Only a rule-breaking administration can truly combat antisemitism
An ambassador’s broadside aimed at French President Emmanuel Macron is another example of how Trump 2.0 is prioritizing the battle against a rising tide of Jew-hatred.
By Jonathan S. Tobin
JNS
Aug 27, 2025
To say this is the sort of thing that just isn’t done is the understatement of the century. It’s not clear if there is any precedent in the nearly 250 years of Franco-American diplomatic relations for the decision of Charles Kushner, the U.S. ambassador to France, to directly attack the French government’s indifference to antisemitism in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.
The traditional job of ambassadors is to promote good relations between the nations they represent and the government to which they are accredited. To speak out in this manner from that perch is pretty much the opposite of traditional ideas of diplomacy. In fact, that tradition dates back to the ancient world, when the concepts of nation-states and ambassadors, as well as the notion of diplomatic immunity for those who serve as go-betweens in this manner, were first known.
But the issue here isn’t—as some of Kushner’s critics and those of the administration he represents claim—one of an unqualified and even unsuitable ambassador behaving badly. Nor is it a matter of, as Trump’s detractors habitually assert, that on his watch the United States has been alienating its friends while cozying up to enemies. That is often how they misrepresent the president’s efforts to use diplomacy while attempting to solve problems like the Russia-Ukraine war and the North Korean nuclear threat.
The real significance
It is true that allowing the U.S. ambassador to Paris to take shots at the president of France is highly unorthodox. And it’s far from clear as to whether it will lead to a policy shift, either in terms of combating antisemitism or affecting its destructive anti-Israel stands.
However, the true significance is being lost amid the usual cacophony of criticism of Trump and his appointees, as well as the snark about Kushner, who is a convicted felon who was pardoned by the president and, more significantly, the father of Jared Kushner, the presidential son-in-law and former White House advisor.
Instead, what matters about this contretemps is that it demonstrates just how seriously this administration takes the issue of antisemitism and the way America’s traditional allies in Europe have become the allies, whether intentionally or not, of Hamas.
Everything else, including the sniping at Kushner, the foreign-policy establishment and the mainstream media’s horror at Trump’s unusual approach to diplomacy, remains secondary to this very obvious fact about the administration that its critics prefer to downplay or ignore.
The context in which this shot across Macron’s bow should be seen is how Trump has prioritized antisemitism in a way unprecedented for an American president. There is simply no other logical explanation for this move, which clearly happened with Trump’s approval. It’s unthinkable that Kushner would choose to mention the president—and the fact that he and his in-laws share Jewish grandchildren—without the White House’s authorization. Kushner’s article, and the way its publication deliberately courted controversy with the French, is yet another indication that this administration understands that the issue has escalated into a crisis demanding an end to business as usual on the part of Washington and its foreign envoys.
Taking Jew-hatred seriously
The development reflects Trump’s war on American universities—from the Ivy Leagues to public college campuses—where he has sought to punish those that tolerated and encouraged the surge of Jew-hatred swept in after the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in Israel on Oct. 7. That effort has also been criticized by Democrats, liberals and leftists for the willingness of the president to take on institutions that Trump’s predecessors never dared to challenge in this manner.
In that case, what has happened doesn’t validate the accusations of incipient authoritarianism that have been leveled at the president. Nor is it violating the rights of the mobs of leftist antisemites, many of whom are foreigners likely violating the terms of their visas, who have targeted Jews while chanting for the destruction of Israel and Jewish genocide (“From the river to the sea”) or for terrorism against Jews wherever they live (“Globalize the intifada”). Instead, the measures undertaken to pressure these schools via stripping them of federal funding (as is actually required under the law for their violations of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act) are a strategic decision aimed at toppling the reign of woke leftist ideology that seeks the destruction of the Western canon, an attack on America as an irredeemably racist nation as well as falsely labeling Jews and Israel as “white” oppressors.
The Kushner article is similar in that it, too, is an indication that this administration doesn’t feel bound by tradition or the usual constraints when it comes to dealing with matters it thinks are important. It’s also an entirely appropriate rebuke to a French government that is not only failing to protect its own Jewish community, but is also acting in a manner that is undermining U.S. diplomatic efforts in the Middle East and encouraging Hamas to continue to refuse to disarm or release the remaining Israeli hostages that they still hold.
For all of the umbrage that the French government has expressed about what it considers to be Kushner’s effrontery in calling them out in this manner, it is Paris and not Washington that should be apologizing for its behavior.
The piece, which took the form of an open letter to Macron, denounced the surge in antisemitism in the wake of Oct. 7. He demanded that Macron and his government enforce hate-crimes law and ensure the safety of French Jews while adding that it should “abandon steps that give legitimacy to Hamas and its allies.”
That’s a reference to Macron’s announcement that France will—like the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia—recognize a Palestinian state at the annual meeting of the U.N. General Assembly in September. This decision isn’t just an unconscionable reward to the Palestinians for their atrocities on Oct. 7. It has also undermined American efforts to pressure Hamas to agree to a ceasefire-hostage release deal. The terrorists have not correctly concluded that they do not need to make concessions since continuing the war that has brought so much suffering to their own people has also garnered them international sympathy from Western nations.
That sympathy is the result of Hamas’s successful propaganda campaign falsely alleging that Israel is committing “genocide” and deliberately starving Gazans.
The call for a Palestinian state by France is the product of two factors.
One is Macron’s frustration over being left out of Middle East diplomacy. Paris and London have indeed been sidelined in efforts to end the post-Oct. 7 war. But that is a function of the fact that neither has been in any sense a great power for the last 70 years.
It’s a particularly sore point for the French for whom Kushner’s article was a humiliating act of lèse-majesté toward Macron—a devastating blow to their national self-worth, which is rooted in delusions about a past defined by la gloire—not to mention a reminder of their current second-rate status.
Both nations have become irrelevant, and their calls for a Palestinian state—something that the Palestinians have repeatedly rejected for 78 years if it means living side by side with a Jewish one—are a way to intrude into a diplomatic process to which they have nothing to offer but their own inflated sense of self-importance and growing hostility to Israel. That hostility relates directly to the criticism of Macron by Kushner and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Palestinian statehood and antisemitism
Calls for a Palestinian state now bolster Hamas and give it a reason to continue to hold onto hostages as well as to keep the war going. They are also a gesture of appeasement to the growing Muslim population in Western Europe and their left-wing allies. The effort to mollify the bizarre red-green alliance of Marxist and Islamist Jew-haters, whose voice grows louder with each passing year on the continent and in their respective countries, is behind Britain’s and France’s turn against Israel. In doing so, Macron is, despite his denials, helping to unleash the storm of antisemitic invective that has made French Jews unsafe, and caused both them and visitors to the country to conceal their Jewish identity to avoid being subjected to harassment or worse.
The increasing atmosphere of intimidation and violence with which French Jews have had to deal in recent years is primarily caused by the rising influence of Islamists in domestic politics and culture. And it has led many people to leave that country because they have not unreasonably concluded that there is no future there for Jews.
The French government thinks that this is none of Kushner’s business—or, for that matter, that of the United States.
Macron’s claim that criticism of French inaction on antisemitism violated an ambassador’s “duty not to interfere in the internal matters of states” rings hollow. As Michael Oren, historian and former Israeli ambassador to the United States, noted, this is the “height of hypocrisy and chutzpah” because France violates “that principle daily with Israel” with its efforts to interfere in Israel’s political controversies as well as its ability to defend itself against genocidal terrorists, who it wishes to empower with statehood.
It’s equally true that France’s involvement in the affairs of its former colonies in Africa is not merely a violation of this standard of non-interference but also a vestige of imperialism that harms those countries by draining their resources and contributing to the flow of illegal immigrants to Europe, something Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has pointed out.
Kushner has himself been subjected to criticism as an inappropriate choice for such a prestigious ambassadorial post, as well as evidence of nepotism. Yet he is far from the first presidential friend, relative or donor to receive a diplomatic appointment, including some past ambassadors to France.
US ambassador to France, Charles Kushner
The New Jersey real estate magnate served time in prison for his role in an unseemly plot against his brother-in-law that inflated a private business dispute into a scandal. That his actions were illegal, as well as tawdry, is not in dispute. But it’s also possible to argue that Trump’s subsequent presidential pardon for his daughter’s father-in-law was at least partly justified by the fact that the 2004 prosecution undertaken against him by then-U.S. Attorney and future New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was selective and unduly harsh in nature, in addition to a case of retaliation against a donor to his political opponents.
A taste of their own medicine
Whatever we might think about this appointment, Kushner’s willingness to use the bully pulpit afforded him by his ambassadorial rank to speak out against French antisemitism and sabotage of American Middle East diplomacy was entirely appropriate—and necessary.
Trump and Kushner have given France a taste of its own medicine; Paris deserved a rebuke for its continued failure to battle Jew-hatred. In doing so, they’ve also shown that the administration’s willingness to break the old rules of diplomacy is sometimes exactly what is needed if progress is to be made.
When such rules protect governments that tolerate antisemitism, the right thing for America is to denounce them. That’s just as true when it comes to democratic France as it would be for rogue Third World or Communist regimes that are a threat to peace.
Trump has done this before in Europe with respect to NATO members that aren’t paying their fair share of the costs of defending the continent and exploiting the generosity of the United States. While his sometimes harsh and even crass rhetoric about the obsolete nature of NATO raised hackles in Europe and among the foreign-policy establishment, such tactics are what have driven nations there to begin to pay up rather than depending on the largesse of American taxpayers.
Blunt American talk about feckless European enabling of Jew-hatred and Hamas is just as necessary.
If France or any other Western nation wants to be taken seriously on these issues, they have to cease their efforts to undermine Israeli security and to appease domestic forces that are the engines behind a new wave of antisemitism. Until then, they should be told in no uncertain terms by the United States that they are undeserving of the title of American ally and deserve no deference when it comes to their domestic troubles.
Loath as they are to give him credit for anything that he and his administration do, it’s time for Trump’s critics to acknowledge that his emphasis on the fight against antisemitism, at home and abroad, is laudable. It’s also a needed course correction from the policies of a Biden administration that, like Macron, was more interested in toadying to forces that hated Israel and the Jews than standing with an embattled Jewish people and a besieged Jewish state. The traditions of diplomacy that Washington is flouting are enabling antisemitism and encouraging Hamas. Trump and Kushner are right to scrap them.
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