“I decide who is a Palestinian.”
March 24, 2025
Sound familiar? Close. Right?
Actually, Trump said about Senator Schumer on March 18th from the White House, “As far as I’m concerned, he’s become a Palestinian. He used to be Jewish. He’s not Jewish any more. He’s a Palestinian.” The reason why I misquote Trump and, to this extent, fictionalize this statement by him is to point out its similarity to another statement.
Alan Cumming as Sigmund Freud in V13
In the course of my film V13 , which is now in the process of being released, the character "Adolf "(Samuel Levine), who by the end of the film has assumed fully his last name, "Hitler," credits two sources for his own brand of antisemitism: one source is the radical German tribalism preached by a Viennese group centered around the newsletter Ostara and the other source is a much more popular and even fashionable form of antisemitism that passed as everyday currency in gentile Europe at the start of the 20th century. The main proponent of this second popular form, whom Adolf also refers to in the film, is the Viennese mayor Karl Lueger. Lueger’s most infamous statement is doubtlessly “I decide who is a Jew.” The resemblance to the recent statement by Trump is unmistakable.
V13 was filmed in present day New York City, but its narrative remains strictly limited to Vienna in 1913. Nevertheless, the way I shot the film provokes its audience to think about the past which it represents in terms of the present we are living through. It does not tell us what to think about this relationship. It encourages a critical view of history. The screenplay is based on the play Vienne 1913 by the French psychoanalyst and playwright Alain Didier-Weill, who died in 2017. Nevertheless. the drama he created that is at the heart of the film seems incredibly relevant.
I propose that the statement by Trump and the one by Lueger imply that loyalty to a particular politician is the determining factor in whether a person can be identified as belonging to an ethnic group vulnerable to unimaginably extreme violence (the Holocaust was still twenty years in the future but many of the Jewish immigrants in Vienna in 1913 were survivors of Russian pogroms). It should not be lost on us that statelessness both defines the Palestinians of Gaza and, according to Hannah Arendt, was a crucial step—a sine qua non—for transforming Jews who had been German citizens into victims of the Holocaust. Like Hannah Arendt herself experienced, these German Jews first had to be deprived of their German citizenship and be made stateless. In this way, they lost the most important human right, according to Arendt, “the right to have rights.” I would argue that this is the implicit threat contained in Trump’s statement. He can identify Schumer and other Jewish U.S. citizens who do not show loyalty to him personally and his policies with a group that is both stateless and targeted with genocide, specifically the one that Israel, with crucial support provided by the U.S., is inflicting upon the Palestinians of Gaza.
Steve Bannon has stated that the greatest threat to Israel comes not from radical Islamic extremists but from sectors of the American Jewish population. "The number one enemy to the people in Israel are American Jews that do not support Israel and do not support MAGA. MAGA and the evangelical Christians and the traditional Catholics in this country have Israel's back. They have the Jews' back. The biggest single enemy to the Jewish people are not the Islamic supremacists. The biggest enemy you have is inside the wire, progressive Jewish billionaires." The Evangelical Christian Zionists, who Bannon asserts have Israel’s back, believe that God’s plan is for Jews to return to Israel forming a racially defined ethno-nationalist state, mirroring the white supremacist Christian state that they envision for the U.S. under Trump’s leadership. Once back in Israel, at the Second Coming of Christ, Jews will have a choice between converting to Christianity or burning in Hell. The Christian Evangelical support for Israel is very overt in the violence it directs towards Jews and Judaism--it is hidden in plain sight.
The title of a 2023 article by Jewish Currents editor-at large Peter Beinart puts it succinctly "Antisemitic Zionists Aren’t a Contradiction". This article, with its meticulously referenced research for conclusions about the inverse relation in the U.S and Europe between support for Israel and antisemitism, is the one document I would wish you all to read. Beinart carefully documents the evidence that expressions of antisemitism regularly co-exist with expressions of support for Israel among the Christian groups backing Trump. Beinart writes, "Trump’s fondness for Israel and antagonism toward American Jews stem from the same impulse: He admires countries that ensure ethnic, racial, or religious dominance. He likes Israel because its political system upholds Jewish supremacy; he resents American Jews because most of them oppose the white Christian supremacy he’s trying to fortify here."
If we want to speculate realistically about what Trump envisions for those Jews whom he alone in his own sick mind can decide are Palestinians—along with others of us whom he defines as enemies of the fascist white supremacist state he is trying to install in the U.S.—you really have to turn to the movies, more specifically, to The Birth of a Nation by D.W. Griffith. This film is about the so-called "birth" of the Ku Klux Klan. The Ku Klux Klan, colloquially known as "the Klan", is the infamous white supremacist group whose popularity was declining until around the time following the release of Griffith’s film. In 1927 Trump’s father was arrested at a Ku Klux Klan rally in Jamaica Queens, according to a NY Times article published the next day. The film is renowned for the rhetorical cinematic power Griffith brings to bare on the goal of promoting white supremacy and for its hideously racist and vile portrayal of Black people. However, despite the racial inferiority it imputes to Blacks, the film also spends time showing that not all Blacks are bad. No, there are good Blacks who know their place, and then there are those who, it purports to demonstrate, deserve to be terrorized by the Klan. This division between those of us who know our place and those who do not is the future Trump has already started to realize through arguing that the religious, cultural and ethnic identity of a person can be decided by Trump. Thanks to technology the fantasy is that those of us guilty of betraying Trump’s racist vision will be identified and made bereft of any rights—as the Trump administration is trying to achieve in the case of Mahmoud Khalid.
Elon Musk recently mimicked the thinking of the other main source to Hitler’s alchemical creation of the Nazi Weltanschauung that we see portrayed in V13. According to this German nativist set of beliefs Christianity is only a Trojan Horse of the Jews to weaken the German people by distancing them from their ancient tribal roots. Speaking to the extreme right-wing German party Alternative for Germany (AfD), Musk urged members of the audience to not feel guilty but instead recognize their ancient roots, "The German people are really an ancient nation which goes back thousand of years," he continued, "I even read Julius Caesar was very impressed (by) the German tribes.” Commenting on Musk's address to the AfD following Vice President Vance's support for the same party when he visited Germany a short time before, Jason Stanley, Yale professor of philosophy and author of Erasing History, said, "when Elon Musk spoke to the AfD, he talked about Julius Caesar praising the German tribes for their warriors 2000 years ago. And he said, 'You should be proud of that past.' In other words, German identity is blood and soil, as the Nazis said. Musk is not praising Germans who are Jewish. He’s not praising my German family, my German Jewish family. He’s praising the 'blood and soil' Germans. That’s the side that—that’s the conception of German identity that we intervened to support. The vice president of the United States went there and didn’t meet with the German chancellor. He met with the head of a party that’s considered too extreme, too hateful for other far-right and anti-immigrant parties in Europe to ally with. That’s how bad the situation is. They normalized that party."
We need to get the American Congress to start impeaching Trump now. Ralph Nader argues this is our only way out. I am for dismantling, in anyway we can, the fascism Trump and his cohorts are implementing. We may not have much time. Going back to the Democrats may seem like an unappetizing repetition for many of us but in every repetition there is an opportunity for change and we should fight for it—starting now.
