Planning to Vote for Trump? Don’t do it for Israel’s Sake

Whatever happens in November 2020,
Israel anyway needs to wean itself off America. 

JERUSALEM - This is addressed to a decidedly limited demographic: the 30 per cent or so of American Jews who identify with Israel to such an extent that holding their noses they voted for Donald Trump and would do so again.

To them, I say: please do not. At least not for Israel’s sake.

I tell you this as a fellow American -- living in Israel -- as a Zionist and as a security hawk. 

If you plan to vote for Trump not because of Israel, but because you think he is a “very stable genius” and Lincolnesque in his pathos, then that is your business.

Here I am addressing myself only to those — and I include my rational Christian evangelical friends — who see Trump plain but would support him again for Israel’s sake. Please do not because Trump is bad for America and that needs to be your paramount yardstick. 

Moreover, in the longterm bad for America is bad for Israel.

In your heart of hearts, you know it. Not owing to this or that policy (even a broken clock is accurate twice a day) but because Trump is bad across a continentally broad canvas. The political culture upon which the American political system depends is unlikely to endure four more years of leadership by a man without a moral compass who surrounds himself entirely by quaking brown-nosing Sycophants.

James Madison’s model of republican democracy cannot much longer sustain unrelenting traumatization by Trump. Moreover, four more years and your children and grandchildren will grow up believing that it is typical for a US president to blatantly lie, spin conspiracy theories, and threaten political foes.

From the outset let me grant you that Joe Biden is past his sell-by date and not because he is 77 years old. Alas, your choice is not Trump or an astute, energetic, centrist, genuinely pro-Israel, charismatic Democrat. Play with the cards you've been dealt. 

Trump has all the advantages that come with demagoguery. Pray that Biden selects a running mate who shows potential to be a better-than-capable stand-in. If he goes with a flash in the pan leftie version of Sarah Palin he will almost certainly guarantee four more years of Trump.  

Let Biden be your Gerald Ford who at the very least can end America's long national Trumpian nightmare.

From a Zionist perspective, Biden has a dismal understanding of the zero-sum nature of Palestinian Arab conflict with Israel. You say that Biden will resurrect Barack Obama’s failed policies on Iran and the Palestinians.  

But his election on November 3, 2020, could make things better for America. And it can only on the margins make things worse for Israel.  

He might further bolster Palestinian Arab strategic intransigence, enable lawfare against Israel at the UN and engage in niggling public diplomacy attacks against “settlements” and the “occupation.” But I do not see him channelling Bernie Sanders breaking diplomatic relations or unilaterally  ending the US-Israel military relationship.

There is anyway a growing realization in the US foreign policy establishment that the two-state solution is unworkable. The minimal demands of the Palestinian Arabs are way beyond anything Israel can accept, and the minimum requirements of Israel are way beyond anything the Palestine Arabs can accept. This has been true for over 100 years. Yet every so often, a new generation of wonks needs to learn this reality anew. 

Whatever its intentions regarding Israel, any new Biden administration will have its hands full with reconstruction and rehabilitation of Covid-19 battered America. Even without the corona pandemic that has cost 100,000 American lives, your country’s social and political cleavages seem (from 6,000 miles away at least) to be approaching pre-civil war levels.

Biden and his J-Street crowd of advisers might be tempted to launch another "peace process" aimed at pushing Israel back (more or less to the 1949 Armistice Lines) but, trust me, we and our Arab partners will resist them.

Regarding Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's plans for a Final Solution of the Zionist problem: Donald Trump, like Obama, Bush 43 and every president going back to Reagan will not go to war with Iran to stop that country from crossing the nuclear threshold. Not for the Jews. Not for the Arabs. Not for anybody. 

The North Koreans understand America. The Islamists in Teheran are no less shrewd.

And to give Trump his due, he has accelerated America’s departure from the world stage, but it was foretold. America is a spent force. Its nuclear deterrence stops at the water’s edge.

This is not the place to lay out a calculus of Israeli deterrence against a nuclear-armed Iran. Only to point out that if Iran was as suicidally committed to Israel’s destruction as many of you believe it would long ago have purchased two or three atomic bombs off the rack from Pakistan or North Korea and tried the Shi'ite version of a Hail Mary pass. 

Whatever happens on November 3, 2020, Israel has to wean itself off America. As anyone with a passing familiarity with ancient history knows the first two Jewish commonwealths fell in no small measure because of violent internal schisms and because Israelites fatally misjudged which world powers were on the ascendant.

To my friends, family and former comrades on the pro-Israel rational right in America — if you want to vote for a polarizing, despicable, ignoramus that’s on you – but do not tell me you’re doing it for Israel’s sake.