israel’s wishful thinking over the Trump presidency

Posted on November 11, 2016 by michaellee2009

Israel’s wishful thinking over the Trump presidency

Donald Trump during the opening ceremony for the Trump International Hotel, Old Post Office, in Washington, USA on October 26, 2016 [Samuel Corum / Anadolu Agency]

Speculation among world leaders and political observers is rife over what will happen next now that billionaire businessman Donald Trump has emerged triumphant as the US president-elect. In Israel, for instance, the right-wing Education Minister Naftali Bennett came out within hours of Trump’s victory to declare the demise of the two-state solution for Palestinian-Israel. Since most realistic observers believe that this was dead and buried years ago, his statement was not so shocking, but when Bennett followed it up by declaring, “The era of a Palestinian state is over,” political doves must have winced.

However, could this be a case of wishful thinking by Bennett and his war-mongering colleagues in Tel Aviv? They and the pro-Israel lobby in Washington may be a little too premature with their joy at a Trump victory. With Hillary Clinton in the White House it would have been business as usual for the Zionist State which, during the Obama years, has continued unabated to slice, dice, steal and occupy huge swathes of Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank without US resistance.

Will Israel be given such a free rein under Trump? For decades under various Democrat and Republican administrations the Zionist war machine has eaten up US tax dollars and Palestinian lands. Most ordinary American voters it seems, while having not the slightest interest or concern about Palestinians living in Gaza or the West Bank, chose Trump because they want a better life and better prospects for themselves and their families. It finally dawned on them that nothing would change as long as the sleazy, corrupt and incestuous “political elite” remained in power, because the politicians on Capitol Hill have all but paralysed domestic decision-making to the detriment of the disenfranchised white, working classes in America’s industrial wastelands.

Don’t for one minute think that I am a Trump supporter, but the truth is that he could be the first US president to bring about change if all his campaign talk about spending and investment comes to fruition. He begins his presidency in January with something that Barack Obama has never had; his party will control both chambers of Congress — the House of Representatives and the Senate — raising the prospect that he might be able to make changes happen. Guantanamo Bay isn’t just a monument to America’s fall from grace with regards to human rights; it is also a stark reminder of Obama’s impotence as president.

Trump has never held public office but he is a crafty businessman who knows how to make a fast buck and he is obviously someone who demands value for money; this was a constant theme during his unconventional election campaign. One of his targets was NATO, which he described as “obsolete”. In an interview with ABC News earlier this year he said: “NATO was done at a time you had the Soviet Union, which was obviously larger, much larger than Russia is today. And what I’m saying is that we pay, number one, a totally disproportionate share of NATO. We’re spending — the biggest alliance share is paid for by us, disproportionate to other countries. And if you look at the Ukraine, we’re the ones always fighting on the Ukraine. I never hear any other countries even mentioned and we’re fighting constantly. We’re talking about Ukraine, get out, do this, do that. And I mean Ukraine is very far away from us.”

To be precise, Ukraine is 9,153 kilometres from the US whereas the Zionist State of Israel is, at 10,882 kilometres, even further away and probably costs the US taxpayer much, much more to prop-up. In business terms, backing Israel is a bad investment and I don’t think it will be too long before Trump realises that subsidising a piece of land, barely the size of a South African game reserve, is not good value for money.

Since 1992, the US has offered Israel an additional $2 billion in loan guarantees every year, with congressional researchers disclosing that between 1974 and 1989, $16.4 billion in US military loans were converted to grants. Furthermore, all past American loans to Israel have eventually been written off by Congress, which explains Israel’s audacious boast that it has never defaulted on a US government loan. This sort of tongue-in-cheek joke at the American taxpayers’ expense is an example of the chutzpah of Tel Aviv ministerial circles.

Unlike other countries, which receive aid in quarterly instalments, aid to Israel since 1982 has been given in a lump sum at the beginning of the fiscal year, leaving the US government to borrow from future revenues. Incredibly, Israel even lends some of this money back through US treasury bills and collects the additional interest. More chutzpah and more US tax dollars down the Israeli drain.

If Trump’s treasury people really start digging they will also discover that, in addition, Israel also pockets more than $1.5 billion worth of private US funding every year; $1 billion in private tax-deductible donations and $500 million in Israeli bonds. The facility for American citizens to make what amounts to tax-deductible contributions to a foreign government, made possible through a number of Jewish charities, is not available for any other country. These figures do not include short- and long-term commercial loans from US banks, which have been as high as $1 billion per annum in recent years.

According to the May edition of The Washington Report on Middle East affairs, the total aid package to the Zionist State is around one third of America’s total foreign-aid budget, even though Israel has just .001 per cent of the world’s population and ranks as the 16th wealthiest country in the world.

In 1994, Yossi Beilen, Israel’s then Deputy Foreign Minister and a member of the Knesset, asked the Women’s International Zionist Organisation, “If our economic situation is better than in many of your countries, how can we go on asking for your charity?” That is, indeed, a vexed question which should cause outrage among the impoverished heartlands of Trump voters.

Earlier this year, President-elect Trump said that he would be “very good to Israel” and even announced that he was close to Judaism. During the election campaign, though, he exposed his ignorance of the Jewish faith; some of his comments bordered on anti-Semitism. Furthermore, he regularly exposed his ignorance of the Middle East.

On Wednesday, Haaretz published a brutal article giving six reasons why Trump would be a disaster for American Jews, Israel and the Middle East. Apart from being unable to distinguish the difference between Hamas and Hezbollah, and his anti-Semitic rhetoric when addressing the Republican Jewish Coalition last December, he was accused of doing the work of Daesh propaganda by exploiting the fear of terrorism and increasing anti-Muslim sentiment.

In his Haaretz op-ed, Alexander Griffing said that he fears that Trump would “outsource Middle East policy to Putin” as his “new foreign policy approach is based on the United States making ‘good deals’ and getting ‘paid back’ for protection or intervention abroad. This would end the US ‘getting screwed over’ by having to do the rest of the world’s work for them. It’s several steps away from the familiar American traditions of neoconservative or liberal interventionist policy. As part of this US Interests First approach, he has regularly called for letting Putin, Assad and ISIS [Daesh] fight it out in Syria.”

If this happens, and it is a suggestion which has played well with US Trump voters, Iran and Hezbollah would strengthen their position on Israel’s doorstep with the absence of US military presence in the region. Trump’s focus, according to his supporters, is that he will “make America great again” and that could mean cutting off the massive financial drain called the State of Israel, which is clearly insatiable.

I’m not convinced, either, by fevered talk that Trump will move the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem; no country in the world recognises Israel’s illegal annexation of the Holy City, which it claims as its capital. Trump’s comment that Jerusalem should indeed be Israel’s capital it was made in the context of his battle with fellow Republican contender Ted Cruz, who has a strong Christian evangelical backing; in the US this also usually means that he is a staunch Zionist, so Trump had to outdo his opponent’s commitment to Israel’s founding ideology. Cruz has long gone and so have, I suspect, many of the Trump camp’s election pledges and promises. His offensive attitude towards NATO also reveals that he feels little or no sentimental attachment to long-time allies, and that could include Israel.

While the world is bracing itself for the arrival of President Donald Trump in 70 days’ time, the situation for Palestinians still hangs in the balance. The only certainty is that under President Hillary Clinton nothing would have changed to improve their situation and US foreign policy would have remained the same; very pro-Israel.

Trump’s focus on US interests will be much narrower and led by the domestic economy because he knows that there is no appetite for continued US military involvement in the Middle East and that America’s withdrawal from the region could be seen, in the long term, as no bad thing. Sadly the main beneficiaries of this will be those dictators already in power who have no interest in democracy or human rights.

If I was sitting in Gaza or Ramallah I would start making overtures now to Russia, China, India and Europe. Trump’s arrival will certainly be a game changer but the Tel Aviv celebrations for his victory may be very untimely. My advice to Israelis is simple: “Be careful what you wish for.”