Useful idiots
The latest decision by the Trump administration declaring “not illegal “the Israeli settlements in the West Bank may well be the final and mortal blow not so much to the non-existent peace process, but to the very possibility to keep a Jewish and Democratic state.
I will not elaborate on this, even though it breaks my heart as a Progressive Zionist Israeli Jew.
What strikes me in this decision is that it shows once more how instrumental and transactional the US-Israeli relationship has become under Trump, which is not surprising given the fact that EVERYTHING is transactional for Trump.
Trump knows only one thing: he needs his base happy and the GOP scared during this impeachment process, to avoid removal from office.
The evidence of corruption-extortion/ abuse of power is so striking the GOP lawmakers do not even pretend to defend him on the merits.
They deflate, obstruct, but they do not question the very fact that Trump used his office for political gain.
In a GOP that has lost its moral and ethical compass, but also any coherent ideology, moving away from free trade/ muscular foreign policy or the promotion of democracy, very few things are still front and center, driven by White Evangelicals:
- Social-conservativism around abortion/ conservative judges/ religious freedom/ anti-gay rights agenda
- The alliance with the Israeli settler right headed by Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu.
Trump does not know a lot about the Jewish people and even less so about Israel, and he could not care less. But this is not the case for his base.
For them, the State of Israel is not the secular realization of the Zionist dream, but the accomplishment of a divine promise.
The Israeli pioneers that founded the State, the secular population that is (still) the majority of Israelis are tools in the accomplishment of this divine promise. These tools can also be called useful idiots actually. To a certain extent, some Religious Jewish Zionists think actually the same way, saying with condescension that at some point the secular will understand the big game at stake…
Trump knows that he cannot lose their support of the white Evangelicals on this topic, the same way he needs to show them how many conservative judges he’s nominating at the Supreme Court, which he emphasized once more recently, with the help of Mitch Mc Connell.
So he decided to give them this symbolic recognition that actually there is no green line, there are no settlers, there is actually no occupation and very soon I would not be surprised that the Trump Administration says there are no Palestinians, as all of this are phony Fake news from angry socialist leftists.
This is an amazing victory for the far-Right in Israel. They’ve been pushing for this for years or even decades.
Their plan is clear: making the very concept of occupation go away, and they will then be able to make legal “facts on the grounds” with full annexation.
As for the Palestinians (who?), they do not matter in their twisted views.
We are talking about a divine promise, remember? Well, in order for it to be fulfilled, we actually need all the Jews to emigrate to the Land of Israel. Not the State of Israel (this is for liberal losers) but to the Land of Israel, all of it, and as early as possible.
This promise can only be fully fulfilled if and when the State of Israel becomes the Land of Israel, which is actually the messianic vision of the settler right in Israel.
If the Palestinians do not get civil rights in that divine promise, who cares? For the white evangelicals, democracy is more a impediment than an objective, and they prove it every day as they try to disenfranchise minority voters, so they will not fight for equality or justice.
The American Jews are and will, but they do not matter for the Israeli settler right. They do not care because they are mostly reform or conservative Jews, they are anti-Trump and they are more interested in a Jewish and Democratic Israel and tikkun olam (Repairing the world) than perpetuating the occupation in a messianic vision.
If this leads to the divorce between American Jews and Israel, so be it. What’s at stake is the Land of Israel and a divine promise, you gotta do what you gotta do, right?
This alliance between White US evangelicals and the Israeli settler right is not only morally disgusting, it is also based on a major delusion.
The far-right Jews see the White evangelicals as Useful idiots that help them build in the territories, erase the green line and the national Palestinian movement.
The white evangelicals see the Jews as useful idiots that will accelerate the accomplishment of the divine promise that will lead to the mass conversion of the Jews to Christianity.
The fact is that these lunatics and national-religious fanatics are playing with the daily lives of millions of Israelis and Palesinian, making impossible any sensible solution, now or anytime in the future.
As for Jews, their battle for centuries has not only be about physical survival, but their survival as Jews being openly Jews. Getting an aliance with people that only want you to see disappear at some point when they “see the light” and recognize Jesus Christ as their savior is absolutely appalling. An embassy in Jerusalem does not justify an alliance with people who want you go away the way you are..
My own family left Spain in 1492 because they did not want to convert to Christianity. That Jews are ready, even theoretically, even in a distant future, to accept to convert for political and territorial gains, and doing so as citizens of the national home of the Jewish people, is revolting.
Useful, but also shameful idiots.