Does Netanyahu Want Trump to Win?
America has no permanent friends, only interests.
—Henry Kissinger
The Nixon administration secretary of state and alleged war criminal usually gets credit for a quote he grabbed from Charles de Gaulle; “We don’t have friends, we have interests.” But the critical addition of the word “permanent” in Kissinger’s paraphrase is disproved by the U.S. government’s embrace of Israel since its founding in 1948.
We always have been behind the Israeli government, which has yet to write and adopt its own constitution or adopt the two-state solution. Conventional wisdom is that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s harsh response in Gaza after the horrible October 7 Hamas attack has been influenced by Israel’s minister of security, Itamar Ben-Gvir of the radically right-wing Otzma Yehudit party. Netanyahu’s Likud party was forced to form a coalition in the Knesset when neither party managed to clinch the majority vote in the 2022 elections.
Netanyahu served as Israel’s PM from 1996 to 1999, then from 2009 to ‘21 and from 2022 to the present, a longevity that rivals that of Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Or of Polish President Andrzej Duda, whose spent most of the last eight years working to dismantle his country’s court system and nationalize its independent free press until Donald Tusk’s Civic Platform won enough votes in late 2023 elections to form a more moderate parliament. (It was Duda who visited the former president at Mar-a-Lago earlier this month.)
Like Duda before his Law and Justice party lost out the pro-European Union Civic Platform party and its coalition, Netanyahu has been hard at work the last couple of years to dismantle his country’s independent judiciary. Many consider his efforts last year to limit the Israeli Supreme Court’s power to exercise judicial review an effort to quash a years-long corruption investigation into him. Netanyahu’s “judicial reform” drew huge street protests from moderate and liberal Israelis.
This week, pro-Palestinian students at college campuses across the U.S. have protested aid to the Israeli government and have demonstrated, UC Berkeley-in-the-’60s style, for a cease fire in Gaza. Though the protests have mostly been peaceful, with Jewish students sympathetic to the Palestinian cause in Gaza sometimes joining in the demonstrations, police in various localities have been called in. Colleges and universities are cancelling graduation ceremonies. Some Jewish students and leaders have accused protestors of anti-semitic threats.
The ‘60s student protest movement reached its first peak at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where more than 10,000 Vietnam War protesters clashed with 23,000 police and National Guard. The convention’s nominee, Hubert Humphrey, went on to lose the November presidential election to Richard M. Nixon.
Coincidentally, this year’s DNC is again in Chicago, and many progressive Democrats who blame Joe Biden for supporting Netanyahu’s war on Gaza and many of whom already have voted against Biden in several state primaries are expected to show up.
The question I keep asking myself is; Who would Benjamin Netanyahu prefer to win our election on November 5?
Lassa is founding editor of The Hustings <https://thehustings.news> Leave your comments here or email editors@thehustings.news and please indicate in the subject line whether you identify with The Hustings’ right column or left column.