As he mourned for the 11 American Jews killed on Saturday by a gunman who believed a racist conspiracy theory promoted by the president of the United States, the writer David Simon read on Twitter that a senior member of Israel’s far-right government was on his way to Pittsburgh for a memorial service. “Go home,” Simon wrote in a caustic message to Naftali Bennett, an ally of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who serves as Israel’s minister for the diaspora. “Netanyahu’s interventions in US politics aided in the election of Donald Trump and his raw and relentless validation of white nationalism and fascism,” Simon wrote. “The American Jewish community is now bleeding at the hands of the Israeli prime minister. And many of us know it.” Simon was not alone in his criticism of Bennett’s visit. “NO THANK YOU,” Rebecca Vilkomerson, the executive director of Jewish Voice for Peace in New York, replied to Bennett’s tweet about his visit. “Your racist worldview has more in common with the perpetrator of this attack,” she told Bennett, who supports Jewish-only settlements in the Israeli occupied West Bank and the expulsion of African asylum seekers from Israel. “Naftali Bennett has eagerly normalized Trump in exchange for the codification of apartheid in Israel,” the political cartoonist Eli Valley wrote. “He shares Trump’s bigotry, he has boasted about murdering Arabs, and he should not be welcomed anywhere in the American Jewish community.” The Pittsburgh chapter of If Not Now, a group of young American Jews opposed to their community’s support for the Netanyahu government’s nationalist policies — including the building of a wall along Israel’s southern border to block African asylum-seekers — protested Bennett’s visit at a vigil on Sunday near the Tree of Life synagogue, where the shooting took place. “The inspiration for this attack,” If Not Now member Ren Finkel said, “is the anti-Semitic rhetoric of Trump and other Republican leaders.” When Trump visited the Pittsburgh synagogue on Tuesday, he was met by thousands of protesters, who could be heard shouting “Words have meaning!” and “Trump, go home!” by reporters with the president.

The crowd at Beechwood and Forbes in Squirrel Hill ahead of a planned protest against today’s visit by President Trump: https://t.co/rtAnIzt0Yd@theinclinepgh pic.twitter.com/4xr1n5NRbl — Colin Deppen (@colin_deppen) October 30, 2018

"Words have meaning!"



Protesters await the arrival of Pres. Trump and the first family near the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in the wake of Saturday's mass shooting. https://t.co/20NWyrahhT pic.twitter.com/VcTDgpX5A8 — ABC News (@ABC) October 30, 2018

Large group gathered for @IfNotNowPGH protest as Trump prepares to arrive in Squirrel Hill.



“He’s fostered an administration of white supremacy and he is not welcome here in our time of mourning,” says one of the organizers, Arielle Cohen. pic.twitter.com/LXPD09KWZI — julia reinstein ? (@juliareinstein) October 30, 2018

Trump is now at the synagogue in #Pittsburgh. Cops keeping thousands of protesters about a block away. pic.twitter.com/f6WDf49maM — Christopher Mathias (@letsgomathias) October 30, 2018

Watching the president arrive at the synagogue to be met by Ron Dermer, a former Republican operative from Miami who is now Israel’s Ambassador to the United States, struck the political commentator Josh Marshall as “offensive and bizarre.”

This is a touchy subject. Many will disagree with me. But I find it offensive and bizarre that this was choreographed so that the Israeli Ambassador is the one who greeted the President first at the Tree of Life synagogue. The Prez is not visiting Israel. pic.twitter.com/VFH9Y45Qq8 — Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) October 30, 2018

“The important context is that the Ambassador is himself a former GOP political operative in the US,” Marshall added. “He represents a government that has allied itself strongly with President Trump, notwithstanding the fact that the American Jewish community is overwhelmingly opposed to the President and the President is himself spending a lot of time whipping up xenophobia and a climate of anti-Semitism which is contributing to these attacks.” Pressed by supporters of Israel on Twitter to explain his denunciation of Netanyhau, David Simon pointed out that the Israeli prime minister’s backing of Trump had come despite the clear anti-Semitic undertones of the American president’s rhetoric against “globalists,” with its “implications of Jewish financial cabals.” As the journalist Gregg Carlstrom noted at the time, the villains in Trump’s final 2016 campaign ad — which used footage of Syrian asylum-seekers marching through Hungary to paint a false picture of the U.S. border with Mexico — were all prominent Jews: Janet Yellen, then the Federal Reserve chairwoman, Lloyd Blankfein, the head of Goldman Sachs, and George Soros, whose image appeared as Trump railed against, “those who control the levers of power in Washington.”

Trump's final pitch to voters is a dramatic reading of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. https://t.co/Nl29D92fIu — Gregg Carlstrom (@glcarlstrom) November 6, 2016

After Trump’s election, Netanyahu also refused to condemn the president’s repeated incitement against Soros, Simon noted, even as the president and his Republican allies fed their followers “a steady stream of conspiratorist horseshit so acutely racist and anti-Semitic that the name of a Holocaust survivor can now be invoked as a fixed dog-whistle for Jewish conspiracies against white nationalist America.” The Pittsburgh gunman cited as justification for his massacre of Jews a baseless conspiracy theory about Soros, which has been promoted by Trump’s favorite cable news network, Fox News, and Rep. Matt Gaetz, a Florida Republican endorsed by Trump — the false claim that, as Simon put it, “a Jewish financier is paying brown-skinned people to journey to our southern border and menace our nation.” “This specific, vicious and batshit-crazy notion found favor throughout the president’s base and has even been repeated by elected officials in his party,” Simon wrote. “It is the precise preamble to a gunman walking into a synagogue and declaring that all Jews must die and killing people where they worshipped.” “Netanyahu, and by extension his government,” Simon argued, “stands among those who are now complicit in serving to bring about this experiment in American fascism.” Daniel Seidemann, an Israeli lawyer who has called Trump’s decision to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem “a disaster,” asked if Netanyahu — whose son Yair thrilled white supremacists by sharing an anti-Semitic meme about Soros — was finally willing “to condemn the systematic, vulgar anti-Semitic assaults on George Soros which you yourself have validated?”

Are you heartbroken and appalled enough to condemn the systematic, vulgar anti-Semitic assaults on George Soros which you yourself have validated?



Are you willing to criticize your own mini-me Yair, who used blatantly anti-Semitic imagery regarding Soros?



No. I didn't think so. https://t.co/I49EBgO9tw — Daniel Seidemann (@DanielSeidemann) October 29, 2018

As Mairav Zonszein explained last year in The New York Times, Soros, as a supporter of Israeli rights groups like B’Tselem and Breaking the Silence, has become a hate figure to ultranationalist Israelis, including Netanyahu, who have recently bonded with racist European nationalists around a shared hatred of Muslims. “In his remarks at the weekly Sunday cabinet meeting in the Knesset, Netanyahu referenced ‘new anti-Semitism’ in Europe and ‘radical Islam’ but never mentioned the actual ideologies behind this attack: white supremacism,” Zonszein reported on Tuesday in The Washington Post. “Also conspicuously absent from Netanyahu’s rhetoric has been any mention of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), the organization that Robert Bowers, the accused Pittsburgh shooter, had attacked on social media for aiding refugees, which many people have been donating to as a show of support. Netanyahu’s Likud party even reportedly distributed talking points to activists describing HIAS as ‘a left-wing Jewish group that promotes immigration to the U.S. and works against Trump.'” Earlier this year, when Netanyahu angrily demanded an investigation of the New Israel Fund, a U.S. group that supports civil society projects in Israel, he said it “receives funding from foreign governments and figures hostile to Israel, such as the funds of George Soros.” The specific cause of Netanyahu’s wrath in that case was the New Israel Fund’s opposition to his effort to deport thousands of African asylum-seekers who had managed to make it past his border wall. By steadfastly refusing to admit that the conspiracy theories about Soros aired by Trump and his allies are anti-Semitic, and seeking to absolve the president of blame for inciting the terrorist attack, Netanyahu and his spokesmen in the United States, the Israeli Ambassador, Ron Dermer, and New York Consul General Dani Dayan, have made it safe for such wild notions to circulate online and across the airwaves. Nowhere has that been more clear than in Hungary, where the ultranationalist government of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has repeatedly blanketed the nation with billboards and public service announcements falsely portraying Soros as a shadowy puppet-master scheming to flood the country with Muslim immigrants.