Republican frontrunner Donald Trump has accepted an invitation to speak at the annual Policy Conference hosted by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee next weekend – a move that has stirred up critics of both Trump and AIPAC.
The AIPAC conference, which offered speaking slots to all of the viable presidential candidates, will be held from March 20 to 22, overlapping with a Republican debate scheduled for March 21. The time slot in which Trump will speak has not been released yet, but it is not out of the realm of possibility that Trump will skip the next debate – he has said publicly that he does not believe the GOP needs any more of them.
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Appearing at AIPAC will require Trump to clarify his muddy position on how he would deal with the generations-long struggle to find peace between Israelis and Palestinians who are seeking a homeland of their own in the Middle East.
Earlier in the campaign, Trump said that he would prefer to approach negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian authority as a disinterested third party.
“Let me be kind of a neutral guy,” he said during a town hall event sponsored by MSNBC last month. “You understand a lot of people have gone down in flames trying to make that deal. So I don’t want to say whose fault it is — I don’t think that helps.”
Trump’s Republican opponents for the presidential nomination immediately pounced on his comments, suggesting that he had just said that he would not be fully supportive of Israel. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio went as far as to suggest that it is impossible to negotiate with the Palestinian authority at all, because they cannot be trusted.
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In a subsequent presidential debate, Trump claimed "First of all, there is nobody on this stage who is more pro-Israel than I am,” before mentioning, for the umpteenth time, that he was once the Grand Marshal of New York’s “Israeli Day Parade.”
However, not all American Jews are happy with the campaign Trump is waging – and for many it’s not questions about the strength of his support for Israel that worry them. It’s his bigotry. Leaders of the Reform Judaism movement in the U.S. put out a statement saying that, while they understand that AIPAC seeks to hear from all the main presidential contenders, “we cannot ignore the many issues on which Mr. Trump has spoken clearly. When he speaks hatefully of Mexicans or Muslims, for example, we recall a time when anti-Semitism put Jews at deathly danger, even in the United States.”
Without offering specifics, they said “the Reform Movement and our leaders will engage with Mr. Trump at the AIPAC Policy Conference in a way that affirms our nation's democracy and our most cherished Jewish values. We will find an appropriate and powerful way to make our voices heard.”
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Rob Eshman, editor-in-chief of the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles and publisher of TRIBE Media, took AIPAC to task on his blog, particularly noting Trump’s rhetorical attacks on Muslims and Hispanics.
“Bigotry is bigotry. Racism is racism,” he wrote. “A demagogue willing to defame or threaten an entire religion or nationality just to rile up voters could easily redirect his venom to some other group when the time is ripe. That’s the line Trump crossed. He is creating an atmosphere and a precedent for winning votes by fanning hate and discord. The near-riots last weekend at Trump rallies in Chicago and St. Louis show what will happen in a Trump America — and what might happen at the AIPAC conference.
“By giving Trump a platform without taking a stand on outright hate speech, AIPAC is helping to fuel this discord. That’s the core moral mistake AIPAC is making.”
