“Stay strong Israel, January 20th is fast approaching!” Donald Trump tweeted today in anticipation of Secretary of State John Kerry’s much-ballyhooed speech on Middle East peace this morning. But Steny Hoyer joins forces with Trump in telling the Obama administration to leave Israel alone.

President Obama’s decision to allow passage of a UN Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlements as illegal has done more to change the shape of the conflict than any other action in the last ten years, even than Israel’s massacres in Gaza. Israel supporters always said that the country would not move toward peace if the U.S. was tough on it. But the UN Security Council resolution against settlements shows the opposite to be true: a little distance is already causing huge positive developments, isolating the country in world opinion and licensing criticism of PM Netanyahu. Obama has nudged Israel, and the media, toward recognition of the country’s new status, as a rogue state.

More cries of betrayal from the pampered nation. Benjamin Netanyahu says President Obama “initiated” the resolution against settlements at the United Nations, betraying his “explicit commitment” to Israel not to support such action. Education Minister Naftali Bennett says it was all planned in the Cairo speech 7 years ago. Israel’s situation is naked in the wake of the Security Council resolution to condemn the settlements.

‘We tried everything,’ White House aide Ben Rhodes says, in explaining Obama decision to allow UN Security Council resolution against settlements. He says Obama and John Kerry repeatedly warned Netanyahu about Israel’s “international isolation” but Netanyahu chose to ignore the warnings.

When it learned President Obama intended to allow a UN Security Council resolution condemning settlements to go through yesterday, Israel called on Donald Trump to intervene, and he called Egyptian president al-Sisi, and Egypt withdrew the resolution. And you thought we had one president at a time!

The Obama administration was going to abstain from a UN Security Council vote condemning Israeli settlements today, according to reports; but Egyptians withdrew the measure at the last minute under international pressure from Israel and Donald Trump.

If a newspaper had produced the documentation of political corruption that Wikileaks provided in the last year, it would be up for a Pulitzer Prize. The media should stop demonizing Wikileaks and the Russians and focus on what we learned from the records.

Donald Trump is giving ISIS a recruiting tool by nominating an extremist supporter of settlers as ambassador to Israel in David Friedman. Hatred of the U.S. will increase if the Arab world comes to believe that the U.S. is abandoning the Palestinians.

A landmark piece in the New York Times: Omri Boehm of the New School says Trump era will force liberal Zionists to choose Zionism or liberalism, because Zionism is “a political agenda rooted in the denial of liberal politics” and the privileging of one ethnic group over another.

The good news of Trump’s nomination of an extremist to be the US ambassador to Israel is that the American Jewish monolith in favor of Israel will shatter publicly and liberal Zionists will have to throw in the towel on the failed dream of partitioning the land so as to preserve a “Jewish democracy.”