Author Archives: Rabbi

The End of UNRWA

Posted on February 20, 2025 | Comments Off on The End of UNRWA

(First published at JNS.org)

The Knesset overwhelmingly passed legislation last year prohibiting the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) from operating on Israeli territory. It also banned every Israeli from cooperating with UNRWA in any way. Despite an outcry from the anti-Israel elements of the international community, the law went into effect at the end of January, and UNRWA was obligated to cease its operations in Israel. Its social services to residents of Jerusalem, for example, were assumed by the municipality, but it has created a vacuum among purveyors of incitement and anti-Israel animus.

The time has come for the United Nations, once and for all, to close down UNRWA entirely. It has not served a useful purpose for many decades, if ever. UNRWA in Jerusalem provided health care and sanitation services, as well as administered some schools—tasks that, according to residents, performed poorly in all respects. Elementary-school education taught little beyond incitement against Israel, and UNRWA routinely sold its supplies on the black market, enriching its employees and impoverishing its clients. As reported in Israel Hayom, only 2.3% of eighth-graders in UNRWA schools were proficient in reading at age-appropriate levels.

UNRWA’s failure to provide services pales before its active participation in terror, both inside and outside of Gaza. Estimates are that almost half of UNRWA’s staff in Gaza were active members of Hamas, and dozens of UNRWA workers were identified as among the assailants and torturers of Jews on Oct. 7, 2023. A substantial part of the UNRWA annual budget of roughly $2 billion functioned as a grant to Hamas. Terror facilities run by Hamas, including weapons depots and tunnels, were discovered under UNRWA buildings in Gaza, and Hamas has claimed responsibility for repeated acts of terror in Jerusalem in the last several years.

Why does UNRWA still exist? And why must it be permanently shuttered?

UNRWA was founded 75 years ago to deal with the 700,000 Arab refugees who fled their homes during and after Israel’s War of Independence in 1948. Oddly, another U.N. agency, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), was created around the same time to deal with the remainder of the world’s tens of millions of refugees resulting from the wars in that tumultuous decade. Neither agency inquired after the welfare of the 800,000 Jews who were simultaneously driven out of their homes in the Arab world, most of whom resettled in Israel and the West.

More importantly, UNRWA’s singular focus since its origin has been to perpetuate the refugee status of Palestinian Arabs rather than end it through resettlement, which is the objective of UNHCR. This is accomplished in several ways. First, UNRWA redefined “refugee” for its own purposes. According to the UNHCR, refugee status is limited to those individuals who fled a war zone. As soon as they are resettled, they are no longer considered refugees and are beyond UNHCR’s purview.

By contrast, UNRWA contrived its own unique definition of “refugee,” i.e., any descendant of a male who fled the Arab invasion of Israel in 1948. Thus, refugee status for Palestinian Arabs is transmitted from generation to generation, unlike any other refugee group in the world, and so by UNRWA’s (inflated) count, they now number almost 6 million people. Today, 99% of these “refugees” were born and raised in the country where they now reside. UNRWA is subsidizing its fourth generation of refugees, something unprecedented, and which therefore has no natural end to it.

Second, UNRWA makes no effort to find permanent homes for its “refugees” but has maintained them in refugee camps since 1949. While UNHCR seeks to terminate refugee status, UNRWA seeks to immortalize it. As such, for most Palestinians, their refugee status is never lost, and they remain eligible for UNRWA subsidies. In effect, Palestinians are not required to assume responsibility for their own well-being and resettlement, even though they reside mostly in Judea, Samaria and Gaza or in the Arab world among their co-religionists whose language and culture they share. Certainly, residence in Arab countries such as Jordan, Syria or Lebanon for 60 to 75 years should have resulted in the loss of their refugee status. Those countries should assimilate them.

Third, the desire to maintain the refugee status of Palestinian Arabs forever stems from UNRWA’s primary purpose. It perceives its role as integral to the fight for Israel’s destruction and disappearance. It is not just that UNRWA regularly incites against Israel and has participated in acts of terror. UNRWA inculcates a narrative of victimization and permanent grievance that can never be assuaged except by violence against Israel.

U.S. President Donald Trump said he would halt U.S. contributions to UNRWA, as he did in his first term, which then amounted to 17% of the agency’s budget, or $371 million. It is time that UNRWA be shuttered entirely. To incentivize this, Washington should threaten to reduce its contribution to the United Nations itself for the exact amount the international body spends on UNRWA, which is now upward of $2 billion.

It’s time for new thinking and new approaches. In the wake of the Trump initiative to relocate Palestinians in Gaza elsewhere in the Middle East so they can begin new and productive lives, UNRWA becomes even more superfluous.

As long as UNRWA exists and Palestinian Arabs perceive themselves as eternal wards of the world, they will retain their fantasy of destroying Israel. UNRWA will never disband itself; it is one of the world’s foremost boondoggles. Its disbandment by the United Nations can only help promote a better life for Palestinian Arabs and a more peaceful world.

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The Saudi Seduction

Posted on February 4, 2025 | Comments Off on The Saudi Seduction

Prime Minister Netanyahu’s diplomatic plate is overflowing. His visit to Washington, including the summit with President Trump, must delineate Israel’s impending agenda on several different fronts, most importantly the achievement of victory in Gaza that will defeat Hamas, end its reign of terror on Israel from its Gaza base of operations, and liberate our remaining hostages. Add to that the elimination of Iran’s nuclear capacity and these meetings are quite momentous.

According to reports, President Trump is fixated on advancing on the Saudi front, with the goal of achieving normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia. To be sure, that is a worthy objective and will jumpstart the Abraham Accords that the Biden administration left to wither. Nevertheless, Israel should enter these negotiations as equals, not as beggars at the trough desperate for recognition at any price. We should be mindful of our national interests – as well as the advantages and limitations of any agreement with Saudi Arabia.

The theory is that any agreement with the Saudis will effectively end the Arab-Israeli dispute. Saudi Arabia has special status in the Muslim world as the custodian of the Islamic holy places. As such, its rapprochement with Israel would be tantamount to a declaration that all Islam should reconcile with Israel, effectively ending Israel’s ostracism from much of the Muslim world. That is certainly consequential.

Yet, similar claims were made when Israel and Egypt made peace in 1979. Removing the Arab world’s largest army from the battlefield was assumed to make future wars with Israel impossible, and an era of peace and prosperity would dawn. It hasn’t quite happened like that. It is true that battlefield wars between Israel and our neighbors have ceased since then but they have been replaced by protracted wars fought against non-state actors, or evil terrorists as they should be known, several times in Lebanon and Gaza, continuously in Judea and Samaria, with the specter of a genocidal Iran looming over the region.

Saudi Arabia may be attempting to modernize but agreements between democracies and autocracies are inherently unstable, as the latter are always subject to coups and abrupt changes in leadership. There have been several attempts to overthrow the Saudi monarchy, and we should recall the temporary rise to power of Mohammed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 2013, which, if not overthrown by current Egyptian President Abdel al-Sisi, could have spelled the end of the Israel-Egypt peace treaty.

Israel then must be cautious about relinquishing vital assets or compromising our security for tentative gains that might be short-lived. These forfeited assets or hazardous compromises could theoretically include an end to the war with Hamas and withdrawal from Gaza, recognition of a Palestinian state, a freeze on construction of Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria, withdrawal from Lebanon, a return to the status quo of October 6, 2023, a ban on Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount, et al.

Not one element of this is worth normalization with Saudi Arabia, even if President Trump is enamored with the deal. We are not at war with Saudi Arabia, except in the technical sense. There are no reciprocal claims on each other’s territory. There is no reason there should be any hostility between Israel and Saudi Arabia, there is no casus belli, and no reason peace does not already exist. I have never placed much stock in the notion that these powerful autocracies must heed the “Arab street,” and thus Israel has to make precarious compromises, and Saudi Arabia has to be afforded a fig leaf so as to better sell the deal to its public. Autocracies do not work that way. Perhaps the value of these agreements can be put into better perspective by analyzing the relationship between Israel and its current peace partners.

The peace with Egypt, as well as with Jordan, has long and accurately been described as a cold peace. Trade exists, but tourism these days is almost non-existent. Israelis must hide their identity when visiting those countries and the welcome is not always hospitable. These countries are not our friends or even allies, and they consistently evince open hostility to Israel in international forums including the United Nations. It would seem that we want it more than they do, which is not inherently unreasonable because Israelis feel better without the sense of isolation imposed on us by much of the world, but which should give us some pause as to the risks implicit in these agreements and the tangible concessions we make to procure them.

In both agreements, we forfeited vital territory won with the blood of our soldiers. With Egypt, we relinquished essential assets (oil) and with Jordan, we were somehow cajoled into providing them with water for, it seems, infinity. In exchange, they agreed to… well, not kill us. Both nations benefited substantially from American aid after signing these agreements.

Perhaps even more instructive is the linchpin of the Abraham Accords, the agreement with the United Arab Emirates. We enjoy trade and tourism. I have visited the UAE several times and always felt comfortable there. Yet, there was a noticeable difference on my most recent visit six weeks ago. Public Jewish prayer has ended, even if previously it was informally tolerated. There are no longer minyanim, even if an ornate synagogue was opened in the Abrahamic Village in Abu Dhabi. Jews who used to walk around with kippot no longer do so. There is a plethora of kosher restaurants in the UAE but – aside from the ones with “kosher” in their names – the others cannot be identified from the outside as kosher. There is no insignia, no indication that they are kosher restaurants, and patrons must ask for the kashrut certificate to verify that the establishment is, indeed, kosher. This state of affairs preceded the murder of the Chabad Shaliach, Rabbi Zvi Kogan, Hy”d, in the UAE this past November so it is not just security related.

The sense of “inclusion” that one felt in the early years of the Abraham Accords has subtly changed to a sense of “toleration.” Granted, any peace treaty is better than any war, but the question remains: at what price? Absence of war is a value for all sides, even without a treaty. What must we renounce or surrender for the privilege of being liked or tolerated? All we ask of former adversaries is they commit to not hating us, nothing more tangible. In exchange for that, in the Abraham Accords we postponed indefinitely the annexation of our biblical heartland, Judea and Samaria, and in the Egyptian and Jordanian treaties, surrendered quantifiable resources.

Normalization with Saudi Arabia is not worth it if the price is our acquiescence to the establishment of a Palestinian state in the center of our homeland. We should beware of the diplomat’s rhetorical games, of finding equivocal language that might mean this to us and something else to them but ultimately leave us weakened. One of Menachem Begin’s greatest mistakes at Camp David in 1978 was consenting to what was called “the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people,” then a newly created nuisance on the world scene. Begin resisted mightily, until he didn’t, assuaging his conscience by telling himself that “legitimate” and “rights” are undefined, and so they can mean whatever we want them to mean.

It was a good lawyer’s argument – but has been seized upon by our enemies to mean what they assumed it meant: that Palestinians have “legitimate rights,” not Jews, and whatever they are, the Jews are depriving them of those rights. Add to that the effective declaration in the disastrous Oslo Accords that the land of Israel is not just the homeland of the Jewish people, and we should not wonder why even the horrific massacre of innocent Jews – babies, women, men, the elderly – gained us very little sympathy from the world. Why sympathize with a nation that deprives others of “legitimate rights” on land that they do not consider their own?

We should not beg, grovel, or plead for recognition by other nations. There is something amiss about an ancient and eternal people fawning for acceptance by a nation – Saudi Arabia – that literally came into existence in 1932. We must come as a proud nation, equals. The Saudis want a defense pact with the US? That is fine – but we need not pay the price for it. Arguably, they need normalization with us more than we do with them. The Saudis need our assistance with their sworn enemy Iran – and if Iran is successfully neutralized, how valuable does this treaty then remain for them? The answer is, not much, so why should we concede anything substantive in order to achieve it?

That being said, I welcome a normalization deal of equals. Here is a suggestion: Mutual recognition between Israel and Saudi Arabia including full diplomatic relations, joint military efforts to defang the Iranian menace, trade and tourism (although we should be wary of wealthy Arab countries buying substantial real estate in our cities), Israel’s concurrence to a mutual defense treaty between Saudi Arabia and the United States (including lobbying Congress for approval, a such a treaty is not a done deal) and Saudi assent to the land of Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people.

And about the Palestinians? Well, if Saudi Arabia assigns less than 1% of its territory – in the area of the desert that is adjacent to Iraq and Jordan – President Trump can realize his creative plan to resettle Gazans in a place where they can thrive. Just 1% of Saudi Arabia – whose borders are not sacrosanct, were artificially drawn a century ago, and are still not finalized today – can fit almost 60 Gazas (1% can even contain almost four “West Banks”). Or the Saudis can draw that 1% from their southwestern coast, so Gazans can live near the beach and next to their friends, the Houthis of Yemen. Build them an oasis in the desert. Let them live.

But let us not repudiate our past, or endanger our future, on the shifting sands of Arabia. No good has ever come from renouncing our homeland. Only good can come from asserting our divine rights – call them “legitimate rights” – in the land of our forefathers to build a holy and godly society.

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Echoes of the Past

Posted on January 28, 2025 | Comments Off on Echoes of the Past

(First published at Israelnationalnews.com)

One of the negotiators of the catastrophic Gilad Shalit deal (one kidnapped soldier exchanged for 1027 Arab terrorists, including Yahye Sinwar) said something mindboggling on the radio recently. He opined that the Shalit deal “was a terrible mistake, and I would do it again.”  

It is hard to wrap the mind around that level of dysfunction, and yet, that mindset is quite prevalent in Israel today, and I am wondering why. Many people state unabashedly that the current hostage deal demonstrates how much Israelis “sanctify life.” That is true, except when we consider the price we paid in murdered Jews for the Shalit deal and the price we will pay in murdered Jews for the newly released murderers among us. We sanctify life in the present and sacrifice life in the future. We cherish the individual while putting society at risk. It is arguable if such constitutes the sanctification of life or the desecration of life. When we choose to disregard the obvious and inevitable effects of our actions, time and again, we should stop comforting ourselves on the extent to which we cherish life and instead question our wisdom, sanity, and desire to survive as a nation. Arab terrorists recognize that there is no chance we will execute them, little chance they will serve their full sentences, and full knowledge that they will be financially rewarded, and handsomely, by their leaders for their crimes. So why wouldn’t they try to murder more Jews?

The irony is that Hamas made a huge tactical error in murdering so many Jews on October 7. It cost them world popularity, at least in the short term. For a brief moment, Israel was graciously granted the right of self-defense, if only for a brief moment. In due course, Jew haters and their Western enablers recovered their evil equilibrium, and almost instantly, branded Israel as the aggressor, perpetrators of genocide, and other canards. Undoubtedly, our enemies’ future raids will focus less on murdering Jews than on kidnapping Jews because they realize that our society cannot handle it and will literally pay any price, even in ever-escalating torrents of our own blood. Surely Hezbollah has received that bloodcurdling message loud and clear.

It is interesting that, to my knowledge, Donald Trump has not mentioned the release of thousands of Arab terrorists and the attendant consequences of that folly, past, present, and future. In his mind, the deal is ceasefire for innocent hostages, including Israeli withdrawals from territory we repeatedly won at the cost of our soldiers’ lives. The exchange of innocents for terrorists is the humiliating part of the deal, effectively equates the two groups – in itself, a moral obscenity – and, as we have seen, is the face of victory for the Arabs. It may be painful for us to accept this truth, but presently the Arabs are happy with the outcome of their invasion and massacre. They murdered Jews, the Jewish army is being forced to withdraw from Gaza, they do not care about their own loss of life or destruction of property, and they have won freedom for their imprisoned murderers, now free to murder again.

Those Israelis who associate the release of our hostages with “victory” are deluding themselves, and many intentionally because of their hatred of our government. The release of our hostages is not the face of victory. It is the face of “status quo,” merely restoring the situation that existed on October 6 when they weren’t hostages. If the world perceives – as it does – an exchange of “our prisoners” for “their prisoners,” we only have ourselves to blame. Instead of the raucous celebrations trumpeted in the media, we should feel much like the recipient of a heart transplant. The patient lives, and the family rejoices, but someone had to die for that patient to live. It is indeed heartwarming to witness their freedom – they all have been given a new lease on life – but many did not survive, many died trying to free them and secure our future, and many will die in the future, G-d forbid, as a result of this ill-fated deal.

So why do we never learn from the past? Why do keep making the same mistakes repeatedly?

We rely on certain shibboleths in this society, among them how much we cherish life. There are others. We will pay price to bring a Jew to a Jewish burial, except when we don’t, as with Elie Cohen or Ron Arad. We will never leave anyone on the battlefield, except when we do, as with the aforementioned or Jonathan Pollard. Israel will not negotiate with terrorists, true decades ago but demonstrably false since the days of Oslo. Israel leads the world in negotiating, and negotiating poorly, with terrorists. Yet, I believe that our irrational response to these trying times is rooted in something far deeper than the catchwords that soothe our pain.

The State of Israel arose out of the ashes of the Holocaust. To be sure, the movement for Jewish statehood began long before the Holocaust, but it is undeniable that the Holocaust was a prime catalyst for Israel coming into being when it did. In essence, Israel was created not just in response to the Holocaust, but in the self-definition of the founders, Israel was the anti-Holocaust. The new Israeli Jew was the diametric opposite of the exile Jews, who were slaughtered in the millions without much resistance, passively, helpless.

Israel was supposed to be the antidote to the Holocaust, the promise that “never again” would Jews be gunned down en masse, forced to hide in closed rooms, attics, sheds, trees, bushes, and ditches. “Never again” would Jews be vulnerable and defenseless, tortured and incinerated, carted off by gleeful and malevolent foes to their deaths or at least an uncertain future. Never again! A functioning Jewish government with a powerful Jewish army would protect Jews from the helplessness that typified the exile Jew.

That Israeli self-image was shattered by the Hamas invasion of October 7. That day was the Holocaust reborn, if only, mercifully, for one day. Sure, there were no death camps – but before the Nazis constructed the death camps, the Einsatzgruppen – the SS paramilitary squads – rained their terror on Jews, going from village to village and house to house searching for Jews, ultimately murdering more than one million of the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust.

The Einsatzgruppen in the guise of Hamas terrorists were reincarnated for one day – October 7 – even as we know from their own words that they would love to do it again and plan an encore. On that day, Jews hid by the thousands in barns and sheds and any place that would conceal them from the ravenous wolves who pursued them. Thousands of Jews ran for their lives from the bullets and bombs of our enemies, and hundreds were gunned down in cold blood. Many were tortured, humiliated, violated, and kidnapped. We even had our partisans spring into action – Jews by the thousands who raced down to Gaza on that holy and sad day to save their fellow Jews, repel the enemy, and defend the nation of Israel. The Arab-Nazis demonstrated the same frenzied hatred of Jews as did their German-Nazi antecedents, their efforts lacking only scale and the capacity to murder even more Jews. The evil desire was exactly the same.

What was missing on October 7 was a functioning government and a functioning army – the very tools that we created in order to preclude another Holocaust. Every institution of society collapsed and left us vulnerable to the predations of the enemy, precisely as happened during the Holocaust. The government and the army began to function again in the days after October 7, with purpose, resolve, and direction, if not always with a precise definition of victory and a clear plan to achieve it, notwithstanding the slogans. Hence, the army leadership ruled out the traditional demarcation of victory – conquest and retention of enemy territory and expulsion of a hostile population. Having dismissed that outcome, it left the government incapable of withstanding American pressure – whether from Biden or Trump – and left us susceptible to this recent craven surrender to terror.

The blow to our self-image – Israel as the antithesis to the Holocaust – was so intense that it led us to surrender to terror and, at least for now, undo the successes of the war, all to remove the stain of October 7 through the release of our hostages, notwithstanding the devastating price in blood we are bound to pay. It is as if the specter of the Holocaust weighs so heavily on our minds that victory and a strategic change in our relations with our enemies is superfluous. It was sufficient that we redeem Jewish honor by inflicting massive and deadly force on the enemy and devastating their territory. For many Israelis, not including the families of the hostages, this outcome revives their faith in Israel as the refuge and haven for Jews, the only place on earth where, in their thinking, Jews are safe, as risible as that sounds. This thinking is short-sighted.

The “Israel as haven” trope has been a staple of Zionism since its founding and always a major incentive for Aliyah. Is it time to retire it? Certainly, Israel is a haven for Jews, and unlike during the Holocaust, Israel enabled us to take the war to our enemies and show them our righteous ferocity in defense of our lives and homeland. Yet, the Torah never promises us that we will be safe in Israel, only that “if you obey My statutes and observe My commandments… you will dwell safely in your land” (Vayikra 26:3,5). G-d gave us the land of Israel not so we should be safe but so that here we will create a “kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” Safety is not the purpose. A holy state in a holy land is the purpose.

October 7 was such a shock to the Israeli self-image and awakened in all of us the latent insecurities of exile Jews that it has rightly caused many Israelis to turn inward, to seek a deeper connection to G-d, Torah, and the Jewish people, to find meaning amid the chaos, corruption, and cruelty. Our self-image has to change. The world offers us no sympathy for being victims. Indeed, more people than we can imagine delight in victimizing Jews. We do not yearn to survive only so that we might survive; we yearn to survive because G-d has given us a life of purpose, a message for mankind, and mandated that we prepare the world for His kingdom. We are an eternal people not because we say we are but because the Eternal G-d has willed it, and because His Torah to which we are faithful is also eternal.

When we realize the nature of our destiny, we will no longer consider the Holocaust as a burden or the State of Israel as the Holocaust inverted. A people of destiny will make better decisions, spiritually and politically, and we will merit to hasten our redemption and the redemption of all mankind.

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Trump 2.0

Posted on January 22, 2025 | 1 comment

(First published at Israelnationalnews.com)

Donald Trump’s return to power and the world stage should presumably benefit the United States, Israel, and the free world while vexing the world’s enemies of virtue and justice, even as we do not put our faith in either princes or human beings (Tehillim 146:3). That being said, President Trump is bound to do many things that please us in Israel and some things that infuriate us. It bears keeping in mind that Trump is President of the United States and not prime minister of Israel, and while the United States and Israel’s interests are often aligned, they are not identical. We are expected to define our national interests and objectives, we are expected to make prudent decisions about our lives and nation, and we should be capable of saying “no” (or “no thank you”) when pressure is applied to coerce us into doing things against those interests and objectives.

If you haven’t yet noticed, Trump can be blustery in his pronouncements and downright tempestuous in his threats. We should also notice that few are carried out, most are uttered for their effect or for purposes of negotiations, and even he isn’t always aware of the ultimate consequences of his fulminations. He threatened “Hell to Pay” if all our hostages were not released by the time he took office, which of course did not happen, and with little prospect of that happening anytime soon. Trump boasted loudly that he would end the Ukraine-Russia war on “Day One,” with “one phone call,” which, do note, did not happen. Perhaps amid all the inaugural festivities, he had no time to place the phone call or maybe Putin’s telephone was busy.

A normal, self-respecting country knows how to say no when its national interests or the lives of its citizens are endangered. We in Israel have not yet achieved that status, and so, notwithstanding our passionate desire to gain freedom for our illegally-and-in-violation-of-international-law-held hostages, our government (again) has committed to releasing into society thousands of terrorists and murderers, all to terrorize and murder again. Suzie Dym of Mattot Arim calculated, based on past ratios of innocents released in exchange for terrorists, that more than 380 Israelis can be expected to be murdered in the coming years by these freed terrorists. Israeli TV generally downplayed the gleeful celebrations occurring in Arab villages in Samaria at the first batch of discharged terrorists; having Israelis watch that would dampen the ecstasy at the release of our first freed hostages. The message our weakness sends to our enemies and the world is that crime pays.

This is not the first time PM Netanyahu caved under pressure and likely won’t be the last but there is no other politician alive today who can put the most positive spin on the most craven surrender. He could depict Custer’s last stand as just a momentary setback on the way to complete victory. Netanyahu has done many positive things as Israel’s longest-serving prime minister but his legacy will forever be marred by the Shalit deal and this, the Netanyahu deal. He could have said no or not yet or not this deal.

Bear in mind that Trump has openly expressed his desire to reclaim the Panama Canal and seize Greenland, to which the prime ministers of Panama and Denmark responded, in their respective languages, “take a hike.” The world did not come to an end, the sun rose the next day, Panama and Denmark are still functioning, and Trump’s threats will go nowhere. (Humble prediction: Greenland will remain Danish, the Panama Canal will not be renamed the Trump Canal, and the US will negotiate slightly reduced passage fees.) What I cannot figure out is what is the American interest in coercing this deal, which, even temporarily, strengthens Hamas and better enables it to remain in power over its quite supportive constituents.

Pundits have opined that Trump wanted a victory on his first day in office, akin to Reagan whose inauguration coincided to the minute with the release of American hostages held in Iran after 444 days of captivity. (The US exchanged or paid nothing for this release, unlike Israel in our current imbroglio.) That reason strikes me as too facile, and even if true, only three Israeli hostages were released – along with numerous Arab evildoers – which is not quite Reaganesque.

Some maintain that this was a good will gesture from Netanyahu to win assistance on the Iranian front or to deflect future pressure, and that could be. But it is even more likely that Trump was testing Netanyahu and his inclination to fold under pressure, which makes it even more dangerous in the future. Strength respects strength and bullies devour weaklings, and it is time that we define our vital interests and protect them at any price.

The good news about Trump is that he comes to most world issues with only one preconceived notion – that he can solve any problem – but no others. He is untethered to the shibboleths of modern diplomacy, especially including the creation of another Palestinian state. We would do well to establish our red lines and soon, or there will be unwanted responses to unexpected events. Yes, Mahmoud Abbas is unlikely to survive the Trump term (he thinks he will be 93 when the Trump administration ends) but Abbas will surely be succeeded by a more polished leader who will beseech the world for the welcoming gift of Palestinian statehood, including the division of Jerusalem, and recite all the clichés the international community wants to hear. We should prepare for that.

The other bit of good news is that Trump is surrounding himself with a foreign policy team that is strongly pro-Israel and a welcome relief from the condescension of the Obama-Biden staff. The dark cloud in this is that Trump sees himself as master of foreign policy and likely will sideline his formal advisors (think FDR ignoring Cordell Hull and Nixon snubbing William Rogers). If so, the real variable is Steve Witkoff, fresh off cramming this horrible deal down Israel’s throats.

He is an unknown. In truth, there is an advantage to an outsider bringing fresh ideas into the staid foreign policy establishment. We benefited greatly from that in Trump’s first term, especially the decoupling of the “Palestinian” issue from other regional relationships which then engendered the Abraham Accords. Sages such as John Kerry, frozen in their outlooks (especially their cold contempt towards Israel), deemed that impossible. It took new eyes to see the possibilities and act upon them.

Yet, it is striking that the three primary architects of the Abraham Accords – Jared Kushner, David Friedman, and Jason Greenblatt – were all Orthodox Jews who possess a particular world view grounded in both realism and a sense of Jewish destiny. By contrast, Witkoff, a successful real attorney and developer, is typical of the secular American Jew who possesses a (thus far) tenuous attachment to Jewish tradition and a paucity of Torah knowledge.

That is a world of difference, illustrated by the attribution to him soon after his appointment as Trump’s Middle East negotiator, that Witkoff sees the conflict in Israel as a “complicated property transaction,” in which, presumably, each side wants something – land or money – and you try to find the middle ground through negotiations. Witkoff has certainly been involved in numerous real estate projects involving complex and acrimonious negotiations. And as a native New Yorker, I too know that New York can be a tough environment in which to live and do business.

Nevertheless, it is highly doubtful that Witkoff has ever been involved in a “complicated property transaction” in which the prospective buyer tortures, mutilates, rapes, and murders the sellers or their tenants. It is most unlikely that Witkoff ever dealt with buyers who routinely blow up the buildings they seek to acquire or kidnap the children of the sellers and hold them in torturous captivity only because these “buyers” are cruel, evil, Nazi-like psychopaths coddled by much of the world. Has Witkoff ever negotiated with malicious ghouls who murder and then hide the bodies of their victims? I think not. Even the New York real estate field is not that tough. Instead, we are in a war of ideas, of conflicting visions about life, human purpose, and destiny, and not in a war over condominiums v. co-ops v. commercial development.

Perhaps Steve Witkoff can learn a little more about Jewish history and Jewish destiny. He would learn that the Bible prophesied our exile from Israel if we sinned, and then our return to the land of Israel at the end of days. He would learn that our struggles in the land of Israel have little to do with territory and much to do with Torah, faith, redemption, Moshiach, and the revelation of G-d’s kingdom on earth. He would learn – many Israelis should learn this as well – that our rights to the land of Israel were given to us by the Creator. No nation and no international organization have the right to compromise that. Those nations that support us in the endeavor of the reborn Jewish state on this holy land will be blessed and those who try to frustrate our destiny will be cursed.

In the meantime, the Trump years will bring us moments of elation and others of deflation. We should not expect him to be everything we want. We should appreciate him as a relief from the nasty rebukes of the Biden years, Biden’s unbridled pursuit of policies that harmed us, and his sale of weapons to us just enough so that we should fight but not enough that we should prevail.

Most importantly, we should remind ourselves that decisions about the destiny of Israel must be made here, by us, by our government, and not by outsiders (or, for that matter, by our Supreme Court). We can listen to our friends and allies – and then decide what is in our interest. Above all, that means internalizing that, as King Shlomo put it (Proverbs 29:18), “when there is no vision, the people will lack restraint, but one who keeps the Torah is fortunate.”

We need to articulate a Jewish vision for the future. People with a strategy will always run circles around those without a strategy – and leaders without a strategy eventually wind up with Oslo Accords, expelling Jews from Gaza, repeated wars in Lebanon and Gaza, incentivizing hostage taking by rewarding the kidnappers, and conquering Gaza with no plan to reassert sovereignty and reestablish Jewish settlement there. Our enemies have a vision; we could use one.

The purported suggestion that Gazans will relocate to another country and Israel retain security control over that tiny, doomed territory, is a good start, far more encouraging than the hostage deal. And Donald Trump will respond more favorably to a nation with a vision that can simultaneously further American interests in the world for peace and prosperity (or vice versa) than a nation that lurches from crisis to crisis, groping in the dark for a way forward because it eschews the light of Torah.

We need a clear vision because Trump is mercurial, temperamental, transactional, and unpredictable. He wants concrete accomplishments and not just diplomatic babble, deeds and not talk, but like many others, he considers an “agreement” and a “signing ceremony” to be an accomplishment, regardless of its enforceability or future hazards. Like many in politics, he can be a “stage one thinker” as well, never contemplating the longer-term effects of any action. As such, our vision, and our commitment to implement it, are indispensable.

If we ascertain and solidify our vision, the Trump years can be a boon for Israel, the region, and the world. If our leaders cannot figure that out, then we need new ones, faithful ones, and soon.

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