Musk-Soros Feud Spills Over Into Israeli Politics

If Twitter is too contentious for you, wait until you hear about the Israeli foreign ministry. Members of Jerusalem’s striped pants set were at each other’s throats Wednesday due to a feud between the social network’s owner, Elon Musk, and philanthropist George Soros. The foreign ministry’s official Hebrew-language account decried Mr. Musk’s anti-Soros tweets, saying they “reeked of antisemitism” and led to a “flood of antisemitic conspiracy theories on Twitter.” The account quoted the director of the ministry’s digital diplomacy bureau, David Saranga, as saying that Twitter “does nothing to address the problem” of antisemitism. Soon after, a right wing Israeli commentator, Yinon Magal, reported that the foreign minister, Eli Cohen, was unhappy about his digital tsar’s comment. “Soros is not the kind of person who needs to be defended by the state of Israel,” Mr. Cohen reportedly said. Mr. Magal added that in reaction to Mr. Saranga’s tweet, the minister decreed that all postings on the official foreign ministry’s account that are not purely informative, meaning those of a political or diplomatic nature, must now personally be approved by Mr. Cohen. Before it caused tumult in the foreign ministry, the Musk-Soros dispute raged on Twitter. Did Mr. Musk legitimately criticize the mega-donor to left wing political causes? Did he turn on the spigots of the world’s oldest hatred? The debate is pitting right against left and Jew against Jew. The feud may have started on Monday, when Mr. Soros’s investment arm, Soros Fund Management, sold its holdings in Mr. Musk’s Tesla, parting with 120,000 shares. Soon after, the owner of Twitter compared Mr. Soros to the cartoon villain Magneto. Like the Marvel comics character, the Hungarian-born Mr. Soros is “also a Holocaust survivor,” a journalist, Brian Krassenstein, noted. He added that Mr. Soros is “attacked nonstop for his good intentions, which some Americans think are bad merely because they disagree with his political affiliations.”Mr. Musk shot back: “You assume they are good intentions. They are not. He wants to erode the very fabric of civilization. Soros hates humanity.” He criticized the donor’s involvement in district attorney elections in America, “where a relatively small amount of money has outsized influence,” with the intention of minimizing “prosecuting even violent criminals.”Mr. Soros has used the pages of the Wall Street Journal to defend his financial contributions toward the election of prosecutors in large cities. His Open Society supports a vast array of progressive causes in America and around the world. Critics on the right are often tagged as antisemitic. Mr. Soros is “held up by the far-right, using antisemitic tropes, as the source of the world’s problems,” the CEO of the Anti Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, a former official in President Obama’s administration, tweeted. Mr. Musk “will embolden extremists who already contrive anti-Jewish conspiracies and have tried to attack Soros and Jewish communities as a result.”Conservative American Jews have a different view. “I agree with Elon Musk that anti Israel George Soros is harming humanity & a danger to America and the world,” the president of Zionists of America, Morton Klein, writes. “I disagree with ADL’s extremist Greenblatt who absurdly calls attacks on Soros antisemitic. Soros is attacked for his policies, not his religion.”It could well be that both are correct. One likely reason that the Jerusalem official, Mr. Saranga, was quick to criticize Mr. Musk was his former posting as Israel’s ambassador to Romania. The Open Society is active in central Europe and the former Soviet republics, where criticism of Mr. Soros too often involves ugly antisemitic tropes. Yet, Mr. Klein also has a point in noting that Mr. Soros is “anti Israel.” One accusation often hurled by antisemites was never directed at the philanthropist: No one ever contended that his loyalty is divided between America and Israel — or that he promotes any other specifically Jewish cause, for that matter. Such accusations are often directed at Jewish donors to political causes, such as a late casino magnate, Sheldon Adelson. The Open Society, in contrast, contributes to several Palestinian organizations, including some that call to drag Israel officials into international courts for war crime trials. In Washington, Mr. Soros has helped establish J-Street, formed as a counterweight to a long-established pro-Israel action committee, AIPAC. It is often said that Jews know antisemitism when they see it. When the Palestinian Authority’s president compared Israel to Goebbels this week, President Biden’s ambassador to combat antisemitism, Deborah Lipstadt, tweeted that such “rhetoric about the world’s only Jewish state is entirely unacceptable.” Meanwhile, also this week, J-Street lobbied the Biden administration against adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism. That definition “focuses disproportionately on criticism of Israel,” the Soros-backed organization’s vice president, Dylan Williams, said.

Musk-Soros Feud Spills Over Into Israeli Politics

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