With his decision to abandon the ceasefire, President Trump corrected what the author sees as one of the gravest mistakes of his presidency. Though it never dawned on Israel’s best-ever friend in the White House, Trump was obeying the dictum which had cuffed Israel from birth: Never let the juggernaut Jews win a war.
Zionists had the right to be scandalized — but not to be surprised. “America First” is Trump’s lifelong and oft-claimed credo.
The premature ceasefire he declared in what could be the queerest surrender terms ever drafted, bound Israel to lay down arms. It brought to mind that old truism: “If the Palestinians lay down weapons there’d be no wars anymore. If the Israelis lay down weapons there’d be no Israel anymore.”
Now a war rages 1,000 days after beginning as Swords of Iron. It radiated, became Roaring Lion and Epic Fury, and it looks far from over.
Whether this wisdom occurred to the president or to JD Vance no longer matters. Now that Trump has abandoned as a lost cause negotiating with the Islamic Republic, there’s no need to regurgitate the fateful consequences of a memo much too grandly called an MOU. Chief among the defects, surely, was the ridicule and contempt it invited from MAGA supporters and opponents alike.
“All human happiness or misery,” says Aristotle, stems from character. Hardly greater misery can come than from permitting a regime — Trump, better late than never, concedes they’re “scum” — to manipulate the planet’s pre-eminent head of state.
Bizarre it may sound, but cuffing Israel’s right to defend itself, the Big Satan effectively defanged the Little Satan.
For what fabulous return on investment? For no more than a wink and a nod from “liars” (he finally concedes) that there’d be no further funny business with Trump’s choke point, the Strait of Hormuz.
The “violent,” “evil,” and “sick” regime (he concedes) promptly set about putting its windfall to work. The nuclear and missile programs and terror network will be restored after the drubbing they took from Midnight Hammer, Epic Fury, and Rising Lion.
Trump, meanwhile, moved Israel to the back burner. When it bombed Beirut, retaliating for Hezbollah attacks in southern Lebanon and northern Israel, he phoned Netanyahu and called him “f***ing crazy.” He told the Israeli leader to stop with the military ops.
It got worse. Trump publicly declared that his great ally had “No f***ing judgement,” though he “knows who the boss is.”
Not even a rotten and failing head of state — South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa comes to mind — would tolerate being rubbished and patronized in that manner. Regrettably, Netanyahu had no recourse. He could hardly go over Trump’s head to address Congress or lobby Democrats, as he’d done about the JCPOA nuclear deal Obama had patched together. After all, a majority of Americans can’t stomach Trump’s war games in the Middle East.
JD Vance met the rift with glee and spite.
“Donald J. Trump is the only head of state in the entire world who is sympathetic to the nation of Israel at this moment in time,” declared Vance. “If I was in the cabinet of the Israeli government, I might not be attacking the only powerful ally that I have anywhere left in the entire world.”
Though Netanyahu ridiculed the claim that the president alone had Israel’s back, the gist of it remained. “You’re our puppy dog — a troublesome one. Behave yourself.”
The Israeli leader did not behave. With Trump at the NATO Summit in Ankara, Turkey, Netanyahu begged him not to sell Tayyip Erdogan F-35 jet engines nor allow him back in the program. Likud’s Foreign Minister, Gideon Sa’ar, piled into the scrap. His Turkish counterpart, Sa’ar, was inciting genocide by calling Israel “a burden of humanity that humanity can no longer bear.”
Trump was unmoved. He and Turkey’s leader saw eye to eye — Erdogan has been a cooperative member of NATO compared to other members he could name. Israel, remembering the piety of the patriarchs, will have to gear up for a new front in a multifaceted war.
Dear oh dear, the Middle East powder keg had once been so uncomplicated. The war in progress presents a complete contrast. There’ll be no blast on a ram’s horn to announce that, ‘The Temple Mount is in our hands.” No Israeli flag will be sunk into the bank of the Suez Canal or planted atop Mt. Hermon.
No one knows how or when sporadic exchanges of fire between Iran, its octopus proxies, and Israel will end. All we know — maybe not Trump — is that Israel was never allowed, and may never be allowed, to finish off the enemy.
The 1948 War of Independence was long enough. It took Israel a year and a half before controlling 77 percent of the original British Mandate of Palestine — a great increase on the 56 percent it was allocated by the UN partition plan.
Then what happened? Truces were brokered by the UN. Armistice agreements were devised by UN mediators. Israel’s borders were decided for it.
The 1967 war, which wrapped up in six euphoric days, doubled the area under Israel’s control. And then? Again, outside intervention. U.N. Security Council Resolution 242 ended hostilities and called for it to swap land for peace. Never mind that international law made the Jewish state the undisputed landowner.
The 1956 Sinai Campaign was an eight-day fiasco. Humble Israel thanked the powers that be for allowing its continuous use of the Suez Canal.
The 1973 Yom Kippur War took three weeks to vanquish the invaders. And then? Again, U.N. intervention. Henry Kissinger, acting as Nixon’s Secretary of State, made treaties on Israel’s behalf. He embedded the U.S. as the mediator in the Arab-Israeli conflicts, effectively fathering the Israeli-Palestinian issue. That ultimate albatross, the 2-State Solution, would henceforth weigh down its bent neck.
The First Lebanon War in 1982 raged for three chaotic months and yielded victory of a sort. The PLO was expelled from Lebanon. And then? The Sabra and Shatila massacre, and Israel’s bitter distaste for war, yielded a damp squib.
The Second Lebanon War of 2006 ground on for 34 days of relentless rocket attacks on northern Israel and the abduction of IDF members. And then? Yet another U.N. Resolution intervened. It allowed Hezbollah to claim victory after demonstrating an ability to fight the IDF to a standstill. And then?
Except for the limited wars against horrific intifadas, that is the end of the story about war in the old era. One must not ask, “And then?” too often. It leads to an altogether different milestone.
Now a war rages 1,000 days after beginning as Swords of Iron. It radiated, became Roaring Lion and Epic Fury, and it looks far from over.
Hold onto the 470-day-long Operation Swords of Iron in Gaza, sparked by Oct 7. To what extent was Israel stopped, and how, from winning that brutal urban and subterranean war?
It could have taught Trump the ugliness of trying to make Israel conform to his political and business agendas.
President Biden and Secretary of State Anthony Blinken held sway. They, co-operating with Hamas and its Ministry of Health, cuffed Israel; sought to bring it up short; put the brakes on it; stop Juggernaut Jews from annihilating Hamas.
Blinken, acting like a co-opted member of the Israeli war cabinet, told it to make a “clear plan” for protecting civilians before resuming the business of annihilating Hamas. This meant, he explained as though talking to a roomful of warlords, “acting in compliance with international humanitarian law.”
Wagging a finger, Blinken warned Netanyahu’s cabinet that a repeat of “the massive levels of civilian life and displacement scale we saw in the north” would not be tolerated.
It was a reproof and a warning. His thinly veiled threat signalled that President Biden might well ditch Israel if things at home get too hot for him, as indeed they already had. Thus, the playbook was rigged.
As to the hostages, the terrorist group could hold them, alive or dead, as bargaining chips. The game was refereed by Blinken, who resorted to Biden, who resorted to Obama. The survival of Hamas was paramount.
And Hamas? Terrorists will be terrorists, smirked the smutty gamesters.
READ MORE from Steve Apfel:
No Pieces of Paper Ever Bound the Islamic Republic
A Cancer Within Diaspora Communities
The World’s Most Controversial Scrap of Skin
Steve Apfel was once a business economist and the founder of the School of Management Accounting. As a veteran authority on anti-Zionism, his 2012 book, Hadrian’s Echo: the whys and wherefores of Israel’s Critics, was acclaimed by top Middle East scholars. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B007PIVM6G
