Trump said one thing right during last week’s debate: “She hates Israel,” Trump said, “If she’s president, I believe that Israel will not exist within two years from now.”
Correct, but incomplete. If Mr. Trump gets elected president, Israel, as we know it today, will not exist, either. Within the next two years or in a shorter time frame, the country will occupy the whole Mandate 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).
A brief reminder: During World War I in 1916, British forces drove Ottoman forces out of the Levant and shared with France what was Ottoman Syria under the Sykes-Picot Agreement. With the Balfour Declaration of 1917, Britain promised its support for the establishment of a Jewish “national home” in Palestine, with the condition of partitioning the land with the Muslim people who had been living there for the last 2,000 years. Mandatory Palestine was then established in 1920, and the British obtained a Mandate for Palestine from the League of Nations in 1922 until the actual partitioning and creation of the two states.
You know the rest of the story: The political, religious and military Jewish organizations started a terror campaign and drove almost 2 million Palestinians out of the partitions that would be theirs.
As the end result of the comic dramatic work using buffoonery and horseplay the British started, the Americans began realizing creating one country in the land when the British transferred the mandate to the U.S. Instead of partitioning the land and the governance between the two people, the U.S. president endorsed the establishment of what is known today as Israel, a.k.a. “The Jewish State.”
That entity is what I mean when I say “Israel as we know it.” I presume it is about to come to its natural end, especially after the botched Netanyahu-Ben Gvir plan to drive another 2 million Palestinians out of Palestine.
Because long before the day David Ben Gurion, the founder of Israel and its first prime minister, set his foot on the land of Palestine, his organization, the Jewish Agency, had started working at the Roosevelt administration and the president himself tried to make them believe that he supported the idea of a Jewish state.
Authors John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, in their seminal book titled “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” explain the process that made the American people, their elected representatives at Congress and the president and his administration, who were essentially not interested in the creation of a Jewish state, to believe that they should support the “virtuous Israelis” not “evil Arabs.” The book explains in detail that the content of the arguments used by that “Lobby,” which made this heart change possible, was “a lot of gas, not a lot of substance.”
According to the contemporary lexicon, the processes that use “a lot of gas, but not substance” are called “gaslighting,” a form of psychological manipulation in which self-doubt and confusion are being sowed in the victim’s mind. The Jewish Agency and its president, David Ben Gurion, used the “Moral Argument” on the Americans and their politicians that Western people (read: Christians) owed to the Jewish people compensation because of the history of “Jewish suffering” (later, “the tragic experience of Holocaust” would be added to that phrase). The proper compensation would be a “homeland for the Jews”; the appropriate place should be “The Eretz Israel” that God of the Bible gave to Abraham and his sons.
Yet, at that time, there were Arab people on that “Eretz,” and supporting a Jewish State on it would mean “an exodus” of Muslims from their homes, villages and towns (which turned out to be happening as soon as Ben Gurion set his foot on it), and that would drive Arab nations to the Soviet Union (which it did: All those pro-British and American-friendly Arab nations gave bases and signed agreement with the Soviets). As any gaslighter would do to gain power and control over his victim, the Jewish Lobby, by distorting reality and forcing the president to question his own judgment for a decade, had finally succeeded in having Roosevelt support the U.N. Plan for Palestine. The next day, the British naval armada carried Jews to Palestine, and Israel was founded and began expanding the boundaries of Yishuv, the area of Jewish residents in Palestine, before the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.
The rest of the story is the blood and tears of the nakba years. The nakba, “catastrophe” in Arabic, refers to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians through violent displacement and dispossession of land, property and belongings, along with the destruction of their society and the suppression of their culture, identity, political rights and national aspirations. Before the nakba, Palestine was a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural society; the Zionist movement, aiming to establish a Jewish state in Palestine, prevented Palestinians from establishing a Palestinian State. Their territories, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza Strip, were put under the administration of Jordan and Egypt from 1948 until 1967.
After 1967, the U.S. administrations had their lackluster support of Israel replaced by whole, vivid and unconditional support to the tune of $20 billion annual cash and military aid, thanks to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a pro-Israel lobbying group that advocates its policies to the legislative and executive branches of the U.S. So much so that, the U.S. has forgotten its opposition to the illegal Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories and the “Two State Solution” to the Palestinian Problem.
Despite the fact that Israel is a “dubious ally” of the U.S., the U.S. Congress automatically adds $1.2 billion to $3.4 billion in aid packages to the annual budget. Please refer to the Mearsheimer-Walt book for the arguments of “The Lobby” and its overturning the reality, fabricating stories about the “Arabs who are sworn enemies of Jews and Christians.” The Department of State announced in 2017 that the U.S. had “sold” $380 billion worth of weapons to Israel, which included fighter jets and advanced air-to-air missiles, and Israel has not paid one single penny back yet.
Actually, since 1967, Israel has not paid back any “loans” it received from Israel. According to a Bush administration article in The Washington Post, “(former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel) Sharon played (former U.S. President George) Bush like a violin.”
But it does not stop there. Fast forward to Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas and several other Palestinian nationalist militant groups launched coordinated armed incursions from the Gaza Strip into the Gaza Envelope of southern Israel; Netanyahu, seizing on this incident, began to complete the implementation of their sacrament that reportedly existed since the U.N. Partition Plan Declaration in 1917: There is no Palestine, it is all Israel remove all Palestinians from the land, do not share it. Since Oct. 7, Israel has been occupying Gaza like the West Bank. Some believe that Israel’s plan to depopulate the Gaza Strip never existed, and American governments consented to this plan right after the Israeli military operations started after Oct. 7.
There is more to it: Netanyahu and Israel’s Zionist extremists are determined to provoke a much bigger war that will engulf the entire Middle East region. Zionists are convinced that the U.S. and its European allies have been sufficiently gaslighted to do so and attribute that to the political power of the Israel Lobby and the American evangelical Christian Zionists, who are a major voting bloc in U.S. politics.
I do not want to indulge in the rather incredible Zionist dreams like the “Samson Option” (if Israel were facing an existential defeat, it would use its nuclear weapons to destroy its enemies even if that meant its own destruction). But when you look at the fact that its presidential candidates compete with each other in being the best friend of Israel and Zionism, “the most powerful nation” seems to have lost its grip on reality, collectively.
Unsurprisingly, neither candidate is going to save Israel from itself.
