Trump Did October 7th

Things Can Always Get Worse

I have very little appetite these days for lecturing people about how they should vote, but I do find the number of left-leaning friends expressing unwillingness to vote for Biden—or to even to vote for Trump—over Palestine to be alarming. Just to show I’m not hectoring, I’ll try my best to sympathetically reconstruct their case. For people horrified by the slaughter in Gaza, Biden seems to be totally unwilling and unable to rein in Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel. To many, his statements about the demonstrations against the war on college campuses have functionally lead a smear campaign against the protestors as an antisemitic mob and have given permission for a nationwide wave of repression. “How can Democrats seriously claim to be standing in the way of fascism when they are the party of the truncheon at home and genocidal war abroad?” This reaction is not purely emotional; it has some political rationale: The thinking goes that unless Biden truly fears the loss of the election by alienating his left flank, he will not shift his policy on Gaza. And there is some indication that discontent with the war has already pushed Biden administration from its big hug of Netanyahu to a more a circumspect role, with reports of arms shipments being delayed and a push by CIA director William Burns in Qatar to end the war. But beyond these considerations, the overwhelming feeling I’ve observed by some on the left is, “How could get it get any worse?”

If there is one lesson in life, it’s that it can always—always—get worse.

Trump has recently been portrayed in the press as being more critical of Israel than in the past, in part due to his personal dislike of Bibi Netanyahu for snubbing him. But this image doesn’t really hold up under any scrutiny. In March, Politico ran a piece with the headline “Trump used to brag about his support for Israel. Now his criticisms are growing sharper.” The evidence given for this are some remarks in an interview. Trump said Israel had made a “very big mistake” and had bad “public relations.” But what he was saying is that Israel ought not to have allowed images of the invasion to be shown, not that they ought not to have done the things shown in the images. He says, “Go and do what you have to do. But you don't do that. And I think that's one of the reasons that there has been a lot of kickback. If people didn't see that, every single night I'd watch and every single one of those... And I think Israel wanted to show that it's tough, but sometimes you shouldn't be doing that.” The “That” being showing what’s happening: as usual, he’s totally focused on appearances. In the same interview, he goes on to say AOC and Rashida Tlaib “hate Jewish people.” This is not exactly someone who is now tacking to the left on Israel. Oh, and by the way, the interview itself was with Israel Hayom, the right-wing Israeli rag funded by Sheldon and now Miriam Adelson.

Let’s also consider the consequences of Trump’s foreign policy with respect to Israel and Palestine. Allow me a Trumpian locution: Trump is the worst president we ever had on Palestine. That’s because he basically understands nothing about it and doesn’t really give a shit about it. What opinions he does have are guided by reflexive Islamophobia. And because he doesn’t care that much about it, he defers to people in his circle who actually do, who are either fanatics or amateurs. People like his ambassador to Israel David Friedman, once an attorney for the Trump organization, who has strong ties to the settler movement and organizations opposed to a two state solution. Or the Adelsons, who basically shaped Trump’s entire failed approach to the region. Or, Jared Kushner, his idiot son-in-law whose main qualification in this area is that he happens to be Jewish. (I think this is literally how Trump thinks: “Oh, Jared can do it, he’s Jewish. Oh, get David for it, he talks about Israel a lot. Israel guy. Oh, Sheldon, told me this, Miriam, told me that.”) These people are not diplomats, they are not spies, they are not statesmen, they are some schmucks off the street. That’s exactly who you are voting for when you vote for Trump: Schmucks off the street.

No wonder then that Trump’s “peace plan” for Palestine and Israel, created under the auspices of Kushner and Friedman, was a total farce: a two-state solution in name only that basically relegated the areas reserved Palestinians to permanent Bantustan status and set the groundwork for annexation of large portions West Bank. It’s true that previous administration have by and large failed to stop the expansion of settlements, but Trump’s administration actually gave them its blessing and stopped treating them as illegal, reversing years of U.S. policy. And does everyone just forget that he moved the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, something we know now that Sheldon Adelson basically just paid for? Then there’s the supposedly “smart” and “successful” part of Trump’s diplomacy, the push for normalization of relations with the Gulf States while trying to totally ignore the Palestinian issue. This was always a recipe for disaster: there can be no serious peace without a just resolution to the question of Palestine. And we’ve seen that: this whole fakakte scheme blew up on October 7th. So, let’s put it in the most Trumpian terms possible: Trump did October 7th. Now, in one of those sickening ironies history loves to supply, Trump’s total incompetence and malevolence on Palestine, his responsibility for the instability in the region and the very real possibility it may tip into a broader war, may actually result in his reelection.

The world we are living in was built during the Trump years. It can be directly traced to the failures of his policy. You can argue on Twitter until you are blue in the face about settler colonialism and campus antisemitism, but the reality we live in will be shaped through the high offices of state. And we have some limited capacity to decide who occupies them. Even if Trump is less positively disposed on a personal level to Bibi, he can be easily outmaneuvered by him or whatever goon succeeds him, because he’s very stupid and just not all that interested. Say what you will about the State Department under Biden, under Trump there basically won’t be one: policy will be made through the kind of informal dealmaking and influence peddling that typifies Trumpland. We can now clearly see the results of that approach.

I don’t like to hazard predictions, but if experience is any guide, I strongly believe a right-wing Israeli government, under the chaos of a second Trump administration, would attempt to go forward with annexation and ethnic cleansing of the West Bank and God knows what permanent “solution” for Gaza. And I believe the chain reaction that would set off could very likely lead to World War III. We’ve already seen how bad things can get after just four years of Trump. What about eight? Or more!