conservative political commentator and podcaster who hosted his own talk show on Fox News from 2016 to 2023.
For Carlson and others, Israel’s military actions in the Middle East have been problematic for the effect they have had on the Arab Christians, who are seen as a persecuted minority. Slowly, attention to the plight of Christians in places like Syria, Gaza and the West Bank has grown in America. The effect has been to put Arab Christians back on the US political and media map. This has not sat comfortably with Israel’s supporters.
Link to history
One reason it has hit a chord with Trump’s support base is that American Christians increasingly see the Levant as the heartland of Christianity. This is nothing new. The Levant has held a special place in American Christianity since the 19th-century Ottoman era, when American pilgrims followed the trail from Antioch to Jerusalem via Damascus. At the time, the lands of Palestine, Lebanon and Syria were generally known as Syria.
The languages of Aramaic and Syriac were studied under Syrian monks, and various colleges were set up. Even the famed American University of Beirut was first called the Syrian Protestant College in 1863. Syria was very much associated with the earliest Christians. Jerusalem was even part of southern Syria in textbooks. To some extent, the recent war in Syria has renewed attention on the persecution of Eastern Christianity as a whole, from Iraq to Palestine.
