Trump’s New Wardrobe

(First published at Israelnationalnews.com)

Are we getting rolled? Again?

Israel has a wretched history of winning wars and losing the negotiations after. The territorial gains of the Sinai Campaign and the Yom Kippur War were reversed within months and those of the Six Day War have been largely dissipated in the nearly six decades since. It is why we keep fighting over the same land, repeatedly, such as Gaza, recently for the seventh but obviously not the last time. Such diplomatic malpractice is a result of an utter lack of strategic thinking, an inability or unwillingness to articulate our strategic goals and to insist on them in any negotiations. It is also a consequence – for decades now – of PM Netanyahu’s strengths as a conflict manager but his weaknesses as a conflict solver. He never acts decisively until he is compelled to by events and always stops short of any measures that can produce victory, much less total victory. He is a master at kicking the can down the road and then eloquently and convincingly explaining how that secures our future.

Israel’s strategic interests currently include destroying Hamas, asserting sovereignty over Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, relocating the hostile population of Gaza, neutralizing Iran, and monitoring our unfriendly neighbors to the north (Syria and Lebanon) and the south (Egypt). It does not mean we can achieve all of them, but we are presently negotiating ourselves into a situation in which none of that will be possible. Since President Trump has declared “peace in our time,” he is less than concerned that Iran might be rebuilding its nuclear program or Hezbollah and Hamas are already rearming. Peace is already here. He is enamored with the thugs who seized power in Syria and is a sucker for flattery, the more extravagant the better.

To use a Trumpian expression, “everyone knows this.” When Putin said, “I never would have attacked Ukraine if Trump were president” (literally, a Trump campaign line,) it was music to Trump’s ears and enables him to condone Putin’s brutality and disregard for Trump’s wishes. Every foreign visitor to the White House must pay homage to Trump as peacemaker, even if the reality is otherwise. Of the eight or nine campaigns he claims to have ended and brought peace, most of us were even unaware that those countries were at war. These were skirmishes that – of course – will continue but gain little attention because, after all, they made peace.

Did Trump prevent us from finishing the job in Gaza? Only in the minds of those who love averting responsibility for our leaders’ own failures. He – and, truth be told, our government – succumbed to the notion that the main purpose of the war was freedom for our hostages, which was literally the status quo on October 6, 2023. On October 6, Hamas was in power and held no living Israeli hostages. Hamas today is weakened, but still in power, growing in popularity, and planning its next moves against us. For Trump, the hostage release was the highlight, and he deserves acclaim for accomplishing it. We, of course, will pay the price in dead Jews, G-d forbid, murdered by some of the thousands of terrorists released from prison, in kidnapped Jews because the tactic works, and in the premature end to the latest war in Gaza. Already, the tide is shifting against us.

The original deal called for the disarming of Hamas before the rehabilitation of Gaza begins, but it now seems that the resolve to disarm Hamas is already waning. It takes a special kind of gullibility to assume that a third-party will forcibly seize Hamas’ weapons and emasculate it as a ruling force. Who will do it – the Egyptians who sealed their border to Gazan refugees who wished to flee, and who have dispatched thousands of drones carrying deadly weapons to nefarious entities in the south of Israel? Turkey – whose dictator calls our prime minister Hitler and thinks Israel has no right to exist? Qatar – one of the world’s leading funders of terror, long Hamas’ host and sponsor, and which already underwrites several anti-Israel organizations operating openly (our government turns a blind eye) in Yerushalayim? Indonesia – which has said that it will send peacekeeping forces once Hamas is disarmed?

For how long will be play this game, delaying and delaying the disarmament of Hamas until it is too late, the world’s attention has been diverted elsewhere, and this version of “peace” is applauded?

It must be stated that, indeed, Donald Trump is the best friend Israel has ever had in the White House. He has done things on our behalf that are unimaginable for any other president. Undoubtedly, a President Harris would have recognized a spurious Palestinian state several months ago, as did France, the United Kingdom, and Canada. (By the way, whatever happened to the punitive actions Israel was to take against those countries – closing their consulates in Yerushalayim, rethinking our ties with them, recalling our ambassadors, tongue-lashing theirs? These threats were made both by PM Netanyahu and FM Saar, and their execution? Empty as always.) A President Harris would have embargoed arms to Israel and retracted US support at the United Nations. We would be in a far worse position.

Nevertheless, it is important to realize that Trump is the US President, not Israel’s prime minister, and he rightly acts in what he perceives to be the interests of the United States, not the interests of Israel. Because he says the right things and has been so helpful in many ways, we are lulled into thinking that whatever he does must be good for us and whatever he is planning for us is necessarily beneficial. That is a mistake.

Trump is a secular materialist. He sincerely believes that money runs the world and that people who have money downgrade and dismiss their values and principles. That is false, as proved by, among many others, Osama bin Laden, a billionaire. In this part of the world, religion is the prime mover. Ideology is supreme. The secular materialist mind cannot understand the suicide bomber – or even today’s Gazans, among whom once again Hamas has majority support despite the devastation wreaked upon them. The secular materialist mind cannot fathom how and why restaurants are springing up across the Arab world – including in Jordan, a country with whom we are at peace – called “October 7” in celebration of the great massacre of Jews that took place on that day. It simply does not comprehend the hold of religion in the Middle East and how it can produce such virulent ideas and actions. What then does the secular materialist mind do? It wishes religion away, pretends it doesn’t exist, and declares peace because peace will make everyone wealthy.

Trump is a friend, but let’s face it. If a Democratic president sponsored and endorsed a UN Security Council resolution providing for a “pathway to a Palestinian state,” most wise and sane Jews would be outraged. If a Democratic president proposed selling America’s most advanced weapons to Saudi Arabia and Turkey – thereby eroding much of Israel’s qualitative edge – most wise and sane Jews would be horrified. If a Democratic president precipitately ended Israel’s war on terms that were favorable to the enemy who has vowed to exterminate us, most wise and sane Jews would be apoplectic. And yet, Trump is doing all of this, and has placated many of us, probably because he means well, and he means well despite his complete ignorance about the true nature of the hostility against Israel. Just because he is not Harris does not mean that everything he does is in our interest, and we must be mature enough to recognize that, and object when necessary – even saying a firm “no” and acting in our national interest without US support.

The reality is that much of Trump world is a chimera. Extortion, bluster, boasts, volatility, effervescence, and caprice are all part of the act. At his core, he is a huckster, a bluffer, a fulminator prone to outlandish claims and tempestuous threats (yes, I voted for him three times!). All this served him relatively well in the real estate and the entertainment industries, built as they are on such bravado, and in this unusual era, made him an incredibly and wildly successful politician.

Those traits are less helpful in effective governance. Thus, despite the braggadocio, the US dollar is its weakest in years, the deficit is skyrocketing, inflation is persistent, the on-again-off-again tariffs have not produced much in revenue and have confounded merchants, suppliers, and consumers, the health care system is a mess, the government is dysfunctional, cities are tinderboxes, China is ascendant, and little that Trump accomplishes will survive him, especially if he is succeeded by a Democrat. Thus, his favorite expressions are “we’ll have to see what happens,” “the best ever,” or “there’s a great chance of…” whatever happening, which of course never happens. He is not held to his word or his claims because they can shift tomorrow, and sometimes even that same day. Most administrations have always operated with a “message of the day,” something they want the media to cover and report; the Trump administration offers several messages an hour, occasionally conflicting, and quite often stimulating, amusing, or distracting.

But like the emperor’s new clothes, we cannot allow Trump to force us into a reality that we know is not so. The real world in which we live is warning us that peace is not coming here anytime soon. Hamas will not merely lay down its weapons, Hezbollah is not surrendering and the Lebanese government is not anxious to provoke a civil war. An Iran even thirsting for water still prioritizes its fantasies of destroying us. We can be hopeful of the path of Syria’s new president – but also quite skeptical. Even the Abraham Accords should be put in perspective. The original countries that joined represented a real breakthrough – an agreement between nations, including ours, of equals. But now? We have a peace treaty with Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan for more than thirty years already. What is added by them joining the Abraham Accords, other than access to American money if they seek it?

Is it worth it to us to have Saudi Arabia join the Abraham Accords if the price is that we effectively renounce sovereignty over Judea and Samaria, pave the road – even rhetorically – to a Palestinian state, allow Hamas to survive, and arm the Saudis to the teeth? Not as I see it.

In a perfect world, an American military base in Israel has value, especially when seeing how the large US airbase in Qatar ingratiated the Qataris to the Americans. But a base that supervises Gaza should be located… in Gaza. As “peace” now reigns, there should be no fear of having a base in Gaza. An American base in Israel is undesirable because it will more inhibit us than it will pressure Hamas. Worse, if an American soldier is killed by a Hamas rocket, Israel will be blamed, and Jew haters in the US, already inflamed, will now add “Americans are being killed because of Israel!” to their growing list of calumnies. And foreign troops invited to a country tend never to leave. It is bad optics, unnecessary, and dangerous for them and for us, and it nullifies the traditional Israeli assertion that we do not ask any other country to defend our soil. We can still say “no, thank you.”

As Trump arms the Muslim world and finds the right words about a Palestinian state to appease the Saudis, we should be concerned. We must plan for a future in which one of these well-armed Arab fiefdoms overthrown by radicals, in which the PA’s Abbas dies and is replaced by a smooth-talking, Western-educated Jew hater, who also wants to annihilate us but knows how to speak the slick, facile, and unctuous language of the West, in which the American president is someone – Democrat or Republican – who has little sympathy for Israel, cares nothing about the Jewish vote, and is now armed with a Security Council resolution in which the world endorsed a Palestinian state.

Perhaps our leaders have planned for the day after. We can only pray that it is so for it never seems like it. What is comforting is that as we approach the era of complete redemption, our few allies will fade away, one by one, as our unique destiny takes center stage, and, as promised by the ancients prophets who spoke of our national return as well, G-d’s kingdom on earth will be manifest through us. May that day come soon with minimum of suffering and hardship, heralding a world of true peace and brotherhood.