Did the president of the United States really fluster Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week at the White House when he asked him to be and act “reasonably” in his dealings with his neighbors and Türkiye?
Let me clarify a little more: Could a U.S. president disturb or annoy an Israeli leader by interrupting anything in U.S.-Israel relations?
No, I think we need a clearer question: Is any U.S. official capable of disturbing any diplomatic, military or financial arrangement the Israeli government has regarding its neighbors? And regarding the U.S. itself.
Carter incurs wrath
“The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” a book co-authored, 20 years ago, by John Mearsheimer, professor of political science at the University of Chicago, and Stephen Walt, professor of international relations at Harvard Kennedy School at Harvard University, is full of examples of Israel’s disrespectfully leaving the U.S. out in the cold. Perhaps the most striking example of such actions was President Jimmy Carter’s losing his second term election. Following 12 days of secret negotiations at Camp David, Carter had a peace agreement signed by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin.
Yet, his election campaign was believed to be sabotaged by the Israel lobby because the Israeli Zionists noticed that the U.S. president was using the analogy of apartheid of South Africa in his talks about the way Israel had treated the West Bank and Gaza. The U.S. security services had learned later that Begin’s team was not amused at all when they had heard the word “apartheid” from the lips of a U.S. president. Following Carter’s unexpected defeat to Ronald Reagan, California governor and former movie actor in 1981, no sane U.S. president made such nasty analogies about Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.
Kennedy pays with his life
Actually, Carter could have taken lessons reading secret documents about the tragic murder of President John F. Kennedy. Kennedy had ended the arms embargo that both the Eisenhower and Truman administrations had enforced on Israel and introduced the concept of a “special relationship” between the U.S. and Israel.
However, in the summer of 1960, after learning that Israel was assisted by France in the construction of what U.S. intelligence had called “a significant atomic installation” in Dimona, Kennedy asked the Pentagon to find out the details of the Dimona installation. Even though Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion had privately assured Kennedy that Israel did not plan to develop nuclear weapons, Israel did not allow the U.S. inspectors to go into the installation. Israel notified the American team that “the installation was in full compliance with America’s non-proliferation policy.” Kennedy knew it was a whitewash; the president asked the Israeli officials to allow the American inspection team to have their own inspection. According to Seymour Hersh, an American investigative journalist, political writer and winner of the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting, Kennedy looked satisfied and even sent the MIM-23 Hawk missiles to Israel. Nonetheless, Kennedy decided to work more closely with the modernizing forces of the Arab world.
He couldn’t. He was assassinated that year!
Wish Trump luck!
Let’s fast forward to another U.S. president who dared to voice his own wishes, contrary to Israel’s demands that Iran’s nuclear program and that rival Türkiye’s surging influence in Syria be stopped immediately. Netanyahu rushed to Washington to have immediate and definite answers to his demands, but all he got was a sermon on the merits of rational behavior in diplomacy. Netanyahu left the White House last Monday empty-handed after another session of an “Apprentice”-like televised Oval Office meeting for slapping heads of foreign governments.
If you have not yet done so, you have to watch the video of Netanyahu’s face during that meeting. It was not simple frustration; no! It was an expression, asking “What are you saying?” Not in astonishment, but glowering at the U.S. President Donald Trump’s face, in defiance, granting him a term of respite, and telling him “OK, let it be the way you want it!”
Trump, in effect, was not asking only Netanyahu “to be rational,” but in the same breath, he was asking the neocons, the globalists and the fanciers of remapping the Middle East at the state and defense departments, as well as the authors of Project 2025 at the Heritage Foundation, to let him play his way and see if it works better.
Trump was likely thinking: “Why do you want to dismember Iraq and Syria? To create a shield in front of Israel against Iran and Türkiye? OK, what if I can make Iran cease to be a threat, at all? I can deal with Türkiye, too. I know and love Erdoğan. He loves me too! If you (Israel) and we (the neocons, the globalists and the remapping experts at the Pentagon and the pencil-pushers at the Heritage) act reasonably, he is not going to take Syria – I joked with him about taking Syria, but he rejected it.”
Soon we’ll know whether Trump can have his way with Iran. If he does, no war in the region and the democratic process will restart working in Israel. (Perhaps in Iran, too. But that is not the point right now.)
Zionists have their own plan
Israel, for the first time since the first European Jewish immigrants set foot in Palestine, a geopolitical entity that existed between 1920 and 1948 in the region of Palestine under the terms of the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, witnessed a Jewish uprising against Zionism. Respected and renowned historian Tom Segev, for instance, weighs in on the current state of the nation. He says after the Six-Day War with neighboring Arab countries, Israel should have returned all the occupied territories, including East Jerusalem back to their rightful owners, “but Zionism didn’t allow us.”
After 60 years of studying history, Segev, as well as many other Israeli democrats, say that “the stories we were told weren’t correct.”
They didn’t want an apartheid nation, but the Zionist state – and its leaders, from Herzl onward – were incapable of meeting the goals it set for itself. Professor Moshe Zimmermann, a pioneering Israeli scholar of Holocaust history, says: “The Zionist solution is not a solution. We are arriving at a situation in which the Jewish people who live in Zion live in a condition of total insecurity, and not for the first time. So the Zionist solution is very deficient, and we need to examine what caused this deficiency.”
If peace really and finally descends upon Palestine, the apartheid Israel, a failed project based on the wrong premises of Zionism, will cease to exist, and all the people, the Jews, Muslims, Christians and others, will create one, democratic, common country. If it does not, that is, if Trump’s initiative would not work (or Trump would not be able to implement his plan – as Kennedy and Carter were not – the alternative is going to be even more chaotic.
Zimmerman is very pessimistic about the alternative: “The alternative is either for us to execute a Nazi-like act against the Palestinians, or for the Palestinians to execute a Nazi act against us, meaning an attempt to destroy (Israel) – an apocalyptic ‘solution’ of Armageddon.”