The Washington Post has a column that says what I’ve known for a long time. That today’s Hamas troubles can in large part be pinned on Donald Trump who like a former Duluth School Superintendent of the last century who started fires to ease other administrators out of his way to become Superintendent himself. Now after handing Netanyahu the power to blow up Israel Trump is using it to win back the Presidency.
Here’s a choice paragraph:
“If Trump set in motion the deepening risk of a nuclear Iran, he also encouraged the acceleration of Israel’s far-right drift. David Friedman, Trump’s ambassador to Israel, is a deeply ideological champion of the Jewish settler movement and an open skeptic of the two-state solution — the vision of two Israeli and Palestinian states existing side-by-side that has been the official policy of successive Democratic and Republican administrations. Friedman and a coterie of other Trump officials set about emboldening Netanyahu and his allies, who embarked on a series of settlement expansions and seemed forever poised to carry out de jure annexation of parts of the occupied West Bank. Their efforts poured more dirt on the grave of the two-state solution at a time when the Palestinian national movement itself was in crisis and the Palestinian cause seemed even less of a priority among Arab governments.”
The column I’ve reprised twice on Not Eudora and now Not your usual Republican was written after I returned from my 2016 winter visit with Claudia to Palestine and Israel on a peace mission. I watched a drunken Orthodox Jew berating an Israeli peace activist which pretty well summed up Israel to me then. We visited a settler community in the area that had been reserved for Palestine. No doubt today the Republican like settlers are armed to the teeth sending their kids out to shoot Palestinian goats and cut down olive trees.
Perhaps the most unsettling thing that I described in that column was having Benjamin Netanyahu walk into the restaurant where we were eating with ten armed guards and settle himself down at the table next to us for an hour before we paid our tab and left.
Netanyahu was able to trade on his older brother a real hero who helped rescue Israeli travelers when Black September hijacked their plane by rescuing them from the Ugandan airport in Entebbe. He modeled himself after Arial Sharon a man who started wars left and right and who I bad mouthed in my first year as a columnist for the Duluth Reader in a column titled Eve of Destruction.
If and when Iran becomes a Nuclear Power you will be able to thank Donald Trump for that too just as he greased the path for Putin to attack Ukraine. His followers are so trusting they think American schools are letting kids poop in kitty litter boxes. NO SHIT! Just the other day an Oklahoma Republican pushed a law allowing the police to take “furries” to animal pounds.
