And while Israel has a strategy for addressing the first threat, it has no strategy for addressing the second. One reason it doesn’t — in my view — is because of a third existential threat to Israel. And that threat is from America — particularly from President Donald Trump, but also from pro-Israel lawmakers in Congress and from AIPAC, the main Israel lobbying organization.
It’s the threat that America will love Israel to death.
By indulging Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in his quest for permanent Israeli control over the West Bank, Trump, Congress and the Israel lobby are going to create a situation whereby the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank will eventually collapse. The Palestinians there will then say to Israel, as some already have, that they want Israeli citizenship. Israel will then find itself ruling over 2.5 million Palestinians with the choice of either sharing power with them on the basis of equality or systematically denying it to them.
When that happens the debate over what Israel should do will rip apart every synagogue, Jewish Federation and Jewish institution in America — including AIPAC. As long as there was a credible two-state solution on the table, that debate was muted. But once that option is gone, all hell will break loose in the Jewish world and between progressives and Israel’s supporters on every U.S. college campus. It’s already started.
Up until Trump, both Democratic and Republican presidents have played the role of “reality enforcer” for both Israeli and Arab leaders. In both Israel and most Arab ruling circles, you have a mix of hard-liners, moderates and sheer crazies. The job of the U.S. president has always been to draw red lines so Israeli prime ministers or Arab leaders could say to their extremists: “Hey, I’d love to do that crazy thing you want me to do. My heart is with you. But the American president would break my arm if I did. So we’re not going to do that crazy thing you suggest, even though my heart is with you!”
Trump has abandoned that U.S. role. Instead, he’s pursuing a policy of steadily weakening the Palestinian Authority that governs the West Bank — while steadily lifting any restraints on Israel’s creeping annexation of the West Bank.
As The Jerusalem Post noted March 14: The change began with the U.S. State Department’s annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices two years ago, “when the State Department replaced the country designation of ‘Israel and the occupied territories’ with ‘Israel, Golan Heights, West Bank and Gaza.’ Within the 2017 report itself, however, the State Department last year still used the word ‘occupation’ but much more sparingly … This year, the 2018 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices made no mention of the word ‘occupation’ at all.”
Trump’s “anything goes” approach for Israel (and America’s Arab allies — that’s how Jamal Khashoggi got assassinated by the Saudis) is presented as a strategic shift. In fact, no strategic thought has gone into it. It’s actually driven by Trump’s quest to get more campaign donations from far-right Jewish megadonor Sheldon Adelson and to get Jews to leave the Democratic Party and vote Republican — by getting Bibi’s blessings for Trump and, in return, giving Bibi anything he wants, including a tacit presidential endorsement for his re-election.
Many AIPAC officials know that all this could end in disaster for Israel, but they are too afraid to speak out.
So now we have a situation whereby the U.S. keeps weakening and threatening the Palestinian Authority and its president, Mahmoud Abbas, for “incitement'’ against Israelis, while turning a blind eye to Abbas’ very real and vital, quiet security cooperation with Israel — and while saying nothing when Netanyahu provokes Israeli Arabs, telling them they are not real citizens of Israel, only Jews are.
Netanyahu’s incitements against Israeli Arabs aim to make it impossible for his opponents to form a governing coalition with them that could oust him from power. At the same time, Bibi has forged a partnership with the far right Jewish Power party, a party so racist and anti-Arab that Israel’s Supreme Court last week banned its leader from running for Parliament.
It’s disgusting, but the Trump administration has not uttered a word of condemnation for Bibi’s alliance with anti-Arab racists, nor have Democrats in Congress, who were — rightly — quick to denounce Rep. Ilhan Omar’s anti-Semitic tropes about the Israel lobby.
This double standard has strategic consequences. I carry no brief for the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. It is corrupt and mismanaged and does at times incite violence, but Abbas is the last best hope for a two-state deal between Israelis and Palestinians. The PA also provides a basic infrastructure for Palestinian life and, as any Israeli intelligence official will tell you, it provides vital, daily cooperation with Israeli security services that have kept the West Bank largely quiet for years — and relieved Israel of the costs and headache of administering it directly.
The reckless Hamas rocket attack on a home in central Israel, injuring seven Israelis, underscores that Israel has real enemies from which it needs to defend itself. But Hamas is not an existential threat to Israel. If the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, which, as I said, tacitly cooperates with Israel on security, collapses while Israel has to fight Hamas — or if West Bank Palestinian youth decide, in mass, to join Hamas in clashing with Israel — the strategic challenge for Israel would be enormous.
But the arms race between Trump and the Democrats over who can be more unblinkingly pro-Israel has led to a series of punitive U.S. actions — the March 2018 Taylor Force Act, the October 2018 Anti-Terrorism Clarification Act, and the ending of all U.S. contributions to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, UNRWA, which funds Palestinian schools and social services — that have brought the Palestinian Authority close to collapse.
This only hastens the day when Palestinians will say to Bibi and Trump: “OK, you guys won. We lost. The two-state solution is gone, so let us become Israeli citizens and give us the vote.”
Ah, but such a disaster will be avoided, you say, because Trump has his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, working on a peace plan for the West Bank and Jerusalem and after the Israeli election he’ll unveil it? Not so fast. Here’s the quandary Trump and Kushner may find themselves tangled in:
The Israeli attorney general — whom Bibi appointed — has leveled multiple corruption charges against Netanyahu. Bibi is in real legal peril. The only way for him to save himself from the consequences of the indictment is to fight the charges while remaining as prime minister and perhaps trying to bargain for dismissal of the charges in return for stepping down. But the only way he can stay in power while facing indictment is to form a right wing-religious coalition that will stand by him. Every other party will either refuse to join his coalition or desert him at the time of indictment.
“But such a right-wing government will not accept any meaningful concessions to the Palestinians,” a former U.S. ambassador to Israel, Martin Indyk, pointed out to me. To the contrary: “The right wing members of such a coalition will insist on annexing parts or all of the West Bank, now that Trump has greenlighted that by recognizing Israel’s annexation of the Golan. So the irony is that by helping Bibi get re-elected, which Trump is obviously trying to do, he is ensuring the creation of a right-wing government that will reject his peace plan and any prospect for peace with the Palestinians.”
In sum: There is no U.S. strategy here — not from Trump or Congress. There is only a competition over who can love Israel to death the most — for their own reasons.
So Trump will get his campaign contributions from Adelson; Bibi will try to win re-election with Trump’s help, to avoid jail by partnering with a racist Israeli party; the Palestinians will get blamed for everything, only some of which they’ll deserve; AIPAC will have a banner year raising money; Israel will keep moving toward formally or informally annexing the West Bank; and the question of whether or not to still support Israel — when it’s no longer a Jewish democracy — will tear apart every synagogue and Jewish organization across the world.
And the AIPAC convention of 2022 will feature a panel it’s never had before: “Who lost Israel?'’
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.