Trump's 'pro-Israel' Appointees Are the Worst of Our Enemies

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Gideon Levy

Nov 14, 2024

Tragedies are befalling Israel one after the other. The next impending one will occur on January 20, when Donald Trump is sworn is as president. If the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the National Security Adviser and the U.S. ambassador to Israel stick to their words, the coming years spell disaster for Israel. The next period will determine its fate as a perennial apartheid state thanks to its ostensible friends, who are no more than blood merchants, dealers who will deepen Israel's addiction to occupation, bloodshed and power, irrevocably.

They should not be labeled "friends of Israel," they are the obverse. They are the worst of its enemies. The new people in charge of the U.S.'s foreign policy are friends of apartheid, occupation, the settlements and war. Trump is the most moderate and restrained of this lot. He may restrain them somewhat. Itamar Ben-Gvir may also take part in restraining this group of wackos in Washington, if only he overcomes the language barrier.

Someone has already tweeted on X that the U.S. may yet impose sanctions on Israelis who don't move to a settlement. Imaginary? That's not so certain, judging by the delusional stances of these people. All of them could be panelists on [Netanyahu's mouthpiece] Channel 14's flagship program "The Patriots," even though they are even more extreme than its current participants. Their casting as the top echelon of American foreign diplomacy is horrifying. Imagine Channel 14 presenter Yinon Magal as foreign minister.

Racist and ignorant, they know nothing about the reality in the Middle East other than settler propaganda they have been brainwashed with in evangelical churches and on visits to settlements. The most criminal of Zionist enterprises, the settlements, has never had such adamant propagandists. Settler leader Yossi Dagan is already justifiably celebrating their appointment in front of every camera.

They will push Israel into annexation, population transfer, war crimes - which are not crimes in their eyes - ethnic cleansing and genocide. They will dismantle the last global watchdogs, empty of content the international community's institutions and arm Israel even more than their predecessors. They will put a stop to the International Court of Justice and with it the remnants of global justice. The bell may also toll for NATO and the United Nations. On January 20, Israel will receive a permit to kill, cleanse and deport. The addict will get the keys to the pharmacy's drug cabinet.

The designated Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, sees only Israeli victims in this terrible war. "... for almost a year now over 60,000 Israelis have [been] living in hotels & their kids going to school online," complained this pro-Israeli propagandist, who hasn't heard about the two million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the one million Lebanese who've lost everything they owned, moving around helplessly, terrified. They don't have a hotel to sleep in and their children are not studying online. They are being massacred by Israel.

You won't hear any of this from Rubio and his friends. Rubio espouses human rights, but only the fate of the Uighur minority touches his heart, as part of his campaign against China. The Palestinians don't fall into this category for him. It's doubtful that he knows anything about them, or has met one of them. Their fate doesn't interest him because they are all terrorists – that's what the settlers told him.

Michael Waltz, the new National Security adviser, speaks like right-wing journalist Shimon Riklin. "We have to let the IDF finish the job," he wrote recently. And the new ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, is a frequent visitor at the settlements and an inveterate supporter of annexation, viewing the 2005 disengagement from Gaza and four West Bank settlements as "one of Israel's greatest failures."

Once, this grotesque American complained that Jews have to visit Joseph's Tomb in Nablus in the dark of night, after participating in a pilgrimage to this dubious tomb, donning a kippah. He also said once that he was considering buying a house in one of the settlements.

This bunch's term in office will shape the future almost irreparably. The hope that they will cast off their positions, as happens sometimes to Israeli politicians, is our last hope, and it too seems to be baseless.

Originally published in Haaretz here.