Trump seeks buyer for his deal
Three articles. 1) Robert Fisk, Sunni Arab dictators, America’s crackpot President and Israel’s cynical Prime Minister have all agreed on the identity of the devil – Iran; 2) Jacob Bacharach, Haaretz, is stunned by the inept and graceless words of Pres. Trump; 3 ) Shmuel Rosner, Jewish Journal, says peace is a long process not a quick deal. Is boastful Trump up to it?
Crystal ball gazing: Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sissi, Saudi King Salman, U.S. First Lady and President Donald Trump at a new Global Centre for Combating Extremist Ideology, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. May 21, 2017. AP photo.
Donald Trump is trying to stick to the script – but he’s about to really mess up in the Middle East
There he was talking of the ‘ultimate deal’ between Israel and the Palestinians – as if peace was just a commodity to be bought or sold
Robert Fisk, The Independent
May 22, 2017
In Riyadh, Trump couldn’t mention where most of the the 9/11 hijackers came from or whose Sunni cult-faith was the inspiration for Isis – nor which country chopped off heads with Isis-like relish. (Answer: Saudi Arabia). And when he arrived in Israel on Monday, Trump was faced with a new censorship protocol: don’t mention who was occupying whose property in the West Bank or which country was outrageously and continuously stealing land – legally owned by Arabs – for Jews and Jews only. (Answer: Israel).
So bingo, in the biggest Middle East alliance ever created in history, the Saudis and the other Sunni Arab dictators and America’s crackpot President and Israel’s cynical Prime Minister have all agreed on the identity of the devil country they can all curse with one voice, inspirer of “world terror”, instigator of Middle East instability, the greatest threat to world peace: Shia Iran.
So within a few minutes of landing at Tel Aviv airport – part of whose runways actually lies on land legally owned by Palestinian Arabs 60 years ago – the Trump speechwriters (for Trump surely cannot write this stuff) were churning out once more their hatred of Iran, of Iran’s “terror”, of Iran’s plots, of Iran’s continuing desire to make a nuclear bomb. And all this when Iran has just re-elected a sane president who actually signed the nuclear agreement two years ago that substantially reduced Iran’s strategic threat to Israel, the Arabs and America.
“Iran must never be allowed to possess a nuclear weapon,” said the US commander-in-chief. Iran “must cease its deadly [sic] funding, training and equipping of terrorists and militias.” A Martian who might also have landed at Tel Aviv at the same time would surely conclude that Iran was the creator of Isis and that Israel was already bombing the cruel and violent cultists of the Islamic caliphate. And Martians – surely smarter than the US President – would thus be much amazed to discover that Israel has been bombing the Iranians and the Syrians and their militias, but has not once – ever – bombed Isis.
No wonder Trump tried to stick to his prepared script. Otherwise he might do something sane. Like congratulate Iran’s new president on his electoral victory and for promising to stick to the nuclear agreement; like demanding an end to Israeli occupation and Israeli colonisation of Arab land; like telling the tired old dictators and princes of the Arab world that the only way they can rid themselves – and America – of “terror” is by treating their people with dignity and safeguarding their human rights. But no, that’s far too sensible and fair and just and moral – and far too complicated — for a man who long ago fell off the edge of reality and entered Twitterworld. So there he was talking of the “ultimate deal” between Israel and the Palestinians – as if peace was just a commodity to be bought or sold. Like the one he’d just fixed in Saudi Arabia: guns for oil and dollars.
But then, sitting next to Netanyahu, the guy did go off script. To the relief of all, he returned to the horrors of the nuclear agreement with Iran, the deal that was “unbelievable”, a “terrible thing” which the US had entered into. “We gave them a lifeline – and we also gave them the ability to continue with terror.” The threat of Iran, he told Netanyahu, “has forced people [sic] together in a very positive way.”
Palestinian demonstrators denounce Trump’s visit with a footprint on his face and “US policy is shameful to humanity”, in support of the hunger strike by Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, Qalandiya checkpoint. May 22, 2017. Photo by Abbas Momani/AFP
This was truly “unbelievable”. Trump, in his weird innocence, believes that the Sunni Muslim world’s desire to destroy Shia Iran and its allies is the key to Arab-Israeli peace. Maybe that’s what he meant – if he meant anything – when he said that his visit marked “a rare opportunity to bring security and peace to this region, to its people, defeating terrorism and creating future harmony and peace” – that bit was in the script, by the way – in what he called “this ancient and sacred land”. He meant Israel, but he used the same phrase about Saudi Arabia and would no doubt do so about Switzerland, Lesotho or, well, North Korea if it brought any advantage. Or Iran, for that matter.
Who knows if Trump’s going to be able to face up to Jewish colonisation, land theft and Palestine’s own little dictator when he meets Mahmoud Abbas on Tuesday. Or human rights. Or justice. His speech in the Israel Museum afterwards is going to be a humdinger if he wanders off script. But bets are closed on the content: the unity of Sunni Arabs in their hatred of Shia Iran – he’ll mercifully leave out the “Sunni” and “Shia” bits in case this gives the game away – the closer relations between the Gulf dictators and their princes with land-grabbing Israel, the need for Palestinians to end “terror” against their occupiers – the word “occupiers” must also be left out, of course – and America’s eternal, unending, sacred love for Israel right or wrong.
On Sunday, CNN headlined a “reset” with the Arabs. On Monday, the BBC headlined a “reset” with Israel. What they both meant – but dared not say – is that Trump thinks he can get the Arabs and Israel to destroy the power of Iran after the horrid, moral years of Obama. That means “war”, preferably between Muslims. The “ultimate deal”, indeed.
Trump’s Israel Trip Was One Big Gaslighting Charade
He wanted to rehabilitate an image tarnished by accusations of antisemitism. But the U.S. president’s ‘spiritual grand tour’ stop in Israel was an absurd series of empty gestures
By Jacob Bacharach, Haaretz
May 24, 2017
Theodor Adorno, the German philosopher, never actually said that there could be “no poetry after Auschwitz,” but even within his lifetime the misquotation spread so widely that he later took back the words that he hadn’t said: “Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems.” Nevertheless the bad quotation persists. I even used it—as a dark joke, to be sure—in my own first novel.
What accounts for the persistence of the phrase? Partly, it’s just a good aphorism: brief, sharp, and memorable, at once counterintuitive and on the nose. In larger part, though, it’s that it pithily reflects a common attitude toward the Holocaust, especially popular among politicians, recently expressed by American President Donald Trump in an awkward speech during an awkward visit to Yad Vashem: “Words can never describe the bottomless depths of that evil or the scope of the anguish and destruction.”
Words, of course, can and must.
Casting the Holocaust into the voiceless past is the gravest example of the most cynical ploy in politics, through which leaders and governments set their own depredations against some far more unspeakable evil. How convenient that we can never speak of it! How fortunate that it has no history, no human participants, no antecedents, and no practical lessons. The Holocaust ceases to be history and becomes a mood. Its memorial becomes a set. Remembrance is a scene.
It’s ironically appropriate. There’s an element of mockumentary to Trump’s Israel visit, which has so far consisted of a great deal of bumbling about by both him and his hosts, from the goofy red-carpet greeting on the tarmac beside Air Force One to the uncomfortable shuffling and stage direction around the podium at Yad Vashem. (The latter reminded me of nothing so much as Shabbat services at a Reform temple, the rabbi and cantor trying, usually futilely, to get the congregants called to make an aliyah to the Torah into the proper positions around the reader.)
Former president Barack Obama’s message is on the left, U.S. President Donald Trump’s message on the right – an unnecessary caption.
Christopher Guest could hardly have dreamed up a more perfectly absurd message for the memorial’s Book of Remembrance: “It is a great honor to be here with all of my friends. So amazing + will NEVER FORGET.” It makes George W. Bush slipping the note reading “Let freedom reign!” to Condi Rice seem like a modern Cicero in comparison.
The absurdity isn’t only the fault of Israel and Trump’s inept seesawing between a faction of genuine antisemites and a more traditional Republican base that fetishizes Israel and wishes American Jews could be more like their imaginary Israeli cousins.
It was equally present in Trump’s visit to Saudi Arabia, where he gawped at the kingdom’s tacky splendour, sword-danced, made the same bland speech that every American politician makes when speaking to the leaders of majority Muslim nations, rode through a museum on a golf cart, and participated in a ribbon-cutting for the next film in the Mission Impossible franchise, an ersatz Saudi “anti-terrorism centre” whose Hollywood backlot quality will be forever overshadowed by the now-famous photograph of its inexplicable glowing orb.[top]
Next stop, the Vatican. Americans may be familiar with this location from such hits as The Da Vinci Code. At very least, the Pope is the actual leader of a world religion, unlike the sclerotic absolute monarch of Saudi Arabia and the bumptious prime minister of Israel, who most certainly are not.
The bruited spiritual quality of the first half of Trump’s grand tour, the idea that he’ll be charting new territory by popping in on the headquarters of three of the world’s great faiths, is one of its corniest and most insulting aspects: This Is Spinal Tap meets Eat, Pray, Love. As many American Muslims pointed out on Twitter, and in Haaretz, if the president wished to engage in outreach to the Muslim community, could he not have found a mosque in America? As an American Jew, I can’t help but wonder at the symbolism of skipping a White House Seder but motorcading over to the Western Wall to make a big show of loving the Jews.
This persistent conflation of the State of Israel with the Jewish religion—whose modern form and observances were forged in the Diaspora—is a hallmark of the American political class, and it’s even more galling on the tongue of a man whose view of Jews as people is at best stereotypical and retrograde. (He couldn’t even make a speech about the Shoah without mentioning how “successful” we are!)
It’s meant to rehabilitate an image tarnished by accusations of antisemitism, but it only serves to further emphasize the indifference to the spiritual, material, and political lives of the huge communities of Jews living right here in America. Some of these Jews are staunch Zionists, and some of us are harsh critics of Israel, but we do not, in the immortally dumb words of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, consider Tel Aviv our religious home.
Trump’s speech: At its core there are no beliefs, only a series of empty gestures at a false decency without a hint of grace.
Trump concluded his Yad Vashem speech with a litany of God Blesses characteristic of the Christianized oratorical style of American politics but a little weird in a Jewish context and a lot weird at a memorial for the Jewish dead. It speaks, I think, to the ultimately superficial quality of this man and his government.
At its core there are no beliefs, only a series of empty gestures at a false decency without a hint of grace. While Trump was in Israel, more details emerged of one of the most savage programmes of domestic austerity in the modern history of the United States, supposedly the richest country of the world.
Trump cited Elie Wiesel in his speech, but perhaps we should turn to Primo Levi. “A country is considered the more civilized the more the wisdom and efficiency of its laws hinder a weak man from becoming too weak and a powerful one too powerful.”
Which, at present, are we?
Jacob Bacharach is a writer based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is the author of the novel The Bend of the World. Follow him on Twitter: @jakebackpack
Hopeful rhetoric, vague vision for peace after Trump’s Middle East visit
By Shmuel Rosner, Jewish Journal
May 23, 2017
President Donald Trump has come and gone from his trip to the Middle East, his first foreign excursion since taking office earlier this year. He arrived — first in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, then Jerusalem and Bethlehem in Israel — with strong words about Iran as the neighborhood bully and, like so many American presidents before him, buoyant words for the Israeli and Palestinian people.
Optimistic words. Hopeful words. They all conveyed a vision and new possibility for peace in the region, a prospect “I’ve heard,” he said, that is “one of the toughest deals of all. But I have a feeling we will get there eventually, I hope.”
Good for Trump. A new American president. A new chance for a solution. A new team to get it done.
But where were the new ideas Israeli leaders are so certain he has? What is the new approach? How does he propose to untangle the thorny issues on the ground — boundaries, settlers, Jerusalem, etc. — that have left so many presidents before him bloody with failure?
Peace between Israelis and Palestinians was a topic of much discussion when Trump visited Jerusalem and Bethlehem. It was front and centre, but not necessarily the first item on the agenda. In his speech to the Arab world in Riyadh days before, in his unscripted photo-op with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in his later remarks in the prime minister’s house, Trump was more focused on Iran as the source of menace in the region. He and Netanyahu suggested that there are new opportunities in the region. Countries must unite against a common threat — Iran. That’s an opening that can be explored.
Michael Oren, historian, former Israeli ambassador to the United States and currently Israel’s deputy minister for diplomacy, said he believes that this new reality is a conduit of a “tremendous” shift. If once it was assumed that a peace with the Palestinians could lead to reconciliation of Israel with the rest of the Arab world — the situations is now reversed: A peace with the Arab world could lead to a deal with the Palestinians. If the Saudis come on board, if other Gulf states come on board, if the Arab world realizes that fighting against Israel makes no sense in this era of radicalism, the Palestinians might realize that the train of peace is leaving the station and that they’d better hurry so they don’t miss it.
Maybe this is what Israeli leaders mean when they constantly talk about “new ideas.” Trump is a devotee of “new” ideas, “bold” ideas, “different” ideas. For Israel, to resist his push for a deal would be a mistake. But it might be able to convince him that his predecessors failed because of their conventional thinking — and that he, a man bold enough, ought to reformulate the meaning of the ultimate deal. The “two-state solution” is old, tired — and it is so Clinton and Obama. Trump could make his mark by thinking outside the box, that is, by dropping old ideas and replacing them with new ideas.
Israeli President Reuven Rivlin sang the praises of new ideas after his meeting with Trump: “Our destiny — Palestinians and Jews — is to live together in this land,” he said. “In order to achieve this, we need new ideas, new energy that will help us move forward, together.”
But move where? Rivlin has his new ideas; he supports one state, or a confederation of Israelis and Palestinians. Naftali Bennett, the head of the Jewish Home Party and the leader most forthright in attempting to directly tell Trump what needs to be done (“We expect you to be the first president to recognize a united Jerusalem,” he said, to which Trump responded, “That’s an idea!”), has different new ideas. He supports an autonomy for Palestinians and annexation of the rest. Other leaders also have new ideas, including the oldest “new” idea of sticking to an improved status quo.
Does Trump have new ideas? If he does, we were still waiting to hear what they are as he departed for Europe. It was worth noting that Trump refrained from using the term “two-state solution” during his visit. It is possible that he is more open than his predecessors to considering alternative ideas, assuming he has them. In Saudi Arabia, in Jerusalem and in Bethlehem, he kept hinting that his deal is partially built on the goodwill of the conservative Arab regimes of Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Former President Bill Clinton failed to get them on board at Camp David. He was disappointed by their refusal to help him push the late Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, toward accepting the deal that was offered to him. Trump and some of his top advisers believe circumstances have changed in a way that could make such a push more realistic today.
His brief trip was barely a beginning of a long process of exploration of these assumptions and ideas. Although it sent a symbolic message of involvement and new energy, it did little to advance a detailed vision of a peace process. And of course, involvement is crucial, as both Arab and Israeli leaders made clear in their remarks, taking a swipe at the Barack Obama administration.
“We are happy to see that America is back,” said Rivlin, usually not the type to bash the former president. Netanyahu, not surprisingly, was more direct: “I want to tell you also how much we appreciate the reassertion of American leadership in the Middle East.”
The new American president ought to know that there is no correlation between the number of visits to the Middle East and the level of success in handling Middle East affairs. Yes, Trump made “history” — a word used much too often to describe routine events — in going to Israel and Saudi Arabia earlier in his term than any other president. He made “history” again by being the first sitting American president to visit the Western Wall. So what? Nixon made history by being the first president to travel to Israel. Shortly afterward, he was forced out of office. Clinton made history by coming to Israel more than all other presidents, four times. It did not guarantee his success.
The only presidential visit that really made a change was Jimmy Carter’s in 1979. That was a dramatic visit, with ups, downs and crises. It was a make-or-break visit: Carter traveled to Egypt, then to Israel, and forced the hand of the late Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to accept the peace deal that was proposed to him. A few years ago, Israel’s state archives released documents from that visit, including a cable that was sent from Zvi Rafiah, Israel’s then-liaison to the U.S. Congress. Carter briefed congressional leaders when he was back in Washington, D.C., and Rafiah reported to his superiors in Jerusalem that during this meeting, Carter described his meeting with the Israeli cabinet as “terrible.”
“Terrible” and “horrible” are two of Trump’s favourite words. So maybe he will also describe parts of his visit as terrible. Maybe he did not appreciate the food, or the heat, or the forced selfie with Knesset Member Oren Hazan. But as far as we know, by the end of his visit on May 23, nothing truly “terrible” happened. Everybody was nice to him. Everybody agreed with him. Everybody encouraged him to keep doing what he is doing, whatever that is.
‘Everyone was nice to him’. Chief son-in-law and presidential adviser Jared Kushner smiles on the two leaders
A time for confrontation might still come, when a more detailed plan emerges, and a real price is demanded of the parties. Already, Israel and the Palestinians got a taste of the future. Israel watched reluctantly, yet silently, as the Saudis bought weapons in quantities that might put Israel’s military edge at risk. The Palestinians witnessed an American president visiting the Kotel. They heard an American president, not for the first time, raise the issue of terrorism as an obstacle they need to overcome to achieve their objectives. They heard him say “peace” but not “a Palestinian state.”
And so. There was a visit and it went smoothly. For Trump, that is certainly an achievement. Everybody was trying to convince everybody that the visit was successful and that Trump is exactly what they expected him to be.
But there was reason for caution. On the evening of May 22, about an hour before Trump and Netanyahu made their joint statement in Jerusalem, I was sitting in a radio studio in the city of Modi’in. The interviewee on the line was Member of Knesset Ahmad Tibi, an Arab legislator, an articulate critic of Israel’s policies, and a frequent visitor at the offices of Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president.
He was cautious. Very cautious. Wisely cautious. Tibi has hopes, but he isn’t letting them get too high. He knows Trump changes his mind, he said. He knows it is not yet clear what Trump wants, beyond the generalities of having a “deal” and brokering “peace.” He knows Trump won’t always have the patience necessary to see a bumpy peace process through. And so Tibi’s message was simple: I’ll believe him about his Israeli-Palestinian peace effort when I see it.
When I asked Tzachi Hanegbi, Israel’s communications minister, about Trump reportedly walking back on his campaign promise to move the American embassy to Jerusalem, Hanegbi didn’t even blink before explaining that a visit to the Western Wall is much more important than moving the embassy. And when Tibi was asked if he was annoyed by Trump’s visit to the Kotel, Tibi didn’t even blink before explaining that it was an insignificant event that reinforced the fact that the U.S. does not recognize the site as Israeli.
Despite what did and didn’t happen, give Trump credit for this: He was polite, almost gaffe free and vague enough to keep the valuable posture of a Rorschach test: for now, all interpretation of his actions and intentions are still in the eye of the beholder.