“I like Zionism, but I like winning at the Midterms better!”
That is what U.S. President Donald Trump should be saying to his buddy (and tormentor) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Also, he should remind Bibi that the U.S. midterms are closer to his heart than the elections in Israel.
Even those outlets that used to shamelessly grovel to Trump, now clearly unmoored from his orbit, have begun calling his backing of Netanyahu a “fatal second-term mistake.” They think Trump has underestimated the power of patriotic sentiment not only at home, but also in countries outside the United States. Especially in allied countries, where his support as a nationalist leader would add to the strength of local governments and leaders in their own politics.
Now, by supporting what they describe as a Zionist puppet, even his own supporters are likely to vote against him and his allies in government, which appears to be undermining Trump’s ties with the global right.
American farmers have lost patience with him. He distorted the facts on taxes, farm exports and more during his meeting with farmers last month, which the White House said was the largest presidential meeting ever with farmers. Rural approval of Trump has fallen to its lowest level amid rising bankruptcies, and some farmers accuse the GOP of making farming in the country impossible. His rosy portrayal did not change the fact that people saw the reality at the gas stations. Renting a combine harvester, which typically used to cost around $180 per hour in Iowa, now costs around $3,000, thanks to Trump’s war on Iran, which closed the Strait of Hormuz. Smaller operators can no longer afford harvesting machinery.
And most of them are loyal registered Republican voters, and by November, they may have found solutions to their farming problems, but they will not forget who created those problems in the first place. So Trump has thrown Bibi under the bus.
The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman says Trump finally noticed that he had to put his own interests above Netanyahu’s in the Iran deal. Netanyahu’s dragging Trump into the Iran mess really blew the whole thing for Trump’s support in the Make America Great Again (MAGA) crowd. Another NYT columnist, David French, thinks that “Trump and Netanyahu’s really stepping in it now” actually killed the idea behind the MAGA culture.
The real question about MAGA or any other nativist political movements that emerged in the U.S. is how many times they would be fouled by the selfish politicians who have not provided a stable ideology or governmental-political stance that could make the country go back to “parity of political parties” from the “dominance of the Israel Lobby”? The same question seems to be valid to some extent for the Democratic Party, too.
Trump’s deep-seated racism, ingrained by his family since he was a little boy, made him prioritize the interests of native-born or long-established residents of America over those of immigrants or recent residents. He typically avoided a nativist rhetoric and instead identified himself as a patriot trying to make America great. His 2016 presidential campaign slogan has been a rallying cry for many Republicans ever since. Until his foreign policy adventures turned to make Greater Israel rather than making America go back to its own greatness. It is no longer a conspiracy theory alleging that Jewish conspirators are systematically replacing American interests with those of Israel.
When professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt wrote their article in 2002, which was later published as a book titled "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," not many people believed that the majority of the House and Senate members of both parties were on the payrolls of “a loose coalition of individuals and organizations who actively work to steer U.S. foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction.” Now, almost all members of the Z, X, Y generations and most of the millennials know who is on the take and how much they are taking (thanks to the Track AIPAC organization).
Yet, something has happened: the white and black, native or immigrant, Democrat or Republican Americans seem to understand that shame should be on them if they fooled again this time. They have been tricked not once but many times since the creation of the State of Israel. By now, especially after the massacres committed by the Israeli army after the Oct. 7 Hamas raid on the occupied Palestinian lands around Gaza, not only the Americans but almost all nations and their governments have awakened to the fact that this is not a homeland for the Jewish people but a Zionist entity used by those Evangelical and neo-conservative Americans to reshape the Middle East.
Globally, people seem to have learned from their early mistakes and avoid being tricked in the same way again. In the '40s, the good-hearted people of America, Europe and the Middle East had not scrutinized the real intentions of those people in the "Jewish Agency for Israel.” They thought that those Jews running away from the atrocities of European fascism would simply be good neighbors to the native people of Palestine.
Dr. Albert Einstein, professor Sidney Hook, Hannah Arendt, and 18 other scholars and teachers had joined in a public statement denouncing the Freedom Party of Israel led by Menachem Begin, warning the world that, “The Israel they are going to create was not a modern, democratic state but one openly built on the doctrine of fascism.”
Einstein and other Jewish scholars supported the creation of a Jewish homeland in Mandatory Palestine, but were opposed to the idea of a Jewish state with borders, an army and a measure of temporal power. They knew Israel was not going to be a friendly neighbor to Muslims and Christians of Palestine, but a colonial power to occupy and settle after a total ethnic cleansing of all others.
But the world, especially the American Presidents Harry S. Truman, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower, were too busy to get themselves released from accusation, liability or responsibility of the Holocaust so that they failed to notice that another one was being committed with their own help.
If you have a look at Donald Trump’s psychologist niece, Mary L. Trump’s tell-all book titled “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man,” you’ll find out where the latest blatant display of sociopathic disregard for human life in Palestine came from. But she says, “Donald isn’t really the problem after all.” It is we, all, who have been fooled the second and third time. God only knows how many times, as Dr. Trump says, we will continually give a pass and reward world leaders’ transgressions against tradition, against decency, against the law and against fellow human beings.
