Can American Jews simultaneously embrace the country that has proved so good to them, maintain a strong sense of Jewishness, and avoid the destructive tendencies of identity politics? Meir Soloveichik believes they can by emulating Jonas Phillips, who fought in the American Revolution and in 1787 petitioned the Constitutional Convention over a discriminatory law then in place in Pennsylvania, where he resided:

In this letter, Phillips referenced not only the claims of religious doctrine, but of Jewish peoplehood. He described himself “as being one of the people called Jews of the City of Philadelphia, a people scattered and dispersed among all nations.” . . .  Atop the letter intended for the men who would create the Constitution, Phillips described the day on which he composed his letter: “Philadelphia 24th Ellul 5547 or Sepr 7th 1787.””

The “24th Ellul,” of course, is the day of the Hebrew month, and the appended year is that in the traditional Jewish count. . . .  By juxtaposing the Jewish date with the Gregorian one, Phillips emphasized Jews who “fought and bled for liberty which they cannot enjoy,” and he placed America, its ideals, and its Declaration of Independence into the sequence of Jewish time. As both a Jew and an American, he demanded that his country make good on its promise of liberty and equality.

Phillips’s sense of Jewish belonging and American patriotism makes sense if America is understood as a covenantal nation, an idea, Soloveichik writes, best articulated by Abraham Lincoln and Rabbi Jonathan Sacks:

For Lincoln, politics was the mechanism for bringing disparate groups of people together. For social-contract absolutists, politics is a matter of circumstance. If the only thing we have in common is government, then what we share is merely instrumental rather than of intrinsic value.

The end result of a non-covenantal politics is a problematic one. For if we have no common bonds, and government exists only to protect our plethora of self-interests, then each group is incentivized to advance self-absorbed claims to government attention.

It is therefore not hard to see how such a politics leads rather inevitably to anti-Semitism. If Western multiculturalism and its political progeny of identity politics are defined primarily by grievance, they will eventually find their way to the West’s historical scapegoats of grievance: the Jews.

Addressing a recent meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Central Committee, Mahmoud Abbas criticized Hamas more sharply than he has previously (at least in public), calling them “sons of dogs.” The eighty-nine-year-old Palestinian Authority president urged the terrorist group to “stop the war of extermination in Gaza” and “hand over the American hostages.” The editors of the New York Sun comment:

Mr. Abbas has long been at odds with Hamas, which violently ousted his Fatah party from Gaza in 2007. The tone of today’s outburst, though, is new. Comparing rivals to canines, which Arabs consider dirty, is startling. Its motivation, though, was unrelated to the plight of the 59 remaining hostages, including 23 living ones. Instead, it was an attempt to use an opportune moment for reviving Abbas’s receding clout.

[W]hile Hamas’s popularity among Palestinians soared after its orgy of killing on October 7, 2023, it is now sinking. The terrorists are hoarding Gaza aid caches that Israel declines to replenish. As the war drags on, anti-Hamas protests rage across the Strip. Polls show that Hamas’s previously elevated support among West Bank Arabs is also down. Striking the iron while it’s hot, Abbas apparently longs to retake center stage. Can he?

Diminishing support for Hamas is yet to match the contempt Arabs feel toward Abbas himself. Hamas considers him irrelevant for what it calls “the resistance.”

[Meanwhile], Abbas is yet to condemn Hamas’s October 7 massacre. His recent announcement of ending alms for terror is a ruse.

Abbas, it’s worth noting, hasn’t saved all his epithets for Hamas. He also twice said of the Americans, “may their fathers be cursed.” Of course, after a long career of anti-Semitic incitement, Abbas can’t be expected to have a moral awakening. Nor is there much incentive for him to fake one. But, like the protests in Gaza, Abbas’s recent diatribe is a sign that Hamas is perceived as weak and that its stock is sinking.