There was a time when a meeting between the president of the United States and the prime minister of Israel brought only pride to both Israeli and American Jews, who saw two democratic leaders working together. Well, I know that I am not alone when I say that pride is not the emotion that welled up in me on seeing the chummy picture of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu meeting in the Oval Office on Monday. It was disgust and depression.
Each is a wannabe autocrat, each is working to undermine the rule of law and so-called elites in his respective country, each is seeking to crush what he calls a “deep state” of government professionals. Each is steering his nation away from its once universal aspiration to be a “light unto the nations” towards a narrow, brutish might-equals-right ethnonationalism that is ready to mainstream ethnic cleansing. Each treats his political opposition not as legitimate but as enemies within and each has filled his Cabinet with incompetent hacks, deliberately chosen for loyalty to him instead of the laws of their lands.
Each is driving his country away from its democratic traditional allies. Each asserts territorial expansion as a divine right — “From the Gulf of America to Greenland” and “From the West Bank to Gaza.”
Trump and Netanyahu are engaged, each in his own country, in creating a “post-America” and a “post-Israel” world. By “post-America,” though, I don’t mean an America that is losing relative power but an America that is deliberately shedding its core identity as a country, on its best days, committed to the rule of law at home and the betterment of all humanity abroad. By “post-Israel,” I mean an Israel that is deliberately shedding its core identity — that of a proudly proclaimed rule-of-law democracy in a region of strongmen that will always prioritise a permanent peace with Palestinians (if its security can be assured) over “a permanent piece’’ of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
One simply cannot imagine Trump or Vice President JD Vance aspiring to build the America that Ronald Reagan described in his January 11, 1989, farewell address. Reagan spoke of the need to reinforce in our children “what America is and what she represents in the long history of the world.” That America was a moral and political beacon, “a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.”
In mindlessly shrinking our own government and dissing so many of our traditional allies, “Trump is not just destroying careers and values, he is quite literally making America weak again,” Stanford democracy expert Larry Diamond told me. That is about as “post” the America I grew up in — and aspire to see my grandchildren grow up in — as I can imagine.
Netanyahu has been hard at work creating a similar post-Israel. Trump forced out his FBI director for being insufficiently loyal; Netanyahu is close to doing the same with Ronen Bar, the widely respected head of Israel’s FBI equivalent, the Shin Bet, at a time when Bar is investigating some of Netanyahu’s top aides.
Netanyahu himself is on trial on corruption charges. He stands accused by the Israeli opposition — and by more than a few relatives of hostages — of prolonging the war in Gaza to appease the Jewish supremacists who keep him in power and potentially out of jail.
He is also trying, as we speak, to remove Israel’s independent and courageous attorney general because he apparently considers her disloyal. Since coming to office in late 2022, Netanyahu has also been on a mission to undermine the power of the Israeli Supreme Court to check the decisions of the executive and legislative branches.
Netanyahu’s aim today is “dismantling all the essential components of democracy,” Mickey Gitzin, director of the New Israel Fund, wrote in Haaretz on Sunday. “The method is a simple one: You create a maelstrom of daring, illegal moves, simultaneously and on all fronts. While the public is reacting to the dismissal of the head of the Shin Bet security service, you advance draconian legislation against” non-governmental organisations.
Trump’s and Netanyahu’s domestic strategies have truly merged with the weaponisation of antisemitism as a way to silence or delegitimise critics. Readers of this column know that I have zero respect for any campus protesters who bash Israeli actions in Gaza without uttering a word of censure for Hamas — let alone a word of support for Ukrainians whose democracy is being savaged by Vladimir Putin’s Russia. But ours is, for now, still a free country and if people aren’t engaging in violent acts, or harassing other students in or out of class, they should be free to say whatever they want, including advocating a Palestinian state of whatever size they want.
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