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6 Jewish things to know about Vivek Ramaswamy, the GOP candidate who has suggested ending aid to Israel
(JTA) – Ahead of the first Republican presidential debate, the candidate with the least political experience is making some of the biggest headlines — in part due to his views on Israel.
Vivek Ramaswamy, a 38-year-old biotech entrepreneur who has never held elected office, is seeing growing support for his long-shot candidacy. A recent poll placed him neck-and-neck in second place with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in the crowded GOP field, and the RealClearPolitics polling average places him in third.
Both candidates still lag far behind former President Donald Trump, the frontrunner. But Ramaswamy’s rising numbers mean he will share the center of Wednesday night’s debate stage on Fox News, and a recent memo from a pro-DeSantis Super PAC called on the governor to “take a sledgehammer” to Ramaswamy at the debate. DeSantis and the other hopefuls are expected to attack Ramaswamy’s many unconventional views, including a call to eventually end United States aid to Israel.
The Ohio-born businessman, whose net worth is estimated at more than $600 million, has based his campaign largely around tackling “wokeness,” a term that has become shorthand for conservative criticism of progressive values. But he’s also made headlines for more outré proposals, such as a pledge to eliminate the FBI and Department of Education, a call to require civics tests for young voters and a desire to learn “the truth about 9/11.”
Among his policies is a call to phase out U.S. aid to Israel by 2028, which separates him from the largely pro-Israel Republican establishment. Ramaswamy has also drawn attention for criticizing a bill signed by DeSantis that penalizes antisemitic harassment and has called to repeal a law banning religious discrimination in employment.
Before he became a presidential candidate, he was involved in a Jewish society at Yale University and benefited from a fellowship named after the brother of George Soros, the progressive Jewish megadonor.
Here’s what to know about Vivek Ramaswamy and the Jews.
He has floated ending U.S. aid to Israel.
In June, while campaigning in New Hampshire, Ramaswamy suggested that he would be open to ending aid to Israel as “part of a broader disengagement with the Middle East.” He later walked back those comments. But last week, he told actor and podcaster Russell Brand that he does, in fact, want to end U.S. aid to Israel in 2028, the year when the current U.S. commitment to provide $3.8 billion annually to Israel expires.
Ramaswamy said that decision would come as Israel receives recognition from more countries in the Middle East. Israel has signed normalization deals with several states in the region in recent years, a framework called the Abraham Accords, and is now pursuing a treaty with Saudi Arabia. Ramaswamy told the Jewish News Syndicate that he’d also like to spearhead Israeli accords with Indonesia and Oman.
“Come 2028, that additional aid won’t be necessary in order to still have the kind of stability that we’d actually have in the Middle East by having Israel more integrated in with its partners,” he said on a show Brand hosts on the video platform Rumble.
In advocating an end to the aid package, Ramaswamy has perhaps unintentionally aligned himself with the progressive left, whose members have increasingly supported conditioning or halting aid to Israel due to its treatment of Palestinians. Recently, New York Times columnist Nick Kristof argued that the aid dollars would be better spent helping poorer countries. And some voices on the right have also called for ending aid to Israel, arguing that it makes Israel beholden to the United States.
But those views are not shared by Ramaswamy’s most prominent Republican rivals. Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley has criticized his position on aid to Israel, while DeSantis and former Vice President Mike Pence have made support for Israel a cornerstone of their campaigns.
The Republican Jewish Coalition has also implored Ramaswamy to change course. Matt Brooks, the group’s CEO, wrote in an open letter that “it makes much more sense to keep Israel in the family of countries with an interest in buying and using American capabilities” — which the aid package requires.
On other Israel-related policies, Ramaswamy is more in line with his party’s mainstream. Alongside supporting the Abraham Accords, he praised Trump’s decision to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and has attacked U.S. funding for programs benefiting Palestinians.
He says ‘donors’ are behind legislation combating antisemitism.
While Ramaswamy has called antisemitism “a symptom of something that is broken in our society,” he has spoken harshly about a law DeSantis enacted that penalizes antisemitic acts in Florida.
In June, he tweeted that DeSantis’ signing of the law, which criminalizes the distribution of antisemitic flyers on private property, was done “at his donors’ request.” After blowback from the conservative commentariat over his characterization of the law, he tweeted again about it — this time taking aim at “the censorship czars at Twitter” for appending a note to the tweet, which he partially blamed on “DeSantis megadonor David Sacks,” who is Jewish.
In a subsequent interview with Jewish Insider, Ramaswamy said the DeSantis bill didn’t pass his own “litmus test” because he saw it as “a viewpoint discrimination law.” He added that “bad speech” has to be countered with “free speech and open debate.” He pointed to a famous Supreme Court case permitting neo-Nazis to march in the heavily Jewish town of Skokie, Illinois, as an example of a bigotry-related issue that was “decided correctly.”
“I stand fiercely against bigotry and hatred and harassing speech,” he added.
He was in a Jewish leadership society at Yale.
Ramaswamy told JNS that he was one of the “key members” of Shabtai, a Jewish alternative to the “secret societies” at Yale University, where he attended law school. He said the society’s co-founder and rabbinical adviser, Rabbi Shmully Hecht, is a mentor of his.
Shabtai was founded at Yale in 1996 and receives extensive financial support from Israeli-American tech mogul Benny Shabtai, a major backer of Friends of the Israel Defense Forces. Though founded on Jewish values, the society has a diverse membership. It also counts Democratic New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, who himself ran for president in 2020, among its alumni.
Ramaswamy describes his time with Shabtai as formative, and the group has touted him as an alum. Hecht did not respond to a request for comment.
Volodymyr Zelensky is pictured at a welcoming ceremony in Kyiv, Ukraine, Nov. 26, 2022. (Philip Reynaers / Pool / Photonews via Getty Images)
He claims Ukraine’s Jewish president is mistreating Jews.
While Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky has earned admirers across the Western world for his conduct in his country’s war against Russia, Ramaswamy isn’t impressed.
The candidate told Jewish Insider that Zelensky — whose Jewish identity has been targeted by Russian propaganda — has himself mistreated Jews in Ukraine. Ramaswamy did not offer evidence to support that claim, which echoes claims that Russian President Vladimir Putin made to justify his invasion of Ukraine last year.
“I would just say that there are open questions about his treatment of religious minorities, including but not limited to Jews in Ukraine, that I think should be among the reasons we should stop short of holding him out as some sort of hero,” the candidate said. He did not provide examples when asked, though he said that Zelensky’s merging of all Ukrainian TV channels into a single station last year and his dissolution of political parties with ties to Russia would “create the risk for” antisemitism.
Ramaswamy is not the only Republican to criticize U.S. support for Ukraine, a stance that Trump and DeSantis have also questioned. He told Jewish Insider that he sees “protecting Israel” as one of the United States’ “far higher priorities.”
He wants to repeal a civil rights-era law forbidding religious discrimination in employment.
“Reverse racism is racism,” Ramaswamy recently stated in a list of “truths” he said were fundamental to his campaign. To that end, he has promised to repeal Executive Order 11246, a more-than-50-year-old law forbidding federal contractors from engaging in employment discrimination on the basis of race, gender, religion or national origin. “Time to restore colorblind meritocracy once and for all,” Ramaswamy wrote in the New York Post.
Signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965 as part of his flurry of civil rights legislation, the order has long been associated with affirmative action, a longtime bugbear of the right. But the order has also been drawn on by Jewish groups to protest employer discrimination against Jews. In 1966, the American Jewish Committee cited it to protest commercial banks that it said were virtually excluding all qualified Jews from working for them.
He reportedly paid a Wikipedia editor to remove a Soros family connection.
In 2011, Ramaswamy, the son of Indian immigrants, received a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans — funding to help immigrants and first-generation Americans earn college degrees. The fellowship is named for the brother of progressive Jewish megadonor George Soros, a frequent target of leading Republicans who features in a range of antisemitic conspiracy theories.
Shortly before he announced his presidential campaign, Ramaswamy reportedly paid a Wikipedia editor to scrub his fellowship from his entry on the site. He has since gone on to criticize Soros and his family from the campaign trail.
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UNRWA Meets the Spanish Inquisition
View of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) building in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip. Photo: Abed Rahim Khatib / Flash90.
JNS.org – The collaboration between UNRWA, the U.N. agency solely dedicated to Palestinian refugees and their descendants, and the Hamas rulers of Gaza continues unabated.
Two episodes over the last week underscore that claim. On May 14, Israeli jets carried out a precision strike against a Hamas war room and weapons depot that was concealed beneath an UNRWA school in Nuseirat. Fifteen terrorists—10 of them members of Hamas’s elite Nukhba Force—were killed in the strike. Meanwhile, three days earlier, the Israelis released aerial surveillance footage of armed Palestinians in an UNRWA compound in the southern city of Rafah, where the IDF is facing off against four Hamas battalions. The video showed the gun-toting Palestinians milling inside the compound, from where they launched attacks on the gathering Israeli forces.
The intermingling of UNRWA facilities and personnel with Hamas and its nefarious aims has been a constant theme of Israeli messaging throughout the current war in the Gaza Strip. At the beginning of this year, it seemed as if other Western countries shared Israel’s concerns, with 18 of them, among them the United States, suspending funding to UNRWA. However, as the NGO UN Watch has documented, in the intervening period, nine of them have quietly restored their fiscal support. One of these countries was Germany, whose foreign ministry declared in an April 24 statement that UNRWA’s verbal willingness to implement the recommendations of an independent commission headed by former French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna was enough to turn the money faucet back on. Israel’s vociferous objections—pointing out that Colonna had elided Jerusalem’s claim that more than 2,000 UNRWA staff members retain ties with Hamas—made no difference to the Germans, nor to the Japanese, or the Canadians or the other six nations who resumed financial assistance to the agency.
In the midst of all this, UNRWA received an award from the government of Spain—one of the countries that has maintained its funding throughout the conflict triggered by the Hamas pogrom in southern Israel on Oct. 7. The spectacle of a U.N. agency that indulges a terrorist group, whose tactics include the mass murder and rape of civilians for the crime of being Jews, being feted like this is, of course, deeply regrettable. But looked at from another angle, it is highly appropriate.
The award presented to UNRWA director general Philippe Lazzarini by Spanish Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares during his visit to New York on April 19 inducted him into the “Royal Order of Isabella the Catholic.” The “Isabella” referred to here is Queen Isabella I of Castile, who ruled Spain alongside her husband, King Ferdinand II, from 1474 until her death 30 years later. In 1492, at the height of the Spanish Inquisition, Isabella and Ferdinand issued an order for the ejection of Spain’s Jewish population, estimated to have been 300,000-strong.
The king and queen’s announcement of the expulsion—known as the Alhambra Decree—is on display, fittingly, at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Spanish Jews were given four months to pack up their belongings and settle their affairs, a chaotic and painful process that left Spain as a country economically and culturally impoverished. Sultan Bayezid II of the Ottoman Empire, who offered shelter to some of these Jews (among them my own family, who lived for centuries under Turkish rule in the Balkans), poked fun at the Spanish monarchs, questioning the judgment of those who would degrade their own kingdom only to “enrich ours.” In making that observation, Bayezid inadvertently grasped one of the more curious aspects of Jew-hatred—that its advocates will push for it relentlessly, even when it doesn’t suit their own interests to do so.
One of the more curious aspects of Jew-hatred is that its advocates will push for it relentlessly, even when it doesn’t suit their own interests.
Few institutions would be as receptive as UNRWA when it comes to Spain expressing pride in a monarch who deservedly has the reputation as one of the worst persecutors of Jews in their history. The history of antisemitism has been captured in a simple formula: You have no right to live among us as Jews; you have no right to live among us; you have no right to live. Queen Isabella’s place on this spectrum is evident and unarguable. Equally, Hamas belongs there no less. The Iranian-backed organization doesn’t like Jews, doesn’t like Jews living among Muslims and doesn’t like Jews being alive at all. They may be separated by seven centuries, but Isabella and UNRWA, which has actively promoted Hamas-style antisemitism in its schools, have a huge amount in common when it comes to the Jewish people.
Were Hamas to succeed in its goal of eliminating Israel as a sovereign state, we might well expect an announcement to that end not dissimilar to the Alhambra Declaration. Those Jews who survived the destruction of their only state would, if they were lucky, be given four months to liquidate their assets, hand over their properties to “returning” Palestinian refugees and make their way out of the country. No doubt some would figure out a way to stay—probably by hiding their Jewish identities and attempting to integrate with the rest of the population, as those Jews who remained in Spain after the expulsion did. UNRWA, by a twist of historical irony, might even offer to shepherd their exit within parameters set by Hamas that would prevent forever any possibility of returning. While such a scenario may seem improbable today, if history has taught us anything, it’s that it’s not improbable tomorrow.
The history of antisemitism has been captured in a simple formula: You have no right to live among us as Jews; you have no right to live among us; you have no right to live.
Fundamentally, the problem here is that too many states—not just Turkey, Iran, Russia, North Korea, China and other citadels of authoritarian rule, but democracies as well—believe that the way to convince the Palestinians to accept peace is by kowtowing to their jealously guarded victimhood status.
By the end of this month, it’s likely that several European Union member states, including Spain and also Ireland, Malta, Slovenia and Belgium, will have unilaterally recognized an independent Palestinian state. Albares is one of the foreign ministers actively promoting the fiction that such a move will bolster, rather than undermine, the prospects for the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel that will coexist peacefully.
Deep down, you have to believe that Albares knows that’s simply not true—that most Palestinians, as successive opinion polls since Oct. 7 have borne out, regard a state alongside Israel not as a final settlement but a step towards conquering the entire land “from the river to the sea.” These are the stakes that Israel has to contend with when it deals with diplomats and other foreign officials quietly sympathetic to the idea that the Jewish state shouldn’t be there in the first place.
Isabella the Catholic would be proud.
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The UN’s World of the Absurd
Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority, delivers a speech remotely at the UN General Assembly 76th session General Debate in UN General Assembly Hall at the United Nations Headquarters on Friday, September 24, 2021 in New York City. Photo by John Angelillo/UPI Pool via REUTERS
JNS.org – Only in the world of the absurd can a despicable purveyor of terror, Hamas, carry out a brutal massacre, killing over a thousand innocent people, torturing, murdering and carrying out sadistic mass rape, over a space of just a few hours, and then run home to Gaza taking with them hundreds of hostages.
Only in the world of the absurd can the Palestinian representative organization that encourages, finances, supports and represents such murderers be feted and upgraded by the majority of member states in the international community.
Only in the world of the absurd can a group of non-democratic, terror-supporting states oblige the United Nations General Assembly by proposing a resolution that indulges in pampering a terror-supporting entity in a misguided and surreal demonstration of naïveté, skewed political correctness and acute hypocrisy.
Only in the same world of the absurd can 143 states parrot their support for what they blindly proclaim to be a “two-state solution” without really understanding what they are talking about out of ignorance and stupidity.
Only in the world of the absurd can the majority of the international community deliberately ignore the openly declared genocidal intentions of Iran, Hamas and the Palestinian Liberation Organization in their efforts to eliminate the Jewish state and kill all Jews. And this, while at the same time upgrading the Palestinian representation in the United Nations.
Lastly, only in the world of the absurd can all this happen at the same time as incited and handsomely financed and organized groups of violent, hysterical, antisemitic demonstrators occupy campuses and town centers in U.S. and European cities, calling for the elimination of the only Jewish state.
Shooting blanks for statehood
Despite the artificial hype surrounding this resolution, the bottom line is that this upgrade does not grant the Palestinians the status of statehood or U.N. membership that they wished to receive. The U.N. General Assembly has neither authority nor jurisdiction to establish states and grant membership status without Security Council sanction.
The sad naïveté and hypocrisy of those states that proposed and voted in favor of this abnormal new General Assembly resolution are evident in their stated determination in the body of the resolution to the effect that “the State of Palestine is qualified for membership in the U.N. in accordance with article 4 of the U.N. Charter.”
But the U.N. Charter article 4 requires that United Nations membership be open to “all other peace-loving states which accept the obligations contained in the present Charter.”
One may legitimately ask if the self-respecting states voting in favor of this resolution, including Russia, China, Norway, Japan, South Korea, and Australia, and E.U. member states Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, France Greece, Ireland, Luxembourg, Portugal, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia and Spain, genuinely believe that the Palestinians are, or could be a “peace-loving state,” or is this just self-delusion, artificial political correctness or naive wishful thinking?
International law requires the fulfillment of universally accepted criteria for statehood, including control of a defined population and territory and enforcement of the rule of law, none of which the Palestinian Authority has ever fulfilled. This is in addition to the Charter requirement of being a peace-loving state, assuming responsible governance and the capability of respecting international obligations. Therefore, it is clear that this resolution is nothing more than a sad and miserable fiction, a sham.
Clearly, no element of the Palestinian political existence—neither the infamous and brutal terror organization Hamas nor the terror-supporting PLO and its Palestinian Authority—can seriously claim to fulfill such criteria.
Like all General Assembly resolutions, the resolution is not binding, only recommendatory. It does not represent international law and only reflects the political views of those states that proposed and supported it.
The various modalities listed in the resolution for improving the seating, establishing a speaking order of the Palestinian delegates in the General Assembly’s chamber and other U.N. bodies, and upgrading their participation in meetings and conferences are cosmetic, symbolic lip-service.
Despite its call for full Palestinian membership, the resolution distinctly denies and negates any notion of full membership in the United Nations. As such, the Palestinian delegation remains nothing more than an observer delegation, wherever and however they may be seated.
The resolution stresses that they have no entitlement to vote and have no right to membership in U.N. organs, including the Security Council.
The violations inherent in the resolutions
However, in the context of the Palestinian obligations set out in the Oslo Accords, this attempted change of status constitutes a serious and fundamental violation of the agreed obligation not to change the status of the territories pending the outcome of the permanent status negotiations.
The Palestinian leadership and Israel agreed that all outstanding issues, including the permanent status of the territories, must be resolved through negotiations and cannot be determined by unilateral action, whether in the United Nations or anywhere else.
Even the United Nations itself, in several resolutions, has given its endorsement to the Oslo Accords as the only agreed-upon means to resolve the Israel-Palestinian dispute.
Similarly, the European Union, Russia, Egypt and Norway, together with the United States, are signatories to the Oslo Accords as witnesses. A vote in favor of this new resolution by these witnesses undermines the Oslo Accords and is contrary to the accepted obligations of states and organizations that witness international agreements.
Indeed, by supporting this new resolution, they seek to bypass the requirements in the Oslo Accords for the negotiation of the permanent status of the territories and attempt to prejudge the outcome of any such negotiations unilaterally.
Despite this resolution’s artificial and ineffectual symbolic and cosmetic aspects, the overall result of the exercise is nevertheless grave and unfortunate. It will be seen by Hamas and the Palestinian leadership as a green light from the international community for them to continue to support and conduct terrorism.
The regrettable message emanating from this resolution is that the international community is not just ignoring Palestinian terror against a fellow U.N. member state; it is encouraging it.
Originally published by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.
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Is God Protecting Us?
Moses Breaking the Tables of the Law (1659), by Rembrandt. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
JNS.org – It’s been a tumultuous, emotional roller coaster of a week in Israel and around the Jewish world: Memorials, moments of silence and then celebrations, albeit muted and rather subdued under our current difficult circumstances.
In this week’s parsha, Emor, we read about the required standards of behavior of the Kohanim, the Priestly tribe. They are not permitted to come into contact with the dead and their marriage choices are more limited than the average Israelite.
We also find the commandment of Kiddush Hashem. Every Jew, not only a Kohen, is expected to sanctify the name of God. Sometimes, this means actually giving up one’s life for the faith, as millions of our brethren have done throughout the ages. For most of us, however, it means behaving in a way that will bring praise to the God of Israel. When we act morally, ethically and righteously, people generally respect us, and this brings credit to our God and our faith.
Way back at this very first revelation at the Burning Bush, Moses was told by God that we were expected to become a “kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” When we have lived up to that calling, we have indeed been a “light unto the nations.”
Today, Israel is confronted with a world in which hypocrisy has reached proportions unheard of in the annals of history. The whole planet seems to have lost its moral bearings, and frankly, its senses. Even our friends are pressuring us, and now threatening and extorting us, too.
Yet we must do what we must do. Will all the hundreds of precious, young lives snuffed out be in vain if we don’t finish the job in Gaza?
Things seem very confusing. On the one hand, we recently witnessed the incredibly miraculous hand of God protecting us from a 300-plus missile and drone attack by Iran. The 99.9% success rate of our defenses simply cannot be explained militarily or scientifically. On the other hand, we have lost hundreds of our best brave defenders. Where was God there? Is there a contradiction here?
This is shaping up to be nothing less than an existential war for our very survival. The question is: Are we safe or not? Is God protecting us or not?
My mind goes back to 1991 and the Gulf War. Saddam Hussein of unblessed memory was threatening Israel with his lethal Scud missiles and even chemical weapons. Israel was distributing gas masks to every citizen in case of a chemical attack by the vicious dictator.
Iraq had invaded Kuwait. The United States warned Iraq to get out and gave it a deadline. It was not our battle. Israel has no border with Iraq and the war had nothing to do with Israel. Yet Saddam was threatening us and America provided Israel with the Patriot missile-defense system and asked us to stay out of it. The United States would deal with Iraq.
So they did, but not before Iraq had fired dozens of Scud missiles at Israel. Miraculously, there was not a single fatality.
I remember clearly how the whole Jewish world was petrified at the time. There were prayer meetings and emergency fundraisers for Israel in Jewish communities around the world, including ours.
There was one lone voice in the wilderness, however, who declared that Israel was safe and would be safe from any such attacks. Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, went further and advised the Israeli government that gas masks would not be needed. How right he was.
Here in South Africa, the Zionist Federation was organizing a solidarity mission to Israel. The Rebbe encouraged us to join and several of my Chabad colleagues went with me, along with the late Chief Rabbi Cyril Harris. I even took along my 12-year-old daughter, Zeesy. She was the youngest member of the mission.
It is my personal belief that Israel was miraculously protected by God from the Iraqi Scuds because Israel was simply minding its own business. It was attacked for no reason whatsoever. We had done nothing to compromise our security. The heavenly Guardian of Israel responded accordingly.
Similarly, in the recent Iranian attack, we were completely innocent targets. We have no border with Iran and they have zero justification for being involved. So, we suffered not one fatality. Again, God watched over us miraculously.
But when we make strategic mistakes in our approach to Hamas; when we allow international pressure and public opinion to endanger the lives of our valiant young soldiers; when we refrain from bombing and instead send them into booby-trapped buildings; then, tragically, we suffer fatalities.
It’s one thing to boast about being the most moral army in the world (and we are), but is it wise to tell our enemies in advance when and where we are coming for them? We are damned if we do and damned if we don’t. Our unprecedented noble gestures have been completely ignored by the world, and we are still being accused of genocide. So shouldn’t we be sparing our innocent, precious boys from harm instead?
I am fond of quoting Israel’s founding father and first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, who once said, “It doesn’t matter what the world says. It matters what the Jews do.” How true.
I believe that when we do what we must do, then God does what He must do. May we merit His Divine protection now and always and may our defenders be completely safe and successful.
Please God, we will practice Kiddush Hashem by behaving as noble examples of humanity rather than as martyrs in a war in which, sometimes, we seem to be fighting with our hands tied behind our backs. Six million was enough martyrs. Not one more, please God.
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