‘The Trump paradox is that he was a blessing for Israel and a curse for American Jewry’
[Barak] Ravid told me that he did not emerge from his interview [for his just published book in Hebrew, “Trump’s Peace: The Abraham Accords and the Reshaping of the Middle East”], or his over-all analysis of Trump, believing that the former President is an anti-Semite: “I think his state of mind is similar to the state of mind of many people here in Israel.” He pointed out that Trump’s comments about American Jews, Christian evangelicals, and the Times might as well have come out of the mouth of Netanyahu himself.
Ravid is no outlier. Yossi Klein Halevi, a senior fellow of the Shalom Hartman Institute, in Jerusalem, told me, “In judging a President’s relationship to the Jews, I take a pragmatic Israeli view. What matters aren’t a few thoughtless or even hateful comments but a President’s policies. Some of the most pro-Israel Presidents—Truman, Nixon—made anti-Semitic comments. F.D.R. is still beloved by many Jews even though he was a disaster for European Jewry. The Trump paradox is that he was a blessing for Israel and a curse for American Jewry. His Administration negotiated the Abraham Accords, Israel’s first genuine normalization agreement with Arab countries. And he existentially threatened the liberal order that allowed American Jewry to thrive as no other diaspora. That’s Trump’s Jewish legacy.”
Yonit Levi, of Channel 12 and “Unholy,” pointed out that the “default position” of Israelis is “to love the American President.” This was as true for Bill Clinton, who tried to forge a two-state agreement, as it was for Trump, who shared Netanyahu’s contempt for Palestinian aspirations. The exception was Barack Obama, who lost favor among Israelis partly because he failed to visit Israel on his early trip to the Middle East, partly because of the Iran deal, partly because of his insistence on pressing for progress with the Palestinians––and partly, Ravid said, because of his race. Netanyahu’s “smear campaign” against Obama, Ravid said, was successful to some extent because of its racist undertones. “There are some Israelis who still call him ‘Barack Hussein Obama,’ and not because of his middle name,” he told me. “We have a racism problem in Israel, just like in America.” [Continue reading…]