Average Americans are concerned about the command relationship between the US and Israel. There is a growing awareness of the US funded and armed slaughter in Gaza. In 1967, over 50 years ago, Israelis created an open air concentration camp on the Strip. It held 2.3 million people by 2023, that number today reduced to around 1.5 million, with the population of Gaza City now killed or removed. Palestinian survivors are crowded into a tiny militarized area in the south without food, water or shelter. Most of Israel hopes that a third winter and outbreaks of disease will kill them all. Bibi Netanyahu and his murderous government are also at war with seven or eight other enemies, pot-shotting and assassinating around the region, and perhaps the world – while claiming full US government support.
The Trump campaign was funded by a number of Jewish Zionists who gambled that a Trump in the hand is worth two neoconservatives in the bush. We find few neocons in Washington who will compliment Trump these days; most, like Iraq war cheerleaders David Frum and Bill Kristol are openly contemptuous.
Critics of neoconservatives were long labeled anti-Semitic, and today Trump is arguably more neoconservative than the original thinkers and politicians who proudly endorsed Netanyahu’s twenty-five year old plan for Greater Israel, and worked for US boutique wars and regime changes to assist in the implementation of the Likud Party’s “Clean Break.”
Trump may or may not understand the nuances of neoconservatism; he’s more people person than academic. But he’s got a coach today in Netanyahu, and Bibi’s four personal visits to the White House and numerous phone calls have changed Donald Trump in several noticeable ways.
The first and most obvious shift is that Trump is unable, for reasons of personality or money or blackmail or simple fear of assassination, to assert himself with Bibi. Notwithstanding this recent image of Netanyahu doing a forced reading of an apology to the Emir of Qatar, the relationship between the leader of 9 million Israelis, and the leader of 340 million Americans is that of coach to player, leader to follower, boss to consigliere. Trump will on occasion denigrate and threaten to fight, fire, sue or otherwise impoverish other countries, his own staff, Republicans and Democrats in the Congress, mayors and governors, and past presidents. But he is exceptionally mannerly around Bibi.
The second shift, increasingly evident, is Trump’s obsession with war as much – or more than – peace. The average American may see war as the absence of peace, or the failure of peace, at best a transitional necessity to get back to peace. This is to be expected, we haven’t fought a war in our own country since 1861, and given the North won, we don’t often hear about the brutal 1864 burning of the Shenandoah Valley by General Philip Sheridan, or General Sherman’s murderous march from Atlanta to the Sea, both on orders by future president Ulysses Grant. But the average Israeli sees such war and conflict as normalcy. For Israel, in practical terms, war is peace.
Trump promised the end of wars, but coached by Bibi, he now openly declares total war on foreign and domestic enemies alike. In the name of “peace” Trump has continued to arm both Ukraine and Israel in two of the bloodiest and entirely unnecessary wars of the 21st century. Despite promises to end aid to Ukraine, thus saving Ukrainians from dying and sacrificing their very country for a corrupt, pointless, and broken NATO, he is now hinting at providing Tomahawk intermediate range missiles, and much more, so long as NATO pays. Despite promises to reduce Pentagon waste, he boasts the first trillion dollar “defense” budget, and demands a Department of War. Whatever Bibi needs in Gaza, Trump provides and delivers, be it weapons or cash or Palestinian-free “peace plans.”
Instead of peace talk, Trump increasingly sounds like a mini-bibi, focusing on enemies inside and outside of borders, warning of an America constantly at risk and constantly at war, surrounded by threats so deadly and irrational they can only be dealt with by overwhelming force. As he said to the generals, “They spit, we hit.”
The third shift is the most disturbing, and that is Trump’s increasingly evident adoption of Bibi’s contempt for “the other,” be that political enemies, whole religions, entire cultures, and simply those who disagree. Governors who reject federal control of State Guard units to enforce federal edicts in those states are not just internal enemies, but incompetent, and deserving of prison. Media outlets, whether independent or state, that criticize or snipe at Trump are stupid, lying and fake. Illegal immigrants become invading enemy units, governments that disagree with or question Trump’s policies are losers and illegitimate. More than the name calling, which can be seen as “tough guy” talk, a kind of American machismo, we have increasing dehumanization of the enemy in thought and language. The language of hate and intolerance – from the left where we see it today most clearly, and also from the right – prefigures wars. Language is the footman of war. It is both revolting and alarming when these words become the day-to-day language of the President, whose first and only duty is to the Republic and the Constitution that binds it.
Yet, dehumanizing language, arrogant and insulting language, is how Netanyahu, his political cadre, and 80 to 90% of Israelis speak about non-Zionists, even when they are Jewish. It’s how Netanyahu spoke to the mostly empty UN Assembly last week. Angry, impotent, sputtering contempt. Dehumanize and kill violently those who resist your rules, debate your arguments, choose to live differently, those refuse to accommodate your every demand, those who hold fast to their religions as you are losing yours – this seems to be what Bibi is teaching the American President.
Coach Bibi doesn’t control Donald Trump. It’s far worse than that. Coach Bibi inspires Trump. He serves as an example of something Trump wants – not just in terms of the power to wage war, to smite enemies foreign and domestic at will, but as Israeli Prime Minister off and on for 30 years, to be politically “popular,” a “strong leader.”
Most Christian Zionists surrounding Trump are also inspired by Netanyahu, and none of them have gotten as far as Charlie Kirk did, in starting to realize the hard and disturbing truth about the maniacal and criminal state of Israel. But they will.
An 80 year old man shouldn’t need a morality coach, or a daddy-figure. Four score years of living usually produces a natural shield against this kind of manipulation and suasion.
The “America First” President must end his unhealthy relationship with Netanyahu now, and make amends to all those he has harmed as a result. Better to be embarrassed or even assassinated by Israel’s goons now than go down in history as the American Netanyahu, the man who ended his own nation through nonsensical war and unwarranted hubris.
