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I always assumed opposition to aid to Israel was based on fear or hatred of the jews.

No, some of it has been, but you're talking now about snotty "Arabist" State Department types who have been documented exercising antisemitic social enthusiasms in policy formulation in the 30's and 40's. They haven't been a factor in ages.

Isolationists are another matter. Not necessarily antisemitic, they nevertheless got their panties in a wad years ago over AIPAC and AJC's effectual political lobbying for close American engagement in support of Israel, for reasons we shouldn't have done, viz., because some AJC representatives, in the story told by Margaret Truman (I remember hearing it in the 50's, from my dad, who was in the Air Force at the time), dropped in on Harry Truman during the 1948 presidential race and told him that if he wanted another term as President of the United States, he'd better get on the stick and recognize David Ben-Gurion's government and the State of Israel. Otherwise, all that political money would be going to Thomas Dewey. It was political blackmail -- the AJC called every chip it had, put everything it could muster on one proposition. Israel needed to be recognized, and so the United States Government had to recognize Israel, right now.

Of course, the "Arabists" were screwing around in the background and trying to prevent recognition of Israel; but jerking the arms off a sitting president and beating him over the head with them doesn't get you a lot of brownie points with most people I know.

Of course, the antisemites went nuts, because the AJC beat their play, but Israel won and Truman got reelected. Truman could possibly have arrested the AJC reps for making such a play, but it was Democratic politics not armed robbery, so he let it go; the alternative would probably have busted the Democratic Party wide open at a tender juncture and handed Dewey the White House. But repping as they were for Ben-Gurion, the AJC men should have registered as political agents for the Haganah, which would have made their approach legal and their advocacy lawful and protected. AFAIK, though, not only did they not register, but historians of the Zionist movement have yet to admit to this day that the story was true.

More to the point, though, is the fact that the U.S. began to support Israel militarily and politically as Ben-Gurion hoped, and the rest is history, as the U.S. tried for a long time, and still tries today, to square its "honest broker" aspirations with its guarantees of Israeli security.

I understand the reasons for supporting Israel, but people politically wedded to George Washington's advice against foreign entanglements still think that we need to avoid these involvements in order to preserve American exceptionalism -- the American exemption from internecine struggles abroad that puts the FBI on the trails of Provo-IRA men trying to raise money in America (my own grandmother gave the IRA money, I blush to admit -- she hated the English, including her daughter-in-law, my mother) and shuts down any attempt by Greeks and Armenians in this country to exact revenge on the Turkish nation for their own reasons. Despite having a substantial Armenian-American community, USG supported the Turks against the Kurdish Communists and separatists who were committing terrorist acts in Turkey.

American exceptionalism basically means that we aren't going to have the rest of the world's experiences with intestine hatreds and factionalism here; we can't have other people's wars spilling over into the United States because so to do disturbs our own experiment in government. We have decided as a society long ago, that we won't permit the importation of ethnic and religious squabbles. That policy has become muddied by our postwar internationalism and alliance-building, which was another policy decision taken by Truman, Eisenhower, and John Foster Dulles that put the "America-firsters" like Pat Buchanan permanently in the minority, and for a while, in the minority of the Republican minority. Even Barry Goldwater endorsed containment policies and Dulles's structure of international alliances ("entanglements"), as did his political heir, Ronald Reagan.

All of those developments left the Buchananites (for want of a better word) out in the cold -- but their continued engagement of AIPAC and other internationalist opinion centers like the Trilateral Commission and the CFR does not make them antisemites.

Pat Buchanan isn't Joe Sobran: both were tried in print by William F. Buckley, Jr., and Sobran was convicted and banned from National Review, but Buchanan was exonerated of Abe Foxman's highly political accusations (after the "amen corner" comment). Buchanan may be an antisemite, but his public statements AFAIK are reconcilable with "America-first" sentiments instead, so that anyone wanting to prove Buchanan or another paleoconservative an antisemite has to post up.