The more I read about Trump and Israel the more it seems clear that he wants to please not the Jews but Christian evangelicals of whom there’re many more than Jewish voters in the United States and without whose votes he wouldn’t have become president.
Evangelicals believe that Jesus’ Second Coming depends on all Jews moving to Israel and rebuilding the Jerusalem Temple. They identify Trump as the most effective carrier of their message. By ostensibly as Christian Zionists promoting the Jews’ return to their ancestral land, evangelicals believe that they’re helping to bring about universal redemption with Trump as the agent. Moving the United States embassy to Jerusalem, endorsing Israel’s claim to the Golan Heights, visibly supporting efforts by Jewish extremists to encroach on Arab territory and ignoring Palestinian nationalist claims are all clearly aimed at pleasing evangelicals.
This suggests that Trump’s support for Israel will fade by the end of 2020. By then he’ll either be re-elected for his second and final term or lose the election. In either case, pleasing evangelicals will cease to be relevant for him. Trump Heights in the Golan and Trump Square in Petach Tikvah will be among the monuments to remind Israelis that their leaders backed the wrong horse.
It’s inconceivable that Prime Minister Netanyahu isn’t aware of it. He has literally embraced Trump because it has served his own political purposes. He could present himself as the leader of the Jewish state who has established a strong bond between the United States and Israel. He may be re-elected at the September 2019 Israeli elections or he may not. In either case, that strong bond between him and Trump will cease to be relevant and all Israelis will have to pick up the pieces.
Which is yet another reason, perhaps the most cogent one, for the need of a change of government in Israel. This country needs a leadership that can prepare for the end of the honeymoon by restoring a working relationship with the Democratic Party in the US Congress, perhaps also with the next Democratic president, and cooling the unholy alliance with the evangelicals.
I don’t know if the Blue and White party, currently the most obvious alternative to Netanyahu’s Likud, has what it takes. But it may be the best Israel is likely to get. Ehud Barak’s newly formed Democratic Israel may make enough inroads to add mandates and backbone to the opposition. A combined effort by the centrist parties (there’s no Left to speak of, alas) may keep out the Right and so save us from the illicit love affair with the evangelicals.
Incidentally, that would also help to distance ourselves from evangelicals in other countries, notably Brazil.
Good relations with Christians are, of course, vitally important for Jews and Judaism. But they must be based on dialogue and respect, not on mutual exploitation. Unfortunately, that’s not how evangelicals wish to relate to Jews. Like all fundamentalists they want to use and, better still, convert others. Thus, for example, evangelicals seem to want Jews to “see the light” once they’re all in their land and the Temple is rebuilt to affirm Jesus as their savior.
It’s this that prompted Yehuda Bauer, the great Jewish historian, to describe evangelicals as loving Jews and hating Judaism. Those who hate Judaism are no less our foes than those who hate Jews.
2020