Caroline Glick, Author at Israel Rising

November 29, 2016November 29, 2016

The ADL’s new bedfellows

In an interview this week with the Australian media, Jordan’s King Abdullah became the latest Arab leader to express hope that President-elect Donald Trump and his team will lead the world’s to date failed fight against jihadist Islam.

Like his counterparts in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, Abdullah effectively ruled out the possibility that President Barack Obama will take any constructive steps to defeat the forces of global jihad in his last months in power.

Speaking of the humanitarian disaster in Aleppo for instance, Abdullah said, “I don’t think there’s much we can do until the new administration is in place and a strategy is formulated.”

Egyptian President Abdel Fatah a-Sisi was among the first Arab leaders to welcome Trump’s victory. Sisi has been largely shunned by the Obama administration. President Barack Obama supported the Muslim Brotherhood regime that Sisi and the Egyptian military overthrew in 2013.

Sisi was the first foreign leader to speak to Trump after his victory was announced. He released a statement to the media saying that he “looks forward to the presidency of President Donald Trump to inject a new spirit into the trajectory of Egyptian-American relations.”

The support that the incoming Trump administration is garnering in the Arab world stands in stark contrast to the near wall-to-wall opposition to Trump expressed by the American Muslim community. According to a survey of Muslim American opinion taken in October by the Council for American Islamic Relations, (CAIR), 72 percent of American Muslims supported Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. Trump was supported by a mere 4 percent of the Muslim community.

Muslim American activists played key roles in the Clinton campaign. They were particularly active in swing states like Ohio and Michigan where Trump won by narrow margins.

As the Jerusalem Post reported Wednesday, since the election, Muslim American leaders have expressed concern and hostility towards the incoming Trump administration. Muslim Democrat activist James Zogby, who also heads the Arab American Institute published an op-ed in the Jordan Times to this effect after the election. Zogby expressed concern that the Trump administration would harm the civil rights of Arab Americans.

The gap between the Arab world’s support for Trump and the Muslim American community’s opposition to him is particularly notable because it reverberates strongly the growing cleavage between the Israeli government and public and large swathes of the American Jewish community.

Led most prominently by the Anti-Defamation League and its executive director Jonathan Greenblatt, in the wake of the election, American Jews are at the forefront of efforts to delegitimize Trump and his senior advisors. Unlike their Muslim American counterparts, who are keeping their criticism of Arab regimes to themselves, Greenblatt, the ADL and their allies on the Left have linked their opposition to Trump to legitimizing opponents of Israel.

Before assuming his role at the ADL, Greenblatt worked in Valerie Jarrett’s political influence shop in the Obama White House. As ADL chief, Greenblatt has used his position as the head of a major Jewish organization to support the Obama administration’s policies. To this end, since the election, the ADL has worked to tar the incoming Trump administration as anti-Semitic, focusing its fire on Trump’s senior strategist, former Breitbart News CEO Stephen Bannon.

The ADL spearheaded the campaign to label Bannon an anti-Semite. When its claims were shown to be entirely spurious, this week the ADL quietly acknowledged that Bannon has actually never made any anti-Semitic statements. But its quiet admission of spreading lies didn’t stop the ADL from continuing to traffic in them.

Even after it admitted that “We are not aware of any anti-Semitic statements from Bannon,” the ADL continued to insist that Breitbart has been a home for anti-Semites because some Jew haters wrote anti-Semitic responses to Breitbart articles.

The ADL’s smear campaign against Bannon is a hard sell because Breitbart is among the most pro-Israel websites in the US. But this brings us to the second aspect of the ADL-led campaign against President-elect Donald Trump and his team.

With each passing day, it becomes increasingly clear that the ADL and its allies are using the Trump victory as a means to draw a distinction between pro-Israel and Jew friendly while arguing that anti-Semites support Israel and that people who hate Israel are not anti-Semites. This was the clear goal at the ADL’s summit on anti-Semitism last week.

As Daniel Greenfield reported Thursday in Frontpage Magazine, ADL used the conference to legitimize the so-called BDS campaign to boycott Jewish Israeli products and divest from businesses that do business with Jewish owned Israeli businesses. It similarly normalized the general argument that there is nothing inherently anti-Semitic about opposing the Jewish state.

In a panel with the disturbing title, “Is Delegitimization of Israel Anti-Semitism?” the ADL featured anti-Israel activist Jill Jacobs and the Jane Eisen. Both women argued that BDS is legitimate. At the same time, they denounced fervent supporters of Israel like Bannon and Center for Security President Frank Gaffney.

Greenfield reported that the ADL gave a prominent platform at the conference supposedly dedicated to fighting anti-Semitism to Ford Foundation CEO Darren Walker. The Ford Foundation is one of the leading contributors to anti-Israel organizations in the US and to anti-Zionist political front groups in Israel.

Other speakers explained that it isn’t that Israel’s foes are anti-Semitic. It is just that Israelis and their supporters have become “hypersensitive” to criticism.

All in all, Greenfield concluded, “Instead of tackling anti-Semitism, the ADL was tackling Israel and pro-Israel Jews” and “normalizing anti-Israel rhetoric and organizations.”

A few days after the conference, the ADL took the next step towards normalizing hatred for Israel in America when it announced its support for Rep. Keith Ellison’s candidacy to serve as the next chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

Ellison became the first Muslim American elected to the House of Representatives in 2006. In the decades that preceded his election, Ellison built a long and documented history of membership in and advocacy and employment for the anti-Semitic Nation of Islam. In his capacity as a Nation of Islam spokesman, Ellison made anti-Semitic statements and promoted anti-Jewish and anti-Israel positions and activists.

Since joining the House of Representatives, Ellison has been one of the leading anti-Israel voices in Congress. He has spearheaded multiple anti-Israel initiatives. He openly supports the boycott of Israeli Jewish products and has castigated Israel as an apartheid state.

Together with James Zogby, last August Ellison served as a member of the Democratic Party’s platform committee. The men attempted to purge the platform of language in support of Israel.

Yet Wednesday the ADL released a statement extolling Ellison as “a man of good character.” The ADL praised him as “an ally in the fight against anti-Semitism and for civil rights.”

It even said that Ellison “has been on record in support of Israel.”

ADL is supporting Ellison – and opposing Trump and his pro-Israel advisors – because Greenblatt and his backers support Obama’s policies in the Middle East and want to make it difficult for Trump to abandon them.

Ellison and the leading American Muslim groups oppose Trump for the same reason. The difference between the two groups is that the ADL and its Jewish backers are acting in this manner because they support the Left, which Obama leads. Ellison and his allies at CAIR, the Islamic Society of North America, and the Arab American Institute and other groups oppose Trump because they support the substance of Obama’s policies.

The chief characteristics of Obama’s Middle East policies have been support for the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran against Israel and the US’s Sunni allies.

Former FBI agent and counterterrorism expert John Guandolo estimates that upwards of 80 percent of Islamic centers and mosques in the US are controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood.

The major American Muslim groups, including CAIR, ISNA and the Islamic Circle of North America are tied to the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood in turn supports Iran.

During his year in power in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Muhammad Morsi permitted Iranian warships to travel through the Suez Canal, hosted Iranian leaders and Hezbollah commanders in Cairo and took a series of additional steps to embrace Iran.

Trump’s foreign policy advisor Walid Phares gave an interview to Egyptian television after Trump’s election stating that Trump will support a bill introduced by Senator Ted Cruz to outlaw the Muslim Brotherhood in the US as well as its offshoots CAIR, ISNA and others due to their support for jihadist terror groups formed by Brotherhood members. Al Qaeda, Hamas and a host of other jihadist groups have all been formed by Muslim Brotherhood followers.

Trump’s National Security Advisor, Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, Rep. Mike Pompeo, whom Trump has selected to serve as his CIA Director as well as Marine Gen. James Mattis, the leading contender to serve as Trump’s Defense Secretary are all outspoken opponents of Obama’ nuclear deal with Iran.

Given the stakes then, it makes perfect sense that the Arab American groups oppose Trump.

It also makes sense that Arab regimes threatened by the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran support Trump and eagerly await his inauguration.

And it clearly makes sense for Israel to welcome Trump’s election.

The only thing that makes no sense is the American Jewish campaign to demonize Trump. The ADL’s leadership of the campaign to smear Trump and his advisors while legitimizing BDS and supporting Israel bashers is antithetical to the interests of the American Jewish community.

In adopting these positions, Greenblatt and the ADL along with their allies in J Street, Jewish Voices for Peace, If Not Now, the Forward, other far left groups and mainstream groups that have lost their way show through their actions that they have conflated their Judaism with their support for the Left. To the extent that the interests of the Jews of America contradict the positions of the Left, the Jews of America are behaving in an “anti-Semitic” way.

It is the responsibility of the segment of the community that understands “Jewish” is not a synonym of “leftist” to oppose the ADL and its backers. If they fail to do so, they will contribute to the descent of the community into powerlessness and irrelevance, not only in the era of Trump, but into the future.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

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November 20, 2016

The Ellison Challenge

The Democratic Party stands at a crossroads today. And so do the Jewish Democrats.

Out of power in the White House and both houses of Congress, the Democrats must decide what sort of party they will be in the post-Obama world.

They have two basic options.

They can move to the center and try to rebuild their blue collar voter base that President-elect Donald Trump captivated with his populist message. To do so they will need to loosen the reins of the political correctness and weaken their racialism, their radical environmentalism and their support for open borders.

This is the sort of moderate posture that Bill Clinton led with. It is the sort of posture that Clinton tried but failed to convince his wife to adopt in this year’s campaign.

The second option is to go still further along the leftist trajectory that President Barack Obama set the party off on eight years ago. This is the favored option of the Bernie Sanders’ wing of the party. Sanders’ supporters refer to this option as the populist course. It is being played out today on the ground by the anti-Trump protesters who refuse to come to terms with the Trump victory and insistently defame Trump as a Nazi or Hitler and his advisors as Goebbels.

For the Democrats, such a populist course will require them to become more racialist, more authoritarian in their political correctness, angrier and more doctrinaire.

It will also require them to become an anti-Semitic party.

Anti-Semitism, like hatred of police and Christians are necessary components of Democratic populism. This is true first and foremost because they will need scapegoats to blame for all the bad things you can’t solve by demonizing and silencing your political opponents.

Jews, and particularly the Jewish state, along with evangelical Christians and cops are the only groups that you are allowed to hate, discriminate against and scapegoat in the authoritarian PC universe.

From the party’s initial post-election moves, it appears that the Democrats have decided to take the latter path.

Congressman Keith Ellison from Minneapolis is now poised to be selected as the next leader of the Democratic National Committee. This position is a powerful one. The DNC chairman, like his Republican counterpart, is the party’s chief fundraiser. When a party is out of power, the party chairman is treated like its formal leader, and most active spokesman.

Ellison is the head of the Democrats’ Progressive caucus. His candidacy is supported by incoming Senate minority leader Senator Chuck Schumer and outgoing Senate minority leader Harry Reid. Obama has indicated his support for Ellison. Senator Bernie Sanders is enthusiastically supporting him.

Ellison made history in 2006 when he was elected to serve as the first Muslim member of Congress. As the representative of an overwhelmingly Democratic district, once he won the Democratic primary in 2006, he was all but guaranteed that he could serve in Congress for as long as he wishes.

As Scott Johnson, a prominent conservative writer who runs the popular Powerlineblog website reported extensively in 2006, Ellison is an anti-Semite. He also defends cop killers.

As Johnson reported, Ellison was a long standing member of the anti-Semitic Nation of Islam. During his 2006 Congressional campaign, the local media gave next to no coverage to this association. But when it did come up, Ellison soothed concerns of Minneapolis’s Jewish community by sending a letter to the local Jewish Community Relations Committee.

In the letter Ellison claimed that he had only been briefly associated with Louis Farrakhan’s outfit, that he was unfamiliar with its anti-Semitism, and that he had never personally expressed such views.

The local media and the Jewish community were happy to take him at his word.

But as Johnson documented, his was lying on all counts.

Ellison’s association with the Nation of Islam dated back at least since 1989 and stretched at least until 1998. During that period, he not only knew about the Nation of Islam’s Jew hatred, he engaged in it himself.

As Johnson noted, in 1998, Ellison appeared at a public forum as a spokesman for the Nation of Islam. He was there to defend a woman who was under fire for allegedly referring to Jews as “among the most racist white people.”

Whereas the woman herself denied she had made the statement, Ellison defended and justified her alleged statement. Referring to her slander of Jews he said, “We stand by the truth contained in [the woman’s] remarks…Also it is absolutely true that merchants in Black areas generally treat Black customers badly.”

As Johnson reported, aside from engaging in anti-Jewish propaganda and actively promoting anti-Semitic messages and leaders, decades before the Black Lives Matter was formed, Ellison was a prominent defender of murderers of policemen.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Ellison likened the attacks to the Reichstag fire in 1933, intimating that the al Qaeda strike was an inside job. He then agreed with an audience member who said that “the Jews” gained the most from the attacks.

As a member of Congress, Ellison has been among the most hostile US lawmakers towards Israel. He has close relations with Muslim Brotherhood related groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations and Islamic Society of North America. Both groups were unindicted co-conspirators in the Holy Land Foundation terror funding trial, implicated in funding Hamas and al Qaida.

And now, Sens. Schumer, Sanders and Reid and President Obama along with the Democratic grassroots activists and other party leaders are supporting Ellison’s bid to serve as chairman of the DNC.

As Ellison’s statement about “merchants” makes clear, the Democrats’ Jew hatred may not be of the “Jews are the sons of apes and pigs,” variety. In all likelihood, it will be propagated through angry rhetoric about “bankers” and “financiers,” and “the rich.”

Ellison, a supporter of the anti-Semitic BDS movement, has libeled Israel by likening the Jewish state to apartheid South Africa. Under his leadership, we can expect for Democratic politicians to veer even further away from Israel and to embrace the slander that Zionism is racism.

The populist Sanders’ route seems more attractive to the Democrats than Bill Clinton’s moderate path because the notion is taking hold that Sanders would have been a stronger candidate in the general election than Clinton was.

This view is hard to accept. Most Americans reject socialism, and populist or not, it is difficult to see how Sanders would have sold his radical positions to an uninterested public.

The other problem with the “Sanders would have won,” argument is that it misses the distinction between Trump’s populism and Democratic populism.

Trump’s populism stemmed from his willingness to say things that other politicians and authority figures more generally wouldn’t dare to say. Trump’s allegation that the political system is rigged, for instance, empowered Americans who feel threatened by the authoritarianism of the politically correct Left.

Trump’s opponents insist that his populism empowered white power bigots. But that was a bug in his ointment. It wasn’t the ointment itself. Trump’s willingness to seemingly say anything, and certainly to say things that were beyond the narrow confines of the politically correct discourse, empowered tens of millions of voters. It also empowered white bigots at the fringes of the Right.

Whereas empowering white bigots was a side effect of Trump’s populism, empowering bigots is a central feature of leftist populism. And this is where it gets dicey for Jews.

As Obama – and Ellison – have shown, when Democrats channel populism, they use it to demonize their opponents as evil. They are “fat cats on Wall Street.” They are “racists,” and other deplorables.

There are scattered voices on the Left that are calling for their fellow leftists to revisit their authoritarian practice of labelling everyone who doesn’t walk lockstep behind them as racists and otherwise unacceptable. But for the most part, the populists are winning the argument by essentially demanding more ideological radicalism and more rigidity.

This policy is completely irrational from a political perspective. It’s hard to see the constituencies that will be swayed to support an angry, hateful party.

But this brings us to the Jews, who voted 3:1 for the Democrats, and to the American Jewish leadership whose support for Clinton was near unanimous.

When anti-Semitic, populist voices like Ellison’s began taking over Britain’s Labour Party, British Jews began heading for the exits. When push came to shove they preferred their individual rights and their communal rights as Jews above their partisan loyalties.

So far, this doesn’t appear to be the case among Jewish Democrats.

Consider the Anti-Defamation League’s unhinged onslaught against Trump’s chief strategist, former Breitbart CEO Steve Bannon.

While ignoring Ellison’s record of anti-Semitism and support for Israel’s enemies, as well as his ties to unindicted co-conspirators in funding Hamas, the ADL launched a scathing assault on Bannon accusing him of being an anti-Semite.

The ADL’s assault on Bannon follows its absurd claim in the final days of the campaign that Trump’s ad criticizing George Soros was anti-Semitic. It also follows the group’s bizarre condemnation of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s recent video clip in which he stated the plain fact that the Palestinian demand that Jews be ethnically cleansed from the territory they wish to take control over is an anti-Semitic demand.

As many prominent US Jews on both sides of the partisan divide have made clear, the accusation that Bannon, whose Breitbart website is one of the most pro-Israel websites in the US, is anti-Semitic is appalling on its face. The allegation is simply unsubstantiated.

So why do it? Why allege that a friend of the Jews is a Jew hater while ignoring the actual anti-Semitism of another man?

The answer is depressingly easy to discern.

The ADL appears to be trying to give cover to the rising forces of anti-Semitism in the Democratic Party. By falsely accusing Bannon and through him Trump of anti-Semitism, the ADL defuses the real problem of Democratic anti-Semitism. And if the ADL doesn’t think there is a problem with Ellison taking over the DNC, but alleges that Republicans hate them, then rank in file Jews will stay put.

The ADL of course isn’t alone in sending this message.

Following the election, Conservative and Reform congregations in major cities throughout the US organized communal “shivas,” to mourn Clinton’s defeat as if it was a death in the family. Such actions, along with characterizations of Trump and his advisors as Nazis or Hitler or white supremacists work to bind Jews to a party that is inhospitable to their communal interests while blinding them to the fact that Republicans do not hate Jews or the Jewish state.

For decades, American Jews have been at the forefront of every major social movement on in the US. But the Democratic Party’s move towards anti-Semitism, a move made apparent through Ellison’s rise, is one movement the Jews mustn’t lead.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

November 12, 2016November 13, 2016

Israel in the Trump Era

What can we expect from President-elect Donald Trump’s administration?

The positions that Trump struck during the presidential campaign were sometimes inconsistent and even contradictory. So it is impossible to forecast precisely what he will do once in office. But not everything is shrouded in mystery. Indeed, some important characteristics of his administration are already apparent.

First of all, President Barack Obama’s legacy will die the moment he leaves the White House on January 20. Republicans may not agree on much. But Trump and his party do agree that Obama’s policies must be abandoned and replaced. And they will work together to rollback all of Obama’s actions as president.

On the domestic policy front this means first and foremost that Obamacare will be repealed and replaced with health industry reforms that open the medical insurance market to competition.

With the support of the Republican-controlled Senate, Trump will end Obama’s push to reshape the US Supreme Court in the image of the activist, indeed, authoritarian Israeli Supreme Court. During his four year term, Trump may appoint as many as four out of nine justices. In so doing he will shape the court for the next generation.

Trump made clear during the race that the justices he selects will oppose the Obama-led leftist plan to transform the Court into an imperial judiciary that determines social and cultural norms and legislates from the bench.

Trump will also clean out the IRS. Under Obama, the IRS became an instrument of political warfare. Conservative and right wing pro-Israel groups were systematically discriminated against and targeted for abuse. It is possible to assume that Trump will fire the IRS officials who have been involved in this discriminatory abuse of power.

To be sure, much is still unclear about Trump’s foreign policy. But here too, certain things are already known. Trump will vacate the US’s signature from the nuclear deal with Iran.

Trump will not be able to repair the damage the deal has already caused – at least not immediately. He will not be able to reimpose the multilateral and UN Security Council sanctions on Iran that the nuclear deal cancelled. Such a move will require prolonged negotiations and their conclusion is far from assured.

Trump will likewise be unable to take back the billions of dollars that Iran has already received due to the abrogation of economic sanctions and through cash payoffs from the Obama administration.

At the same time, from his first day in office, Trump will change the trajectory of US policy towards Iran. He will oppose Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons. He will oppose Iran’s rise to regional hegemony.

A second conclusion that it is already possible to draw about the Trump presidency is that Trump will be much more like the hands off Ronald Reagan than the hands on Obama. His past as a businessman along with his lack of governmental or political experience will lead Trump to set general policy guidelines and goals and delegate responsibility for crafting suitable policies and programs to his cabinet secretaries and advisors.

This means that personnel will very much be policy in the Trump administration. Whereas Obama’s cabinet members and advisors have been more or less interchangeable since Obama himself determined everything from the details of his policies to the ways that the policies would be sold to the public (or hidden from the public), and implemented, Trump’s pick of advisors will be strategically significant.

Clearly it is too early to know who Trump’s advisors and cabinet members will be. But there is good reason for Israel to be encouraged by the advisors who have worked with Trump during the campaign.

Vice President-elect Mike Pence is one of the most pro-Israel policymakers in America. Former speaker of the house Newt Gingrich is an outspoken ally of Israel and of the US-Israel alliance. Likewise, former New York mayor Rudy Guiliani, former senator Rick Santorum, retired general Mike Flynn, and former UN ambassador John Bolton are all extraordinary champions of the US alliance with Israel.

Trump’s Israel affairs advisors during the campaign, David Friedman and Jason Greenblatt are also among the strongest advocates of the US-Israel alliance that have arisen in decades.

The striking friendliness of the Trump election team is even more notable when we consider what Israel would have faced from a Hillary Clinton administration. Clinton’s cabinet-in-waiting at the George Soros-funded and John Podesta-run Center for American Progress contained no serious advocates of the US-Israel alliance.

And her stable of advisors were not merely indifferent to Israel.

The Wikileaks revelations from Podesta’s emails, like the correspondences published by Judicial Watch from Clinton’s tenure as secretary made clear that Clinton’s team included several advisors with deep-seated hostility if not animus toward Israelis and toward the Israeli government.

The third thing that is already clear about the nature of the Trump administration is that it will not hesitate to abandon received wisdom on a whole host of issues and initiate policies that the bipartisan policy elites wouldn’t be caught dead even talking about.

Trump’s victory was first and foremost a defeat for the American elite, what Prof. Angelo Codevilla memorably referred to as America’s “ruling class.”

Trump’s campaign did not merely target the Democratic establishment. He attacked the Republican establishment as well. True, in his victory speech Trump said that he intends to heal the rifts in American society – presumably starting with his own party. But at least one thing ought to be clear about that reunification. As the president-elect, Trump will set the terms of the healing process.

There is every reason to expect that at a minimum, Trump will not soon forgive the Republicans who refused to support and even opposed his presidential bid. Members of the NeverTrump camp will be denied positions and influence over the Trump administration and sent into the political desert.

Another establishment that fell on its sword in this election is the American Jewish establishment. Led by the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish establishment, including its largest donors, stood almost as one in its support for Clinton. The American Jewish leadership placed their partisan preferences above their communal interests and responsibilities. In so doing they enfeebled the community in a manner that will be difficult to repair.

Both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party have anti-Semites in their ranks. The Jewish establishment ignored and pretended away the Democratic anti-Semites, even when they were burning Israeli flags at the Democratic convention. They said nothing when anti-Israel ravings that were at best borderline anti-Semitic of senior Clinton advisors like Thomas Pickering and Anne Marie Slaughter were published by Judicial Watch.

On the other hand, the Jewish establishment castigated Trump as anti-Semitic for the presence of anti-Semites like David Duke on the fringes of the Republican Party. Legitimate criticisms of anti-Israel financier George Soros were condemned as anti-Semitic while truly anti-Semitic assaults on Trump donor Sheldon Adelson by Clinton backers went unaddressed.

The consequence of the Jewish establishment’s almost total mobilization for Clinton is clear. The Trump White House won’t have an open door policy for those who falsely accused Trump of anti-Semitism.

Jewish Americans are going to have to either oust the leaders of the groups that put their party before their community or establish new organizations to defend their interests. Whatever path is chosen, the process of rebuilding the communal infrastructure the community’s leaders have wrecked will be long, difficult and expensive.

Unlike the American Jewish community, for Israel, the defeat of the American establishment is a positive development. The American foreign policy elite’s default bipartisan position on Israel was bad for both Israel and the health and reliability of its alliance with the US.

As I explained in my book, The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East, there was a dismaying consistency in US policy towards Israel that ran from Bill Clinton’s administration through the George W. Bush administration and on to the Obama administration.

At least since the Clinton years, the received wisdom of the American foreign policy elite has been that the US must seek to swiftly cause Israel to sign a deal with the PLO. The contours of the deal are similarly clear to all concerned. Israel must surrender control over all or most of Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria and transfer the areas, more or less Jew free, to the PLO.

This bipartisan view is inherently hostile to Israel. It places all the responsibility for making peace on Israel. And as the sole responsible party, Israel is also the sole party that is guilty for the absence of peace. The flipside is similarly dismal. Palestinians are absolved of responsibility for terrorism, hatred and political warfare against Israel.

The anti-Israel hostility inherent in the two-state paradigm has brought on a situation where even pro-Israel US officials end up joining their anti-Israel colleagues in bearing down on Israel to act in manners that are inimical both to its national security and to the very concept of a US-Israel alliance. The foreign policy ruling class’s commitment to the two-state paradigm has blinded them to Israel’s strategic importance to the US and caused them to see the US’s only stable ally in the region as a drag on US interests.

Many of Trump’s advisors, including Gingrich, whose name has been raised as a leading candidate either to serve as Trump’s White House chief of staff or as Secretary of State, have rejected this received wisdom. In a Republican presidential debate in 2011, Gingrich referred to the Palestinians as an “invented people,” and noted that they indoctrinate their children to perceive Jews as subhuman and seek their annihilation. For his statement of fact, Gingrich was brutally assaulted by Democratic and Republican elites.

But he never rescinded his statement.

Trump’s election provides Israel with the first opportunity in fifty years to reshape its alliance with the US.

This new alliance must be based a common understanding and respect for what Israel has to offer the US as well as the limits of what the US can offer Israel. The limits of US assistance are in large part the consequences of the many genies that Obama unleashed during the past eight years. And the opportunities will come more in areas related to Israel’s relations with the Palestinians and the political war being waged against it by the Europeans and the international left than to the challenges posed by the ascendance of Islamism in the Middle East.

To be sure, Trump is inconsistent. But from what we do know we must recognize that his rise is a deflection point in US history.

It is a rare moment where things that were unimaginable a month ago are possible. And if we play our cards right, like the American people, Israel stands to gain in ways we never dreamed.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

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November 6, 2016

Trump’s True Opponent

As these lines are being written it is Thursday morning in the US. Wikileaks announced hours ago that it is about to drop the mother lode of material it has gathered on Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

Previous Wikileaks document drops set the stage for FBI director James Comey’s letter to Congress last Friday, when he informed lawmakers that he has ordered his agents to reopen their probe of Clinton’s private email server, which he closed last July.

One week on, the FBI probe still dominates election coverage. If Wikileaks is true to its word, and even if it isn’t, Clinton and her campaign team will be unable to shift public attention away from the ballooning allegations of criminal corruption. This will remain the story of the election when polls open Tuesday morning.

The focus on Clinton’s alleged criminality in the final weeks of the election brings the 2016 presidential race full circle. Since the contest began in the summer of 2015, it was clear that this would be an election like no other.

After eight years of Barack Obama’s White House, America is a different place than it was in 2008, when Obama ran on a platform of hope and change.

Americans today are angry, scared, divided and cynical.

The outcome of this presidential election will determine whether Obama’s fundamental transformation of America will become a done deal. If Clinton prevails, the Obama revolution will be irreversible.

If Republican nominee Donald Trump emerges the winner, America will embark on a different course.

But even support or opposition to Obama’s revolution is not what this election is about. The anger that Americans’ feel is more powerful than mere policy differences – no matter how strongly felt.

More than a referendum on Obama, Tuesday vote will be a vote about Republican nominee Donald Trump and what he has come to represent. Voters on Tuesday will have to decide what they oppose more: Trump or what he stands for.

Trump is without a doubt a morally dubious candidate.

His prolific record of trash talking make the allegations of sexual harassment leveled against him by multiple women in recent weeks ring true. So too, his willingness to truck in racially charged rhetoric, like his accusation that the Mexican government is sending its rapists and violent criminals across the border for Americans to deal with, has made him toxic for millions of American voters.

But for his supporters, who Trump is, is less important than what he represents.

What he represents is the voters’ rebellion against the American establishment – not just the political establishment, but the full spectrum of the American elite. From Washington to Wall Street, from college campuses to the media, tens of millions of Americans believe that their establishment is rotten to the core. And they support Trump because he is running against the establishment.

Popular resentment and animosity towards the powers that be was enough to win Trump the Republican nomination. And as he closes the gap with Clinton in the lead up to Tuesday, chances are rising that it will be enough to get him into the White House as well.

How did we get to this point?

Trump’s rise has been in the making for a decade.

During the Bush administration, many Republicans quietly fretted that George W. Bush and his advisers didn’t know what they were doing in Iraq. They were angered even more by Bush’s bank bailout in 2008 and his massive increase of the national debt.

But as angry as they were at Bush, Republican anger at their leaders has grown exponentially during Obama’s tenure in office.

Since Obama entered office he has used the powers of his office to seize powers no president had ever dared to claim. And Republicans – who bore the brunt of the damage his policies caused – expected their presidential nominees and congressional representatives to protect them. They expected them to curb Obama’s perceived abuses at the IRS, the EPA, at the border with Mexico, the Justice Department, in the healthcare industry, the military, the State Department and beyond.

In both the 2008 and 2012 elections, millions of Republican voters were appalled by their successive nominees’ refusal to go on the offensive against Obama. In 2008, Sen. John McCain refused to mention Obama’s deep and longstanding ties with radical political and social forces, including his decades’ long relationship with his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, who regularly preached hatred for America from his pulpit.

In 2012, Mitt Romney simply choked. He couldn’t make a competent case against Obama or withstand media criticism, that as the Republican nominee he should have expected.

Republican voters walked away from their party’s defeat with the sense that their candidates cared more about what media said about them than they cared about winning.

Republican voters took an even dimmer view of their congressional leadership. In both the 2010 and 2014 congressional elections, Republicans won big in both houses of Congress. The voters’ clear wish was for their lawmakers to check Obama. But instead, the Republican leadership lashed out at their own voters while failing time after time to check Obama’s perceived abuse of power.

Case in point of course was the Republican Senate leadership’s failure to view Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran as a treaty, despite the fact that it clearly met the standard to be so viewed. By going along with Obama’s lie that the nuclear deal, which destroyed 70 years of US nuclear nonproliferation policy in one fell swoop, was a mere presidential agreement, the Senate leaders enabled Obama to implement his radical deal with little difficulty.

Trump was elected to be the Republican presidential nominee because Trump is the opposite of McCain, Romney and their counterparts in the GOP’s congressional leadership ranks. Trump isn’t merely running against Democrats and the liberal establishment. He is running against the Republican establishment as well. And his supporters love him for it.

Trump began building his anti-establishment credentials as soon as he announced his candidacy. At the first Republican primary debate in August 2015, he effectively declared war against the Republican establishment when he refused to pledge to support whatever candidate the party elected to serve as its nominee.

And the establishment understood that he was the gravest threat to their power and began attacking him.

What they didn’t understand was that he had goaded them into a fight that they could only lose.

The secret of Trump’s success has been a simple logical calculation. As the anti-establishment candidate, he has managed to castigate every criticism launched against him – no matter how valid – as the ravings of the corrupt establishment.

The establishment has not thrown in the towel though. According to one analysis, 91 percent of the media coverage of Trump’s campaign has been negative.

But the negative press has only strengthened his supporters’ conviction that he is the man of the hour.

But the attacks, again, have boomeranged.

A poll taken by USA Today earlier this week demonstrates this point. The poll asked likely voters, “What do you think is the primary threat that might try to change the election results?”

For months, the Clinton campaign has claimed that Russian President Vladimir Putin is interfering in the election on Trump’s behalf. Yet a mere 10 percent of voters polled said that “foreign interests such as Russian hackers,” would try to steal the elections.

On the other hand, 46 percent said the news media would. Another 21 percent said “the national political establishment” was intervening in the elections to shift the vote in the direction they wish.

In other words, 67 percent of voters believe that the establishment Trump is running against is trying to steal the elections.

Anti-Trump voters can be grouped into three often overlapping categories. First, of course there are the Democrats. These voters want Clinton to win. They support what Obama has done as president. They support Clinton because they want to see Obama’s policies continued and because they think she is the best candidate for the job.

Second, there is the establishment itself. In August The Washington Examiner polled Washington elites.

Among members of the Beltway establishment, support for Clinton is overwhelming. She beat Trump 62-22 percent. Twenty percent of Washington Republicans said they support Clinton.

These first two groups of anti-Trump voters support Clinton because they are more or less satisfied with the way things are.

The third group of anti-Trump voters oppose him because they believe that he is unfit to serve. They are Republicans and Independents.

It is this third group that brings us to the greatest anomaly of the election. According to Real Clear Politics’ average of polling data, Trump is trailing Clinton in national polls in a four-way race 43-45 percent. But at the same time, a mere 38 percent of Americans have a favorable view of him. In other words, millions of Americans who cannot stand Trump intend to vote for him on Tuesday.

This anomaly is explained by the public’s revulsion with the establishment. And this brings us to the Wikileaks documents and the FBI’s reopening of its criminal probe of Clinton and her team.

Clinton’s support levels have not dropped in the polls in the week that passed since Comey informed Congress that he had reopened the email probe.

On October 28, the Real Clear Politics poll average placed voter support for Clinton at 44.9 percent. On November 2, it had risen to 45.3 percent.

In the same time period, Trump’s support level rose from 41 to 43.6 percent.

Trump is rising because Republicans who have been undecided or have supported Libertarian Gary Johnson have decided to make their peace with him.

The renewed investigations against Clinton are not driving her voters away from her. As Clinton herself argued hours after Comey’s decision became public, her supporters have already factored in her legal difficulties. Trump is rising because with every new report of Clinton’s alleged corruption, Republican and Independent voters are reminded of how corrupt the establishment has become.

Their view of the lesser of two evils is shifting.

By Wednesday we will know whether the Republicans and Independents who are now accepting Trump will be enough to put him over the top. But what is clear enough today is that the voters who reject the establishment and view it as incurably corrupt will give Clinton no quarter if she manages to eke out a victory. At the same time, the establishment’s hatred of Trump will foment Washington battles the likes of which we have never seen, if he wins on Tuesday.

There is a lot hanging in the balance in this election. But only one question will determine the outcome.

If Trump wins on Tuesday, it will be the establishment he defeats.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

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November 3, 2016

Checkmating Obama

In one of the immortal lines of Godfather 2, mafia boss Michael Corleone discusses the fate of his brother, who betrayed him, with his enforcer.

“I don’t want anything to happen to him while my mother is alive,” Corleone said.

Message received.

The brother was murdered after their mother’s funeral.

Last week it was reported that the Obama administration has delivered a message to the Palestinian Authority. The administration has warned the PA that the US will veto any anti-Israel resolution brought before the UN Security Council before the US presidential elections on November 8.

Message received.

Open season on Israel at the Security Council will commence November 9. The Palestinians are planning appropriately.

Israel needs to plan, too. Israel’s most urgent diplomatic mission today is to develop and implement a strategy that will outflank President Barack Obama in his final eight weeks in power.

Lobbying the administration is pointless. Obama has waited eight years to exact his revenge on Israel for not supporting his hostile, strategically irrational policies. And he has no interest in letting bygones be bygones.

Before turning to what Israel must do, first we need to understand what Israel can do.

A good place to begin is by considering what just transpired at UNESCO, where twice in a week, UNESCO bodies resolved to erase 3,000 years of Jewish history in Jerusalem and the Temple Mount.

The fight that Israel waged at UNESCO is not the fight it needs to wage at the Security Council. The stakes at the Security Council are far higher.

Like the UN General Assembly, UNESCO’s decisions are non-binding declarations that have no legal or operational significance. As such, there is no reason to expend great resources to fight them. For Israel, the goal of the fight at UNESCO is not to defeat anti-Israel initiatives. That is impossible given the Palestinians’ automatic majority.

The purpose of the fight at UNESCO is to humiliate European governments that side with antisemitic initiatives, and to weaken the congenitally anti-Israel body itself.

The government achieved both of these objectives. Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi’s disavowal of his own government’s abstention from the vote on the first resolution – like the similar position taken after the fact by the Mexican government – was a diplomatic victory for Israel.

So too, the fact that UNESCO’s own Secretary-General Irina Bukova felt compelled to disavow her own agency’s actions by rejecting the resolution’s denial of the Jewish people’s ties to Jerusalem was a significant victory for Israel. Her statement was deeply damaging for UNESCO and its reputation.

Finally, the fact that Tanzania and the Philippines voted against the resolution was a testament to Israel’s capacity to convince other governments to abandon their traditional pro-Palestinian voting pattern.

The Palestinians won the vote at UNESCO because they are more powerful diplomatically than Israel. They have an automatic anti-Israel majority. But they weren’t empowered by their victory. To the contrary. They were bloodied by it.

In a sign of their weakening hold on member nations, the Palestinians and Jordanians felt compelled to send a threatening letter to the members of UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee lest they dare to vote against the resolution. Powerful players don’t make threats. They don’t need to.

Israel’s experience at UNESCO teaches us that there are governments that are open to counteroffers. Israel doesn’t need to hide in America’s shadow. It is capable of working on its own to blunt the impact of the Palestinians’ automatic majority. And it will need to use all of its resources to fend off a US-backed assault at the Security Council.

Unlike UNESCO, the Security Council can pass legally binding resolutions. Israel needs to be prepared to bring all of its resources to bear to prevent such a resolution from being adopted against it. Obama’s intention to abandon Israel at the Security Council means that Israel comes to this battle severely hobbled.

But there is one advantage to the US’s betrayal.

Over the years, Israel’s ability to trust the US to veto anti-Israel resolutions at the Security Council was been a mixed blessing. On the one hand, the US has secured Israel from diplomatic assaults. But on the other hand, our ability to trust Washington has made us diplomatically lazy and ineffective.

Safe in Washington’s shadow, we have behaved as through all diplomacy is public diplomacy. That is, we have pretended that statecraft begins and ends with making the moral or strategic case for our side against the other guys.

But public diplomacy is just one diplomatic tool.

The Syrian regime, for instance, has no moral case for securing international support. Bashar Assad didn’t convince Russian President Vladimir Putin to support him by arguing that he is better than alternative regimes. He bought Putin’s support by offering him permanent air and naval bases in Syria.

Then there is Morocco, another weak state with no public diplomacy case to make. Last March, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon outraged Rabat when he acknowledged the plain fact that Western Sahara, which Morocco occupies, is “occupied territory.”

Morocco quickly secured the support of Spain and France and launched an all-out onslaught against Ban. How did Morocco manage?

Morocco’s most powerful diplomatic resource is its control over migration flows from North Africa to Europe. Anytime it wishes, Rabat can open the migratory floodgates just as easily as it can keep them shut. And the French and Spanish know it.

In less than a month, Ban issued repeated abject apologies.

Game. Set. Match. Morocco.

From reports to date, it appears that shortly after the US elections on November 8, the Malaysians or Egyptians will submit a Palestinian-backed resolution that defines Israeli communities in united Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria as illegal. If the resolution is brought to a vote, the US will fail to veto it.

Such a resolution, or a resolution obligating Israel to withdraw to the 1949 armistice lines, would cause Israel grave harm.

So what resources does Israel have to prevent this from happening?

Of course, we have public diplomacy. And that might work with some friendly nations. But it won’t get us over the top. We need to learn from the Syrian and Moroccan examples and consider what we have to offer Security Council members in exchange for their support in scuttling the approaching onslaught against us.

One such resource is the US Congress. Israel’s allies in Congress are sickened by the Obama administration’s devastating Middle East policies. A solid majority of lawmakers can be trusted to support actions that will reinforce Israel’s position.

Israel has other resources as well that we can trade on. We have natural gas. And we have technologies that the governments of the world require to surmount the challenges of the 21 century. There is no reason to give these resources away when we can trade them for diplomatic support.

As for the Palestinians, as the UNESCO vote showed, they are less popular now than at any time in the past 40 years. All they have to offer is threats and antisemitism. Both are powerful weapons.

But they are no longer invincible.

Israel’s goal must be to use our resources at the Security Council in a manner that will make it impossible for Obama to enable an anti-Israel resolution to pass.

A method for achieving this goal has two components. The first component is to convince a friendly country on the Security Council to propose a balanced resolution that would counter the Palestinian-backed Israel-bashing one.

Such a resolution could include four points. First, it could deplore efforts to deny Jewish history in Jerusalem and the Temple Mount.

Second, it can condemn the PA/PLO for their continued unlawful funding of terrorists.

Third, it can urge Israel to restrain settlement construction in areas that in previous negotiations have been identified as likely territory for a future Palestinian state.

Fourth, it can call on Israel and the PA to reinstate negotiations immediately without preconditions.

Israel has friendly ties with a few Security Council members, among them Uruguay and New Zealand. In the final weeks of the Obama era, it is possible that Israel will be able to convince one of them to submit a balanced resolution along these lines.

Obama would be hard-pressed to oppose such a resolution in favor of one that singles Israel out for rebuke.

But that still is insufficient. Obama can make Uruguay and New Zealand a better offer if he wishes.

And so we move to the second aspect of the plan.

If we learn nothing else from the Obama era, we must recognize that the time has come for Israel to stop sufficing with just one Security Council veto. Most states have several. And we need a few more.

Russia today is the best place to start our search for a second veto.

Putin is a dealmaker. As his agreement with Assad showed, he is willing to consider attractive offers. Obviously, Israel won’t offer Russia bases. But we do have other things to offer Putin in exchange for a veto.

For instance, in exchange for a Russian veto at the Security Council, Israel can offer Putin to lobby the US Congress to cancel US sanctions against Russia over Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

Israel has no dog in that fight. And the sanctions are not getting the US anywhere.

Putin might go for the deal for two reasons. First, by stepping into the breach and defending Israel against Obama, he will humiliate Obama.

Second, if Israel succeeds with the Congress, he will reap economic rewards.

For his part, Putin wouldn’t even have to openly side with Israel. All he would have to do is announce that in the interests of regional stability, Russia will not support an unbalanced resolution on Israel and the Palestinians.

If Putin supports a balanced resolution, Obama will be checkmated. His plan to take revenge on Israel for not following him off the strategic cliff will be foiled. Israel will have survived his presidency.

None of this will be easy. And success is far from assured. There are many more ways for Israel to fail than succeed. Our diplomatic weakness remains a millstone around our neck. But as the UNESCO resolutions showed, attacking Israel is no longer cost free. We are not powerless in the grip of circumstances. We have cards to play.

And now is the time to play them for all they are worth.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

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