UPDATED --- Caroline Glick: Israel in the Trump Era

From Caroline Glick in the Jerusalem Post:

It is too early to know who Trump’s advisers and cabinet members will be. But there is good reason for Israel to be encouraged by the advisers who have worked with Trump during the campaign. 

Vice President-elect Mike Pence is one of the most pro-Israel policy-makers in America. Former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich is an outspoken ally of Israel and of the US-Israel alliance. 

Likewise, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, former senator Rick Santorum, retired general Mike Flynn, and former UN ambassador John Bolton are all extraordinary champions of the US alliance with Israel. 

Trump’s Israel affairs advisers during the campaign, David Friedman and Jason Greenblatt, are also among the strongest advocates of the US-Israel alliance who have arisen in decades. 

The striking friendliness of the Trump election team is even more notable when we consider what Israel would have faced from a Hillary Clinton administration. 

Clinton’s cabinet in waiting at the George Soros-funded and John Podesta- run Center for American Progress contained no serious advocates of the US-Israel alliance. 

And her stable of advisers were not merely indifferent to Israel. The WikiLeaks revelations from Podesta’s emails, like the correspondences published by Judicial Watch from Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, made clear that Clinton’s team included several advisers with deep-seated hostility if not animus toward Israelis and toward the Israeli government. 

... the Trump administration ... will not hesitate to abandon received wisdom on a host of issues and initiate policies that the bipartisan policy elites wouldn’t be caught dead even talking about. Trump’s victory was first and foremost a defeat for the American elite, what Prof. Angelo Codevilla memorably referred to as America’s “ruling class.” 

Trump’s campaign did not merely target the Democratic establishment. He attacked the Republican establishment as well. 

True, in his victory speech Trump said that he intends to heal the rifts in American society – presumably starting with his own party. But at least one thing ought to be clear about that reunification. As the president-elect, Trump will set the terms of the healing process. 

There is every reason to expect that at a minimum, Trump will not soon forgive the Republicans who refused to support and even opposed his presidential bid. Members of the Never Trump camp will be denied positions and influence over the Trump administration and sent into the political desert. 

Another establishment that fell on its sword in this election is the American-Jewish establishment. Led by the Anti-Defamation League, the American-Jewish establishment, including its largest donors, stood almost as one in its support for Clinton. 

The members of the American- Jewish leadership placed their partisan preferences above their communal interests and responsibilities. In so doing they enfeebled the community in a manner that will be difficult to repair. 

Both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party have antisemites in their ranks. The Jewish establishment ignored and pretended away the Democratic antisemites, even when they were burning Israeli flags at the Democratic convention. They said nothing when anti-Israel ravings that were at best borderline antisemitic of senior Clinton advisers like Thomas Pickering and Anne Marie Slaughter were published by Judicial Watch. 

On the other hand, the Jewish establishment castigated Trump as antisemitic for the presence of antisemites like David Duke on the fringes of the Republican Party. 

Legitimate criticisms of anti-Israel financier George Soros were condemned as antisemitic while truly antisemitic assaults on Trump donor Sheldon Adelson by Clinton backers went unaddressed. 

The consequence of the Jewish establishment’s almost total mobilization for Clinton is clear. The Trump White House won’t have an open door policy for those who falsely accused Trump of antisemitism. Jewish Americans are going to have to either oust the leaders of the groups that put their party before their community, or establish new organizations to defend their interests. 

Whatever path is chosen, the process of rebuilding the communal infrastructure the community’s leaders have wrecked will be long, difficult and expensive. Unlike the American-Jewish community, for Israel, the defeat of the American establishment is a positive development. 

At least since the Clinton years, the received wisdom of the American foreign policy elite has been that the US must seek to swiftly cause Israel to sign a deal with the PLO. The contours of the deal are similarly clear to all concerned. Israel must surrender control over all or most of Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, and transfer the areas, more or less Jew-free, to the PLO. 

This bipartisan view is inherently hostile to Israel. It places all the responsibility for making peace on Israel. And as the sole responsible party, Israel is also the sole party that is guilty for the absence of peace. 

The flipside is similarly dismal. Palestinians are absolved of responsibility for terrorism, hatred and political warfare against Israel. 

The anti-Israel hostility inherent in the two-state paradigm has brought on a situation where even pro-Israel US officials end up joining their anti-Israel colleagues in bearing down on Israel to act in ways that are inimical to both its national security and to the very concept of a US-Israel alliance. 

The foreign policy ruling class’s commitment to the two-state paradigm has blinded its members to Israel’s strategic importance to the US and caused them to see the US’s only stable ally in the region as a drag on US interests. 

Many of Trump’s advisers, including Gingrich, who has been raised as a leading candidate to serve as either Trump’s White House chief of staff or as secretary of state, have rejected this received wisdom. 

In a Republican presidential debate in 2011, Gingrich referred to the Palestinians as an “invented people,” and noted that they indoctrinate their children to perceive Jews as subhuman and seek their annihilation. 

For his statement of fact, Gingrich was brutally assaulted by Democratic and Republican elites. But he never rescinded his statement. 

Trump’s election provides Israel with the first opportunity in 50 years to reshape its alliance with the US. This new alliance must be based on a common understanding and respect for what Israel has to offer the US as well as on the limits of what the US can offer Israel. 

UPDATE

In light of this article's comments on "the members of the Jewish Establishment", I think it is interesting to note that TODAY,

CAIR AND THE ADL ARE CONDEMNING TRUMP'S PICK OF STEPHEN BANNON AS "CHIEF STRATEGIST":

In a statement issued Sunday evening, the Council on American Islamic Relations slammed the appointment of “Islamophobe, White Nationalist Bannon.” The group said Bannon helped promote a “dark and paranoid picture” of Muslim Americans through the Breitbart News website and Bannon’s own radio show. 

“The appointment of Stephen Bannon as a top Trump administration strategist sends the disturbing message that anti-Muslim conspiracy theories and white nationalist ideology will be welcome in the White House,” said Nihad Awad, CAIR’s national executive director. “We urge President-elect Trump to reconsider this ill-advised appointment if he truly seeks to unite Americans.” 

The Anti-Defamation League echoed CAIR’s condemnation of Bannon’s appointment in a statement of its own. 

“It is a sad day when a man who presided over the website of the ‘alt-right’ — a loose-knit group of white nationalists and unabashed anti-Semites and racists — is slated to be a senior staff member in the ‘people’s house,’” read the Sunday statement from ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt.

To my knowledge, the ADL has never provided any evidence that Stephen Bannon, or Breitbart News, are anti-Semitic.