Kingmakers Sheldon Adelson and Haim Saban are suddenly reduced to begging for crumbs from their respective political parties. This is the message of John Bolton’s failed candidacy for the State Department, Keith Ellison’s survival as frontrunner for the Democratic Party chair, and Trump’s elevation of extremist David Friedman as his ambassador to Israel. These are all signs of the new nationalism we are going to be seeing in the Trump administration: Jews can have Israel and Palestine, but America is for Americans.

Donald Trump was “wise” when he said that he refused to demonize Putin and wouldn’t it be great if Russia and the US could cooperate not fight, Stephen Cohen says on WNYC. And Paul Krugman slurs Trump as a Kremlin agent and thereby stigmatizes dissenting views of the new Cold War.

Trump can’t stop talking about moving the embassy to Jerusalem; and Netanyahu is looking forward to the new president, thereby driving a wedge between himself and American Jewry.

“We’re very careful not to outright oppose BDS,” Wendy Sherman, a Clinton surrogate, told James Zogby during Democratic Party platform deliberations. The tide in favor of Palestinian rights is irreversible, Zogby reports, and in spite of determined resistance from party leaders, the insurgent campaigns of Jesse Jackson in 1988 and Bernie Sanders in 2016 have solidified progress.

Family foundations of which Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner is a director gave $325,860 to the Friends of the Israeli Defense Forces in recent years. The lion’s share of the gifts, about $200,000, were made in two years following the Israeli onslaught on Gaza in 2008-2009. Trump has suggested that Kushner could mediate peace in the Middle East.

Peter Beinart says Steve Bannon can be accused of misogyny, racism and Islamophobia, not anti-Semitism during an open argument among pro-Israel Jews on CNN, a signal of more and more public disagreement.

However dubious big Republican supporters of Israel felt about Donald Trump, in the last weeks of the election campaign many of them gave a lot of money to the Republican Party; and Sheldon Adelson and his wife gave $10 million to a pro-Trump PAC

Chemi Shalev and Jeremy Ben-Ami say that if Keith Ellison is defeated for Democratic Party chair, there will be a backlash against the organized Jewish community that has opposed a rising star; and that is bad for Jews. Ellison is shaking up the discussion of US policy.

Ten years ago Keith Ellison’s candidacy for DNC chair would be dead in the water in light of his criticisms of Israel. But the surprise this time is that many left and liberal Zionist influencers have come out to defeat the smears against Ellison, signaling a new openness in our discourse to debate the Israel lobby.