Under Trump, Israel has a government of Jews with trembling knees

It’s a story often repeated: On June 22, 1982, Joe Biden was a Senator from Delaware and confronted then Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin during his Senate Foreign Relations committee testimony, threatening to cut off aid to Israel. Begin forcefully responded, “Don’t threaten us with cutting off your aid. It will not work. I am not a Jew with trembling knees. I am a proud Jew with 3,700 years of civilized history. Nobody came to our aid when we were dying in the gas chambers and ovens. Nobody came to our aid when we were striving to create our country. We paid for it. We fought for it. We died for it. We will stand by our principles. We will defend them. And, when necessary, we will die for them again, with or without your aid.”

But whether he wanted to or not, even when he was president of the United States, Biden never turned Israelis into Jews with trembling knees. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu maintained control of the war in Gaza and made the decisions. But has Netanyahu and his government turned into Jews with trembling under the second presidency of Donald Trump?

A few months ago, Trump ordered Israel to cancel any plans of settling parts of the West Bank. I am not suggesting that unilaterally settling the West Bank or parts of it would have been a good policy. In fact, I argued the opposite. But it is a policy decision that Israel should make, not the US president. The US president is of course free to advise, but issuing a blunt threat as Trump did is exactly what Begin stood up against. Maybe it’s because Netanyahu is not Begin or because Trump isn’t Biden, but either way, like a lapdog, Netanyahu complied without another word.

But far more dangerous than Trump’s orders to Israel on not settling the West Bank, are Trump’s orders to Israel on Gaza.

A Jerusalem Post editorial puts it bluntly: “[The Gaza plan] crosses many of the red lines that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli government set before proceeding to the next phase. […] [The Israeli government] appears to be powerless to stop the runaway train from bearing down and enabling Qatar and Turkey to rebuild Gaza with their natural partner, Hamas.”

In other words, Trump forced Israel into doing exactly what Netanyahu has repeatedly said that he would never do, leave Hamas in charge of Gaza.

But reality has never stood in the way of Trump. When facts don’t suit him, he makes up new facts.

As reported in the Times of Israel, “Trump praised the terror group for working “very hard” to return the remains of St.-Sgt.-Maj. Ran Gvili”. You might wonder what exactly the terrorists did to deserve this praise. Trump says, “They worked very hard to get the body back”, but the truth is quite different.

An article in the Jerusalem Post, informs us: “The Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) on Monday night revealed that the major intelligence development which led to the breakthrough to find Gvili was the capture of a specific Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist with knowledge of Gvili’s remains’ whereabouts around a month ago. This terrorist also revealed, under Shin Bet interrogation, the identities and locations of additional Islamic Jihad operatives who had been involved in moving Gvili’s remains numerous times.”

So, what the terrorists did was to obstruct and delay as much as they could. They could have returned the body of Gvili long ago. Of course, they could have chosen to not kidnap him in the first place. This is very far from Trump’s fictional accounting of what happened, and his praise of the terrorists is beyond the pale, but it fits his version of the made-up facts.

In another departure from reality, “US President Donald Trump affirmed that Hamas must disarm as part of Phase II of the ceasefire in Gaza in an interview with Israeli Axios reporter Barak Ravid on Monday. “Now we need to disarm Hamas, as they promised,” Trump emphasized.

But who is going to disarm Hamas? If anybody knows it, no one is saying, but most likely, the reason no one is saying is that nobody knows. As the Jerusalem Post editorial said, “Hamas supporters [Qatar and Turkey] [are being] put in charge of disarming the terrorists. We know how that is going to play out.”

A US official said, “We think disarmament comes along with some sort of amnesty, and candidly, we think we have a very good program to disarm. We’re in contact, or people representing us are in contact, with [Hamas], and we expect it to happen”.

It’s like these people have no idea what Hamas is, or perhaps in order to comply with Trump’s fictional reality, they’re pretending not to. Hamas has a single-minded obsession with destroying Israel. It is at the core of their being. To think that they will give up their weapons without a fight is absolutely insane. And who exactly is going to fight them? Only Israel could, but on Trump’s orders, that is now out of the question.

Israelis know all this of course. Netanyahu knows. But the Israeli government is no longer calling the shots. Trump has rendered them powerless. Israelis, under the most right-wing government in modern history, are now led by Jews with trembling knees. Begin must be rolling in his grave.