What Else is There To Say?

George W. Trump lashes his second term to Netanyahu's sinking ship

via Matt Johnson / Flickr

What I’ve heard is that the younger staffers in the Trump administration are demoralized by the president’s unwillingness to act to restrain the Israelis, despite the harm to American standing in the world, requests from all living former security chiefs in Israel, and the demands of his base.

If this continues through the month of August, many more will die needlessly. That is the track we’re on, with the religious parties having left what is now a minority coalition with which Netanyahu is running the country. In all likelihood there will be new elections in a couple of months, but things will get worse until then, and that’s not acceptable.

President Trump knows this is becoming a problem. FT reported he told one of his Jewish donors that his base is in revolt, as they should be.

The deafening silence of America’s liberal internationalists and neoconservatives goes to show the whole neocon project was mostly about making sure Israeli assets had a hand in the democracy promotion game. It was always about Zionist chauvinism rather than a universal concern for democracy and human rights, and the wars waged with that pretense in the Middle East were actually about Israel’s geopolitical goals. There is no need to sugarcoat it anymore.

The point of view I’ve articulated here is what would be necessary to actually stabilize Israel in the face of a constitutional crisis and unpopular war, and there is more appetite for that in Israel itself than in the foreign policy “expert” community here in Washington, it seems. Because it was not done, Israel itself as we have known it will increasingly be in jeopardy.

This is a moment that calls into question a lot of what we held to be solid. If I could make a point about vindicating the America First position: The original America First Committee folded after Pearl Harbor when American military forces were attacked. Today, Israel routinely harms ordinary Americans and yet many of its American defenders, who are in love with a country that exists only in their heads, continue to back genocide. Every one of them is a lesser man than Charles Lindbergh, and every argument used to mitigate Netanyahu’s culpability resembles David Irving’s arguments about Hitler.

This is a situation that can, is, and will continue to cause epistemic collapse for a lot of people. A few people are seeing what’s going on and understand it cannot continue, Michael Savage is proving he’s always been the greatest right-wing radio host, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has a daughter, has called what is going on genocide. “It is dangerous to one’s career for an American Catholic conservative to disagree with American foreign policy. It is fatal to disagree with Israel’s foreign policy,” wrote Fr. Jerry Pokorsky, a priest of the Diocese of Arlington, last week at Catholic Culture, and urged CatholicVote and other Catholic conservatives to move beyond sectarian concern for Palestinian Christians, however legitimate.

The vote in the Knesset to approve annexing parts of the West Bank removes the ambiguity—what is going on there is apartheid. Those people ought to have a vote. If I could make a few predictions about where this is heading: because annexation of the West Bank has been approved, BDS will increasingly come to mean an economic pressure boycott aimed at ending apartheid rather than one that seeks to end the Israeli state, just as there was in South Africa. People in the West Bank are already moving toward seeking a one-state, one-vote solution.

This is where the fight is going to be now. The fight is also going to be in our tech economy. An IDF veteran was recently put in charge of TikTok moderation, and more details are coming out about how Facebook’s Onavo deal with an Israeli intelligence-linked company was used in anticompetitive ways. The way Israel has to abuse the rules and violate people’s privacy in order to get people to accept their bad tech companies and bad behavior is what’s going to come under increasing scrutiny.

It is also going to be hard to justify the continuing integration of Israeli security tech with the United States. Scrutinizing this isn’t the same as BDS, and shouldn’t be confused with it. It’s just a security issue. If the U.S. and the Israeli government are increasingly at odds, we don’t want them providing avionics for Army helicopters, for instance. That just won’t do.

The Dutch, a NATO ally, have already listed Israel as a national security threat. There’s potential for conflict between Turkey and Israel in Syria as well. NATO is a treaty that has been ratified by Congress, Israel was made an ally by the Executive Branch. There’s a legitimate constitutional argument that Israel is not actually a U.S. ally, but even if you don’t accept that, NATO is both constitutionally more legitimate, and more important.

Mark Dubowitz, of FDD, a foreign-born head of a foreign influence operation that probably flouts the law, suggested engaging in lawfare against Israel’s opponents in the United States. I told him that I hoped they sued someone for suggesting FDD is a foreign influence operation that flouts American law, because that’s a proposition that could be defended in any court, and he blocked me. He’s in denial.

A Center for Security Policy guy also suggested treating supporters of Palestinian rights as members of the “Hamas Support Network,” echoing an acronym cooked up for the Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther. This is people choosing Israel over the American people, and that’s unacceptable.

Organized crime issues, like the one that led to arrests late last week in an Israeli organized crime-linked poker game hosted by NBA star Gilbert Arenas, are probably going to become more common too. Most Russian mobsters have Israeli passports.

It is very important that this not spill out into incivility and hostility toward ordinary American Jews, most of whom understand this can’t continue, and would probably agree with most of what I’m saying if I were not widely suppressed on this and other platforms (Hi Substack—if you could see to my domain mapping that’s sat undone for more than six months, there’s an open FTC complaint). But the course we are on cannot, and will not continue. It’s discrediting everything Trump promised, and everything that made him popular.