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” toward 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.”
In 2008, Fareed Zakaria published a prescient book titled “The Post-American World.” He argued that while the United States would continue to be the dominant world power, the “rise of the rest” — nations like China and India — meant that America’s relative dominance would shrink as the Cold War era receded.
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 prioritize a permanent peace with Palestinians (if its security can be assured) over “a permanent piece’’ of the West Bank and Gaza.
One simply cannot imagine Trump or Vice President JD Vance aspiring to build the America that Ronald Reagan described in his Jan. 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.”
Instead, Trump and Vance want to transform our nation into a post-Reagan America, an America that treats democratic, free market, rule-of-law allies like the European Union with disdain. Trump recently stated that the European Union was created to “screw the U.S.” — a sentiment he repeated sitting next to Netanyahu in the Oval Office. The sheer malevolence and historical ignorance of that statement takes your breath away.
Trump and Vance also want to take us to a post-America that greets courageous defenders of freedom’s frontier — namely Ukraine — with demands for their mineral rights in return for grudging military assistance.
Finally, they want to take us to a post-America that is not the least bit interested in preserving, let alone enhancing, its soft power — the power to enlist allies and attract talented immigrants — a concept popularized by the Harvard political scientist Joseph S. Nye Jr. They have contempt for soft power, being utterly ignorant of the fact that if we lose it, we lose our ability to get other nations to join with us to shape a world more receptive to our interests and values, the single greatest advantage we always had over Russia and China.
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,” the 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 F.B.I. director for being insufficiently loyal; Netanyahu is close to doing the same with Ronen Bar, the widely respected head of Israel’s F.B.I. equivalent, the Shin Bet, at a time when Bar is investigating some of Netanyahu’s top aides over alleged ties to the Qatari government.
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 Gaza war to appease the Jewish supremacists who keep him in power and potentially out of jail. That prolongation also forestalls any commission of inquiry for the disastrous war, which started on his watch and for reasons directly traceable to his policy failure: his belief that Hamas could be bought off with bags of money from Qatar.
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. This is related to his party’s religious-nationalist agenda to annex the West Bank and Gaza and evict as many Palestinians as possible — a goal feasible only if that court’s power to restrain the prime minister and his Jewish supremacist coalition is broken.
Netanyahu’s aim today is “dismantling all the essential components of democracy,” wrote Mickey Gitzin, director of the New Israel Fund, 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” nongovernmental organizations. “When everyone is preoccupied with the status of legal advisers, you advance bills that will make it easier to disqualify Arab candidates.”
The public and the opposition get so overwhelmed they find it hard “to process the deluge,” he added, and resistance slowly fragments. Sound familiar?
Trump’s and Netanyahu’s domestic strategies have truly merged with the weaponization of antisemitism as a way to silence or delegitimize 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.
“President Trump has taken a real phenomenon that needs to be addressed — antisemitism that emerges out of debates on Israel — and is using it to justify crackdowns on immigration, higher education and free speech on Israel,” Jonathan Jacoby, national director of the Nexus Project, which works to fight antisemitism and uphold democracy, said to me.
As an American Jew, I neither need nor want Trump’s cynical defense. He is still the man who, in 2017, defended the white nationalists and neo-Nazis who protested in Charlottesville, Va., as including “some very fine people.” Vance has also embraced Germany’s Nazi-sympathizing, Holocaust-trivializing AfD party, whose leaders have called on Germans to stop atoning for Nazi crimes.
As Rabbi Sharon Brous of the Los Angeles congregation IKAR eloquently warned in a March 8 sermon: “We, the Jews, are being used to advance a political agenda that will cause grave harm to the social fabric, and to the institutions that are best suited to protect Jews and all minorities. We are being used. Our pain, our trauma, is being exploited to eviscerate the dream of a multiracial democracy, while advancing the goal of a white Christian nation.”
Netanyahu — like Trump and thanks to Trump — feels a sense of impunity, a sense that nothing can take him down. That kind of thinking filters down and is what leads to incidents like the one last month in which Israeli forces killed 15 paramedics and rescue workers in southern Gaza, an incident that “the chain of command below simply lied” about, a senior Israel Defense Forces officer told Haaretz.
Fortunately, Israeli civil society has shown a lot of fight — much more than America’s so far — and no wonder. Because while Trump can denounce America’s elites to the cheers of his base, Israelis know their country cannot survive without its technical, scientific and military elites. Which is why this month, 18 former Israeli security chiefs — of the I.D.F., Mossad, Shin Bet, military intelligence and police — declared that Netanyahu was unfit to serve as prime minister, because his “conduct poses a clear and immediate danger to Israel’s security and future as a Jewish democratic state.”
To all who aspire to prevent a post-America, post-Israel world, I have only one message: This is the fight of our lives. I am all in — and I am not tired. How about you?
#Opinion #Trump #Netanyahu #Steer #Ugly #World
