Why would a president who has elevated white nationalism, who said there were “very fine people on both sides” in the white supremacist march in Charlottesville, decide that it’s his duty to identify American leaders who he sees as threats to the Jews and to Israel? Why would a man who has given a platform to proud antisemites like Sebastian Gorka and Ben Garrison decide that the safety of the Jewish people rests on his shoulders?

President Trump’s game of feigning concern for Jews in order to undercut women of color in Congress is all too transparent. And this time, his racism has been handed a new amplifier in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Trump and Netanyahu are ratcheting one another’s bigoted behaviors up in a game of anti-democracy chicken, where only these two election-frenzied men can win and many have their free expression and civil rights to lose.

The news that Israel planned to bar Representatives Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib from entering the country due to their support of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement is no surprise. It’s the latest episode in the country’s serial moves to stifle leftwing dissidents, including holding Simone Zimmerman, founder of IfNotNow, at the border; detaining the journalist Peter Beinart in Ben Gurion airport; and denying an entry visa to the BDS advocate Ariel Gold. The government’s ploys to quiet anti-occupation activism started even earlier, notably with the 2016 so-called NGO Law that forced organizations to declare foreign funding they received in an effort to stigmatize pro-peace groups like B’Tselem and Breaking the Silence. All of this from America’s proud “democratic ally” – a country hailed as the “sole democracy in the Middle East” that now thinks it appropriate to harass and intimidate critics of the occupation.

At a certain point in the American-Israeli special relationship, the US might have decried these anti-democratic behaviors. We might have used our military aid as leverage to call for free speech and respect for civil society, as Senator Bernie Sanders has advocated. Instead, President Trump has not only built on America’s recent legacy of writing Israel blank military aid checks but actually used his position to intimidate Israeli leadership into even more unscrupulous behavior. “It would show great weakness if Israel allowed Representative Omar and Representative Tlaib to visit,” Trump tweeted. “They hate Israel & all Jewish people, & there is nothing that can be said or done to change their minds.” Minutes after this tweet, Netanyahu’s administration announced that Omar and Tlaib would be barred from entry, though on Friday morning Tlaib was granted permission to visit her grandmother in the West Bank.

While most of President Trump’s “Maga” agenda is built on false nostalgia for a “great America” that never really existed, his tweets Thursday certainly did evoke a longing for the past – think of that moment when Bill Clinton, Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat met on the White House Lawn in a flash of possibility for cross-cultural dialogue. “Every peace has its enemies, those who still prefer the easy habits of hatred to the hard labors of reconciliation,” President Clinton said then. “But Prime Minister Rabin has reminded us that you do not have to make peace with your friends. And the Koran teaches that if the enemy inclines toward peace, do thou also incline toward peace.”

Trump and Netanyahu use the Jewish community to justify his bigotry

Where a US president was once quoting the Qur’an to broker peace, Trump uses his position to bully our first Muslim women in Congress; where American-Israeli leadership once leaned toward the “hard labors” of negotiations, Twitter-happy Trump of course chooses the “easy habits” of harassment and division.

Trump and Netanyahu use the Jewish community to justify his bigotry – but Jewish civil society groups are not free from blame in this exercise. For decades establishment Jewish organizations, most prominently the pro-Israel American Israel Public Affairs Committee, have advocated blind American support for Israel in a tacit acceptance of the Israeli government’s continued occupation of Palestinian territories. US military aid with few strings attached is the engine of Trump and Netanyahu’s grossly symbiotic relationship, and such organizations have long blithely poured on the diesel.

Tlaib and Omar are no doubt Israel’s fiercest critics in Congress. That both Trump and Netanyahu are so afraid of letting them travel through the country and ground their critiques in first-hand witness accounts of life in the occupied territories is just as troubling as it is unsurprising. As Peter Beinart writes in the Forward, it should be cause for concern when our leaders know that cruelties on the ground are so obvious that critics must be kept from seeing them first-hand. Birthright Israel has used almost $100m of philanthropy annually to test the notion that “the gift of a life-changing trip to Israel” can “transform the Jewish future”. Trump and Netanyahu seem to believe a trip to the country can be dangerous to the future of the Jews – that is if it’s given to critical thinkers visiting occupied territory. Again, for them the “hard labors” of truth and transparency pale next to the “easy habits” of concealment.