At a press conference today responding to a question about the possibility of Democratic support for the Republican-written spending bill, Trump said of Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer [see video below]:
Schumer is a Palestinian as far as I am concerned. He has become a Palestinian. He used to be Jewish. He is not Jewish anymore. He is a Palestinian.
This isn’t the first time the President has labeled Schumer a Palestinian since October 7, usually to criticize his ostensibly insufficient commitment to Israel.
I’ve always been fascinated by Trump’s attempts to disparage Chuck Schumer by calling him a Palestinian. The term of course, shouldn’t be a slur—Palestinians are a people like any other. In the mouth of Trump and many others, however, ‘Palestinian’ signifies the ‘Muslim terrorist,’ the ‘radical,’ the ‘enemy’ of the Judeo-Christian West. Trump’s figure of speech mobilizes intense anti-Palestinian bigotry (and by extension, anti-Muslim and anti-Arab bigotry) against his Jewish opponent. ‘Jews’ and ‘Palestinians’ are often constructed as opposites in mainstream discourse; here, with a Jew transforming into a Palestinian, the binary is blurred. So what’s behind this inversion?
Though Trump surely isn’t aware of it, there’s precedent for his turn of phrase. Eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant, a key figure of the European Enlightenment, referred to European Jews as “Palestinians in our midst,” capturing the Orientalism at the heart of Enlightenment reason. By this, Kant meant that Jews in Europe were foreigners and outsiders, tainted with the exotic Otherness of the Orient.
This was before modern national identities like ‘Palestinian’ and ‘Israeli’ came into contemporary usage. Kant simply meant to indicate that Jews were ‘not from here,’ but instead were exotic Easterners, temporarily in Europe. At the time, Enlightenment Europe was fiercely debating the limits of Jewish inclusion in their universalist project. Trump’s comment suggests, in a sense, that this Jewish question isn’t fully resolved.
In a way, Trump’s comment reveals a deep philosemitism—the worst insult he can hurl at Schumer is to erase his Jewishness. For past authoritarians, of course, calling him a Jew would suffice. In this logic the figure of the Jew is familiar, safe; the figure of the Palestinian is foreign, a threat. At the same time, Trump’s comment is antisemitic—Trump is clearly labeling Schumer a ‘bad Jew’ who is no longer included in the pact of the ‘Judeo-Christian West.’ Schumer, who’s broken the rules of the pact by being insufficiently pro-Israel, is equated with the Other.
The figure of the Jewish dissident is marked as ‘disloyal’ as Trump has repeatedly put it—disloyal both to Israel, and by extension to MAGA as well. Or as Steve Bannon recently told an Israeli journalist, Israel-critical Jews are, “[the] number one enemy…inside the wire” for Israel and the Jewish people, and the same “progressive Jewish billionaires that are funding [progressive causes]” are the opponents of evangelical and Catholic conservatives. At its limit this logic suggests that these ‘bad Jews’ are not only provisionally Jewish, but also provisionally American as well.
Of course, it’s far more common to deploy the oppositional categories of ‘Jew’ and ‘Palestinian’ to attack the latter in the name of protecting the former. Schumer himself is deeply complicit in this project. But Trump’s reference to Schumer as a Palestinian shows the ways in which antisemitism and anti-Palestinian bigotry (and again, anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bigotry) can be deeply intertwined.
When the late Palestinian intellectual Edward Said famously called himself a “Jewish-Palestinian” he offered a way to subvert this toxic binary, to choose solidarity over and against the divide-and-conquer strategy of a Christian nationalist system that was never set up for either community to truly thrive. Schumer, to be sure, won’t lead the way there—but we can.
