Trump’s election is most reminiscent of the Egyptian counter-revolution. Maybe history is not progressive. Maybe cultural advances and economic fairness are not the end point. Maybe history is actually deeply conservative, and majoritarian reactions are going to last a long time in an era of shortages, climate crises and mass migrations.
Benjamin Netanyahu is reported to be anxious about a Trump White House. Why? However hawkish Netanyahu appears to outsiders, he is relatively moderate compared to the rest of his government coalition partners and the Israeli prime minister could find himself outflanked by Naftali Bennett if the Trump administration approves settler demands to annex most or all of the West Bank. Netanyahu’s realization of his Greater Israel dream may prove pyrrhic.
Trump’s combination of rightwing extremism and love for Israel will cause American Jews to come out against the Israeli government and its policies, observers say, thereby accelerating the divide between liberal American Jews and the Jewish state, which is practicing apartheid.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was re-elected on the promise that Palestinians would never have their own independent state, and now even the most powerful pro-Israel organization in the U.S. appears to be changing its rhetoric on the two-state solution. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, scrubbed a reference to the two-state solution from talking points on its website.
Gideon Levy & Alex Levac report for Haaretz: It was a pogrom. The survivors are five congenial Palestinian farmers who speak broken Hebrew and work in construction in Israel, with valid entry permits. They are convinced that they survived last Saturday’s attack only by a miracle. “We will kill you!” the assailants shouted, as they beat the men over the head and on their bodies with clubs and iron pipes, and brandished serrated knives. The only “crime” of the Palestinians, who were in the midst of harvesting their olives when the settlers swooped down on them, was that they were Palestinians who had the temerity to work their land.
At Seattle’s Temple de Hirsch Sinai, Sunday night there was a mournful gathering to respond to the election of Donald J. Trump. Speakers promised the organized Jewish institutions will be in solidarity with Seattle minorities and new immigrants, amid fears for us all.
The rightwing Israel supporters have redefined anti-Semitism to be criticism of Israel. Now an accused anti-Semite, Steve Bannon, is set to enter the White House as a Trump adviser and many Israel supporters have nothing to say, and the New York Times downplays the appointment, because Trump has said that he is pro-Israel. The Israel lobby is swallowing its own medicine.
Please tell us your reaction to Donald Trump’s election victory and your suggestions for how Palestinian justice work in general, and Mondoweiss’s journalism in particular, should regroup and move forward. Even though the implications for US foreign policy are not yet clear, the immediate outpouring of racist and Islamophobic rage across the country would seem to confirm our worst fears. Here at Mondoweiss we are starting to understand what this will mean for our work and how we must change accordingly. As always our focus will be on documenting, analyzing and challenging the ongoing Israeli dispossession of the Palestinian people. But one immediate change following the election is that we plan to expand our coverage of the racism and violence here in the U.S. that is finding political expression and power through the Trump victory.
President-elect Donald Trump’s selection of Stephen Bannon to be his chief strategist has brought to the surface the antisemitic undercurrent of Trump’s reactionary populism. How we go about explaining the phenomenon goes some way towards guiding us as to how to mobilize against it. Max Ajl says it’s essential to understand that “Trumpism” is the product of a US social and political order that was neither reformable nor defensible, and it offers an opportunity to join a more inclusive movement – “one big enough for all of us, except for those who insist that others pay the price for their safety.”
In a triumph of navel-gazing and moral idiocy, NYT op-ed writer Shmuel Rosner says the bad thing about Trump is not what he threatens to America but that Israeli love for him will expose to American Jews the rightwing racism of their Middle East counterparts and they will distance themselves from Israel.