Trump reportedly berated Sheldon Adelson for not giving more millions to his flagging campaign. That’s good news. Trump is less likely to deliver to Adelson, and nuke Iran. Not that the New York Times even explores the foreign policy ramifications of the report.
The new complaint, filed on behalf of four Palestinians from the West Bank, names President Donald Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law who was placed in charge of brokering the deal despite having no experience in foreign policy or the Middle East.
Donald Trump disappointed John Bolton las tyear by refusing to strike Iranian bases in response to Iran destroying an American drone, because the strike would likely kill 150. “Disproportionate… Too many body bags,” Trump said. Bolton writes, “This was the most irrational thing I ever witnessed any president do,” and says he nearly resigned. The author doesn’t understand how frightening this story is, about Bolton himself.
Trump wants Israel “to move forward with annexation to create a wedge issue visavis Joe Biden and the Democratic Party [to have] a hard political tool to use against Democrats in a very tight election. We all remember last summer the brouhaha that Trump created over the potential visit of Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar to Israel and accusing the Democratic Party of being leftwing radicals,” Israeli journalist Neri Zilber tells J Street webinar.
Joe Biden has bent over backwards to tell the Jewish community he can work with Netanyahu and won’t sanction Israel if it annexes West Bank lands. He cannot afford to alienate the largest source of Democratic campaign funding, from pro-Israel Jews, a source Trump is making a play for.
Trump has made the establishment nostalgic for the last Republican president. But Bush made the most destructive executive mistake of recent times, the decision to invade Iraq in 2003. It was based on lies, and a weakminded strategy of bringing democracy by gunpoint, and its wrongness was obvious at the time to millions who protested it.
US media critical of Russian interference in the 2016 election should be reporting an FBI affidavit suggesting Israeli effort to interfere at the highest level.
The Israeli Jewish right wants to keep 620,000 settlers in West Bank– and the left wants to keep 585,000 there, says legislator Yair Golan. So there is no real opposition to the settlement project, or the one-state reality, even though it threatens “the Zionist dream.”
AIPAC ceo Howard Kohr implicitly describes Bernie Sanders as a “radical” who is trying to undermine U.S. support for Israel and aid Israel’s enemies. “Israel cannot afford a single minute where America’s friendship with Israel at the highest levels either wavers or skips,” Kohr said.
The Trump administration strategy is to bully Palestinian leadership into submission, from defunding UNRWA, which supplies care to millions of Palestinian refugees, to removing support for a major tertiary care hospital in East Jerusalem.