Tanya Gold is to Journalism what Harold Shipman was to Care of the Elderly

Piglet ‘reviewed’ Asa Winstanley’s ‘Weaponising Anti-Semitism’ for the Jewish Chronicle – It would have helped if she had read it first!

Moshe Yalon - "Mein Kampf," reversed and Jewish Supremacy ideology infiltrated the government

I first came across Tanya Gold when Jackie Walker, the Black-Jewish activist who was expelled from the Labour Party, mentioned that there was a journalist who was interested in interviewing Jewish anti-Zionists for Harper’s Magazine and she wanted to put our side of the story.

Of course I should have been more wary and remembered that most journalists have the same relationship to the truth that Myra Hindley had to child protection. The article that eventually emerged was a work of fiction, and bad fiction at that.

‘Among Britain’s Anti-Semites’ was a studied exercise in deception and dishonesty. It was accompanied by a photograph of a demonstrator at the Zionist Enough is Enough demonstration on March 26 holding a poster ‘For the many not the Jew.’

This was supposed to be a joke. Yet it was instructive. It was a play on For the Many not the Few slogan of those who supported Jeremy Corbyn. It first emerged from the pen of Howard Jacobson, a minor comic novelist trapped in a Jewish paradigm.

‘For the Many not the Jew’ equated Jews with the rich few, as opposed to the many. Could anything be more anti-Semitic? It is a form of Jewish exceptionalism that says that Jews do not belong in normal society.

I wrote to Gold at the time about her piece:

‘What is remarkable for an article so long in gestation is its sheer superficiality and lack of insightful comment. What is sad is how bland and mundane it is. It is as if you lack even one original thought or idea.’

I was vaguely aware of Harper’s. It had a radical tradition. It published Seymour Hersh’s exposure of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and attacked the US invasion of Iraq. It was generally sympathetic to the Palestinians. Perhaps it was this which caught me off my guard.

Marriage between Jew and non-Jew in Israel is seen as a 'plague' by Zionists

If Gold had been honest I would have been happy to be interviewed but clearly she preferred subterfuge. It is as if she feared having her prejudices confronted. Or perhaps she was hoping that if she posed as a sympathiser then I could trapped into something genuinely anti-Semitic.

Gold took me out for an expenses-paid meal in Soho’s Chinatown. She gave no clue as to her real views. I count myself as fortunate that she didn’t quote me in her article because it would undoubtedly have been a lie! I wrote my experience up in The Dissection of a Lie - Harper’s Tale of Deceit and Deception. I wrote at the time:

Tanya Gold is nothing if not a junkie for every trite and shopworn phrase. It is the sheer lack of originality or evidence of any deep thought which is the most frustrating thing about her article. It is as if Gold had assembled every last cliché as she set out to repel her imagined critics. ‘Anti-Semitism’ she tells us ‘is the only racism that must not be defined by those who experience it.’ Racism isn’t ‘defined’ but described by its victims. Definitions are best left to experts in linguistics. Almost in the same breath she attacks Jewish Voice for Labour for their denial that they are anti-Zionist asking ‘I wonder if this is tactical’ Clearly some self-definitions are preferable to others!

This is by way of introduction to her ‘review’ of Asa Winstanley’s new book Weaponising Anti-Semitism. You can get a good measure of it by the title The book Adrian Mole would have written (if he hated Israel). I confess to not having been a fan of Adrian Mole but if she is comparing Winstanley to Adrian Mole then Gold is the ideal casting for Pamela Pigg aka Piglet, Adrian’s on-off girlfriend. It is also a most appropriate name reflecting as it does her charm and personality!

Winstanley asked Did the Jewish Chronicle’s reviewer Tanya Gold even read my book? The only true thing that Piglet wrote in her ‘review’ was the opening statement ‘Asa Winstanley blogs at the Electronic Intifada’ which she immediately spoiled by going on to say that EI was ‘a website dedicated to attacking Israel.’ Who, one wonders is Israel? EI is a site dedicated to exposing the day to day reality of Apartheid Israel and its horrors. It is as if a site that wrote about Nazi Germany was described as ‘a website dedicated to attacking Germany.’

An unfailing characteristic of most Zionists is how easily they fall into the mindset of the worst anti-Semite. According to Piglet Winstanley’s Twitter comment that the Board of Deputies is “actively involved in promoting Israeli genocide”, a factual statement, becomes an attack on Jews. Do all Jews promote Israeli genocide? Playing the amateur psychologist Piglet opines that Winstanley is ‘a man who dedicates his conscious hours to thinking about Jews. I think he dreams about us.’ Piglet not only projects onto others but does it embarrassingly badly.

Being of a decidedly limited intellect Piglet cannot conceive of Jews who are not racists or Zionists. Perhaps someone should remind her that most Jews who died in the Holocaust were not Zionists whereas two-thirds of the Judenrat, the Jewish Councils who collaborated with the Nazis, were Zionists.

Inter-racial relationships, between Arabs and Jews, are a taboo in Israel because it threatens Jewish national identity

One could even point out that when Zionism first arose in the late 19^th century it was opposed by the overwhelming majority of Jews as a form of Jewish anti-Semitism. But why counter Piglet’s prejudices with facts?

Piglet aka Gold is incapable of reading the index of the book she is reviewing

A clue to the fact that Piglet didn’t bother to read Winstanley’s book is when she writes:

how come then JC editor Stephen Pollard exposed Jeremy Newmark — then leading the Jewish Labour Movement — for alleged accounting irregularities? Was it a (rare) mistake? If Jews represent the malevolent forces of Capital, why did we never try to destroy Gordon Brown, who is also a leftist?

As Winstanley points out

The book includes two and a half pages dedicated to the Newmark affair; pages which extensively cite the Jewish Chronicle (pp. 68-70) and explore the likely reason that Pollard exposed Newmark.

Even a semi-literate hack would have checked the index of the book she was reviewing for the entry ‘Newmark, Jeremy’ but even this was too much for Piglet. When you are writing for the Jewish Chronicle it is de rigeur not to let the facts get in the way of a good story.

Tanya Gold aka Piglet who sees, hears and speaks no evil about Israeli apartheid

Her reference to Gordon Brown as a ‘leftist’ is laughable and says more about the politics of Piglet than anything. I doubt if the dour Scotsman’s most devoted admirer would describe the architect of Labour neo-liberalism, the man who forced through the disastrous Private Finance Initiative and who adopted the BNP slogan of ‘British Jobs for British Workers’, as a leftist. That Piglet considers Brown as a leftist says more about her than anything I could say.

Piglet, doesn’t like historical comparisons. She takes offence at the term ‘witch-hunt’ to describe the expulsions and purges in the Labour Party. Why? Because this is ‘dismissing the very real struggles of witches’. The thought that this might bring these struggles to life and give them a contemporary meaning, probably never occurred to her. Piglet is a simple soul and thinking too much hurts.

Henry Ford 

Piglet would have the persecution of the Salem ‘witches’ left in their own historical tomb. For her there are no lessons to be learnt from history. As that notorious anti-Semite, Henry Ford said ‘history is bunk’. Piglet has a lot in common with the anti-Semites she purports to dislike.

Piglet hates comparing. Each tragedy must be confined to its own box, left in its own peculiarity. For Zionism the holocaust is unique. There are no comparisons with anyone or anything. Hitler was uniquely evil and the Jews were unique victims. That is how Israel sells itself to the world. Anti-Semitism is unique. 

If we don’t compare then there is no historiography. Without comparing we cannot translate historical events into the present and make sense of them. Without comparisons we cannot understand the present either. Instead the past becomes a dead weight, a threat to the present because, as Jefferson observed, democracy and worship of the past are incompatible. For Zionism the holocaust is not a guiding light to fighting racism. It is the justification for its continuance.

Despite being the title of the 6th chapter Piglet has not heard of Arthur Miller’s play ‘The Crucible’. Since she didn’t feel the need to read the book why should she? The Jewish Chronicle employs polemicists not literary critics. No doubt the comparison Miller made between the witch-hunt in Salem and McCarthyism in the 1950s was also ‘dismissing the very real struggles of witches’. Piglet is a warrior for a very 21^st century McCarthyism where the term ‘anti-Semite’ has replaced ‘communist’.

In an article for the New Yorker in October 1996 Miller explained that:

so many practices of the Salem trials were similar to those employed by the congressional committees that I could easily be accused of skewing history for a mere partisan purpose. Inevitably, it was no sooner known that my new play was about Salem than I had to confront the charge that such an analogy was specious—that there never were any witches but there certainly are Communists. In the seventeenth century, however, the existence of witches was never questioned by the loftiest minds in Europe and America;…

Of course, there were no Communists in 1692, but it was literally worth your life to deny witches or their powers, given the exhortation in the Bible, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” There had to be witches in the world or the Bible lied. ….

The more I read into the Salem panic, the more it touched off corresponding images of common experiences in the fifties: the old friend of a blacklisted person crossing the street to avoid being seen talking to him; the overnight conversions of former leftists into born-again patriots; and so on. Apparently, certain processes are universal. When Gentiles in Hitler’s Germany, for example, saw their Jewish neighbors being trucked off…, the common reaction, even among those unsympathetic to Nazism… was quite naturally to turn away in fear of being identified with the condemned. …

But below its concerns with justice the play evokes a lethal brew of illicit sexuality, fear of the supernatural, and political manipulation, a combination not unfamiliar these days. The film, by reaching the broad American audience as no play ever can, may well unearth still other connections to those buried public terrors that Salem first announced on this continent.

All of this is of no concern to Piglet. She is convinced that she is surrounded by anti-Semitic conspiracies and that those who criticise her beloved ‘Jewish state’ are ‘anti-Semites’ for which read ‘Communists.’

Piglet takes offence at Winstanley’s reference to the fact that British Jews vote overwhelmingly for the Tories and have done for over half a century. She complains that ‘until 2010, we were neatly divided between Labour and the Conservatives.’ Another sleight of Piglet’s hand. As Geoffrey Alderman, the historian of British Jewry points out:

"the face of London Jewry… is, arguably more bourgeois now than at any time since the mid-nineteenth century, and it is certainly more Conservative: at the last 4 general elections Jewish support for the Tories in Hendon North, Ilford North and Finchley has ranged from 52 to 68%; even in Hackney North it was (1979) as high as 36%. " ['Jewish Chronicle 28.3.86. 'Two Cheers for the GLC'].

What Piglet relies on is the blip that occurred during the Blair years. However the trends have been clear since the 1950s.

Piglet dismisses comparisons of Israel to Nazi Germany cursorily:

Israel has Nazi-like policies because they practise collective punishment. Anything else? Not really.

But Piglet doesn’t look very far. The pogrom at Huwara has probably not impinged upon her consciousness. The annual ‘Death to the Arabs’ March of the Flags, which the Israeli Police defend, is probably just a party. The fact that Israel now has a neo-Nazi Police Minister in Ben Gvir, according to former Likud Defence Minister Moshe Yalon (‘a reverse Mein Kamp’) is of no consequence.

The fact that Israeli soldiers and police shoot Palestinians who defend themselves against pogroms in the West Bank but have never once shot a settler, because you don’t shoot Jews, tells or should tell even Piglet why Israel has gone down the road of Apartheid.

Piglet is particularly exercised by the fact that Winstanley

digs out every document on the relations between early Zionists and Nazi Germany. “Zionist leaders were explicitly comparing their own movement to Nazism,” he writes. There is “a degree of ideological affinity between the Nazis and Zionism”. The goal of the Haavara agreement was “to save German Jewish capital, not German Jewish lives” and it “stabilised” the Nazi regime. This is a monstrous distortion, but it is useful: the insinuation that Jewish Nazis performed the Shoah on themselves.

Note that Piglet doesn’t challenge the veracity of the documents Winstanley ‘digs out’. She objects to the suggestion that Ha’avara was agreed to by the Nazis when the Nazi state was imperiled by a Boycott which 99% of world Jewry supported. It wasn’t Winstanley who wrote

the Nazi party and the Zionist Organization shared a common stake in the recovery of Germany. If the Hitler economy fell, both sides would be ruined.

It was Edwin Black, a right-wing Zionist in The Transfer Agreement (p.253). Black also described how

the anti-Hitler boycott was threatening to kill the Third Reich in its infancy, either through utter bankruptcy or by promoting an imminent invasion of Germany…The destruction of Hitler’s tenuous regime… loomed as the crisis of the hour in Berlin

Whilst most Jews were doing their best to strangle the Nazi beast in its infancy the Zionist movement saw only opportunities and wanted it to survive. That is the record of the quisling movement that Piglet defends.

The pro-Zionist Jewish Chronicle pulled no punches about Ha’avara and its breaking of the Boycott of Nazi Germany:

We say that that is aiding and comforting one of the most savage oppressions, even in Jewish history…. It breaks the united Jewish boycott front, a front let it not be forgotten, with which non-Jewish sympathisers were also aligned. [Jewish Chronicle ‘The Unclean Thing,’ 27.12.35.]

David Cesarani, the Zionist historian, suggested that those who doubted the viability of the regime in 1933 ‘were not engaged in wishful thinking’ and that it was beset by enemies coupled with a chronic balance of payments deficit.

So at a time when the Nazi government was at its weakest and world Jewry was doing its best to cause it to collapse, the Zionist movement was doing its best to strengthen it but Piglet sees nothing wrong in this.

In Zionism During the Holocaust I write that:

Berl Katznelson, a founder of Mapai and editor of Davar as well as Ben-Gurion’s effective deputy, saw the rise of Hitler as ‘an opportunity to build and flourish like none we have ever had or ever will have.’  Ben-Gurion was even more optimistic. ‘The Nazis’ victory would become “a fertile force for Zionism.” [Tom Segev, The Seventh Million]

To Piglet all this is ‘a monstrous distortion, but it is useful: the insinuation that Jewish Nazis performed the Shoah on themselves.’ No one except Piglet has mentioned Jewish Nazis. The Zionist movement was a Quisling movement which collaborated but to Piglet this is the way of dismissing the treachery of the Zionist leaders at the time.

And if you refer to the Zionist movement as Quislings then you are tarnishing all Jews. A not-so-clever debating trick which omits the salient fact that the Zionists were but 2% of German Jewry. They were treated as freaks and oddities by most Jews, they were the HitlerJuden. Piglet informs us that

Jews genuinely feared Corbyn, and that almost everything we feared has come to pass. Nor can he acknowledge the eruption of antisemitism after 2015.

The fear may have been genuine. The Jewish Chronicle and the Board of Deputies had been doing their level best to whip up fears but as to evidence of the ‘eruption’ of anti-Semitism we are left none the wiser. Piglet offers none. Mere assertion is not proof.

In ‘Among Britain’s Anti-Semites’ Piglet is particularly exercised by the presence of Ken Loach at the launch of JVL. She reminds us that in 1987 he directed Jim Allen’s play Perdition which was based on Israel’s trial of Rudolf Kasztner, leader of Hungarian Zionism during the war. Ken Loach’s Perdition was ‘a monstrous libel’ for criticising Kasztner’s ‘bargain with the Nazis that saved 1,684 Jews in 1944.’ She didn’t tell us why it was that Eichmann agreed to such a bargain.

For an answer one would have to turn to Eichmann’s interview with Sassen, a Dutch Nazi journalist as serialized in Life Magazine, (28.11.60.)

It was a good bargain. For keeping order in the camps, the price of 15,000 to 20,000 Jews … was not too high for me…. there was a very strong similarity between our attitudes in the SS and the viewpoint of these immensely idealistic Zionist leaders…. And because Kasztner rendered us a great service by helping keep the deportation camps peaceful, I would let his groups escape.... That was the ‘gentleman’s agreement’ I had with Kasztner.

Perhaps Rudolph Vrba, who escaped from Auschwitz on April 10 1944 and who warned of the preparations being made to exterminate Hungarian Jewry was also guilty of a monstrous libel when he wrote in the Daily Herald of February 1961:

“I accuse certain Jewish leaders of one of the most ghastly deeds of the war. This small group of quislings knew what was happening to their brethren in Hitler's gas chambers and bought their own lives with the price of silence. Among them was Dr Kasztner.”

Piglet should be aware that fellow Zionist Jonathan Freedland, when looking for a Jewish hero of the holocaust alighted on Vrba because there were so few Zionist heroes for his book The Escape Artist.

Members of the Kasztner Train of the Prominents

Piglet’s comment on Zionist opposition to the Kindertransport, which saved 10,000 Jewish children in England was that ‘a few merely said they would prefer the children to be settled in Palestine.’ Clearly her research didn’t extend to the speech of David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister. In a speech on 9 December 1938 he explained that:

‘If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England, and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Yisrael, then I would opt for the second alternative. For we must weigh not only the life of these children, but also the history of the People of Israel.’

It expressed the attitude of the Zionist minority at the time which Piglet defends with all the charms that you would expect of Mole’s girlfriend.

Perhaps we should leave the final word to Haim Cohen, the Attorney General and Kasztner’s lawyer in his appeal to the Supreme Court against the lower court’s verdict:

If in Kasztner’s opinion, rightly or wrongly, he believed that one million Jews were hopelessly doomed, he was allowed not to inform them of their fate; and to concentrate on the saving of the few. He was entitled to make a deal with the Nazis for the saving of a few hundred and entitled not to warn the millions ... that was his duty… It has always been our Zionist tradition to select the few out of many in arranging the immigration to Palestine ... Are we to be called traitors? [1]

Eichmann, the chief exterminator, knew that the Jews would be peaceful and not resist if he allowed the Prominents to be saved, that the Train of the Prominents was organized on Eichmann’s orders to facilitate the extermination of the whole people. … if all the Jews of Hungary are to be sent to their death he is entitled to organize a rescue train for 600 people. He is not only entitled to it but is also bound to act accordingly.

Piglet however is convinced, to use her own analogy, that she is the only wise one on a ship of fools. Those who died in the Holocaust simply didn’t understand that their own lives were transitory whereas a Jewish State would live on forever. And just like her boyfriend Mole, Piglet will continue to write the same rubbish for as long as it pays her.

Tony Greenstein

---

[1]        Hecht, p. 195, https://tinyurl.com/bnycybb

If Naz Shah’s idea of moving Israel to the USA had been implemented not only would there be peace in the Middle East but Trump would still be President!!

70% of Israelis would, if they could, have voted for Trump and just 13% of Biden! This is Israel today 

Cast your mind back to 2016 and the ‘discovery’ that in 2014, at the height of Israel’s genocidal bombardment of Gaza, when 2,200 people, including 550 children were murdered, Naz Shah, not yet an MP, dreamed of transferring Israel to the United States realizing that Israel would finally be rid of the Palestinians and have no more excuse to engage in blood letting.

The two states get on so well, and the USA has land in abundance. It seemed an obvious solution. It would also save the USA a small fortune in military aid.

By 2016 we were in the middle of the fake Labour ‘anti-Semitism’ attack on Corbyn so Naz was forced to humiliate herself and apologise for ‘anti-Semitism’ to the ‘Jewish community’ (i.e. the Israel lobby) in order that she could stay in Parliament.  Ken Livingstone got suspended defending her and Corbyn went along with all this and ended up getting suspended himself.

However imagine what might have happened if Naz Shah’s fantasy had been acted out.  Is it a crime to fantasize? We all dream of a better world!

A brilliant idea

I have to confess I never understood this ‘anti-Semitism’ stuff.  All Naz Shah and others were suggesting was a change of scenery for Israeli Jews!  There was no hint of extermination or anything. Now today, just imagine what would have happened if that dream fantasy had been fulfilled. 

70% of Israelis supported Trump compared to just 13% for Biden.  Even Jeremy Corbyn got more Jewish voters than Biden got Israeli Jewish voters!!  Imagine what would have happened if we had put half Israel’s Jewish populace in Michigan and the other half in Pennsylvania?  Between them they had 38 electoral college votes and that would have enabled Trump to win by a slender 2 votes.

McDonnell and Owen Jones did more to destroy the Corbyn Project than Boris Johnson - this was the time to tell the Zionists the difference between satire and anti-Semitism

Anti-Semitic? Why?  There’s plenty of rustbelt land filled with abandoned factories and foreclosed land that Israel could colonise and call home. They could establish settlements galore on the ruins of rusting factories.  Indeed they could have rejuvenated them and put back life into America’s industrial economy.

Meanwhile the Palestinians could return to their own home.  Even better the Israeli settlements could be demolished, brick by brick and in that way the old Biblical scenery of the West Bank could be restored to what it was before these ugly concrete structures.

In other words everyone would benefit!

The fact that 70% of Israelis would have voted for the anti-Semitic Trump demonstrates once again that the best friend of Zionism is anti-Semitism. Trump has claimed that Henry Ford, the legendary anti-Semite who printed the Czarist forgery the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in his Dearborn Independent, was his ‘inspiration’. The same Henry Ford that Hitler also claimed as his inspiration and who hung a life-sized portrait of him by his desk.

This is the man that Israeli Jews would have voted for by a factor of over 5-1. So when you see someone like Keir Starmer describe themselves as a ‘Zionist without qualification’ then you know that what they mean is that they are a racist ‘without qualification’.

So loved was  Trump that West Bank mayors and settlers held a religious ceremony, complete with the blowing of the shofar (a ram’s horn) to pray for the re-election of Trump.  Unfortunately god seems not to have been listening!  If this is god’s attitude then if I were a settler I would be very worried that the great bearded one might be angry again with his people! Exile to the United States would be a fitting punishment - again!!

Below are 3 articles, two  from the Times of Israel and one from Gideon Levy in Ha'aretz.

Tony Greenstein

Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden speaks at a rally at the Iowa State Fairgrounds in Des Moines, Iowa, Friday, Oct. 30, 2020. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

 By 70% to 13%, Israeli Jews say Trump is better candidate than Biden for Israel

Israel Democracy Institute poll also finds 42% of Israeli Jews believe the US-Israel bond will weaken if Biden is elected, with only seven percent saying it will strengthen

3 November 2020, 4:30 am  

Some 70 percent of Jewish Israelis believe a victory for Donald Trump over Joe Biden in the US presidential election would be preferable for the Jewish state, an opinion poll indicated on Monday.

The Israel Democracy Institute survey, released a day before the US election day, asked whether Republican incumbent Trump or his Democratic challenger Biden is the preferred candidate, “from the standpoint of Israel’s interests.”

Among Israeli Jews, 70% said Trump is the preferred candidate, 13% said Biden, and 17% don’t know.

Support for Trump was markedly lower among Arab Israelis, with 36% saying he was the preferred candidate, 31% saying Biden, and 33% saying they didn’t know.

Among all Israelis, 63% favor Trump, 17% Biden and 20% don’t know.

Broken down by political camp, 82% of right-wing poll respondents, 62% of centrists, and 40% percent of left-wingers said Trump is the better candidate for Israel. 

Foreign Affairs Minister of Bahrain Abdullatif bin Rashid Al-Zayani, Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu, and US President Donald Trump participate in the signing ceremony of the Abraham Accords on the South Lawn of the White House on September 15, 2020, in Washington, DC. (Alex Wong/Getty Images/AFP)

 If Biden wins the race, 42% of Israeli Jews believe the US-Israel bond will weaken, with only 7% saying it will strengthen. Among Arab Israelis, those figures were 24% and 16%, respectively.

“Presumably this pronounced preference among the Jewish public for Trump to keep serving stems to a large extent from the assessment that Biden’s election would weaken US-Israeli relations, and strengthen the relationship between Washington and the Palestinians,” IDI said. 

The survey polled 611 men and women in Hebrew and 150 in Arabic, constituting a representative national sample of the population of Israel, with a margin of error of  +/- 3.7%.

Trump has been viewed by many as one of the most pro-Israel US presidents ever. 

Marc Zell - Chair Republicans for Israel Overseas

The Trump administration has used the final months of the campaign to further seek support from pro-Israel Jewish and Evangelical Republican voters. In just this past week, the State Department updated its policy to allow US citizens born in Jerusalem to list Israel as their country of birth on passports and US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman signed an agreement with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu extending US scientific cooperation to apply as well in the West Bank — a move viewed by many as a first step toward American recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the settlements.

Opposition leader Yair Lapid of Yesh Atid-Telem is pictured during an interview with AFP at his office in the Knesset, Jerusalem, on September 14, 2020. (Emmanuel Dunand/AFP)

But opposition leader Yair Lapid on Monday said that whoever wins, “the next president of the United States will be a friend of Israel.”

“Both Donald Trump and Joe Biden are friends of Israel, with a deep commitment to Israel and to Zionism,” Lapid said in a statement, while adding he had seen hostile “radical voices” growing stronger within the Democratic Party.

Several rabbis, including Haim Druckman, an influential former member of the National Religious Party, have urged US citizens in Israel to vote for Trump.

And on Monday evening around 150 Trump supporters waving US and Israeli flags rallied in the city of Beit Shemesh south of Jerusalem, where many Israeli-Americans live.

An Israeli supporter of the re-election of US President Donald Trump waves American and Israeli flags from a car at a rally outside of the US Embassy, in Jerusalem, Tuesday, Oct. 27, 2020. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)

The Trump administration has also sought to expand the list of Arab and Muslim-majority countries to normalize relations with Israel in the final months of its current term. Last Friday, Sudan agreed to become the third country to do so in recent months. Sudan followed the lead of the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain after weeks of pressure from Washington, which conditioned removing Khartoum from its blacklist of state terror sponsors on Sudan making peace with the Jewish state.

These moves follow decisions by the Trump administration to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, transfer the US embassy there, recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, scrap previous policy deeming settlements to be illegal, release a peace plan widely deemed to be the most favorable to Israel yet, take a far more combative approach toward the Palestinians than previous administrations and pull out of the Iran nuclear deal, which the Netanyahu government opposed aggressively.

On the other hand, Trump’s critics point out that he has turned the issue of Israel into a political football when for decades the bipartisan nature of support for the Jewish state had been touted as something that kept Israel more secure. Polls of Jewish voters in the US show that at least two-thirds prefer Biden over Trump, many of whom blame the president for the rise in white nationalism in the US, which has seen Jews targeted in record numbers of anti-Semitic attacks.

Moreover, these more dovish voters are less supportive of the Israeli settlement enterprise in the West Bank and tend to oppose moves the Trump administration has taken to solidify the Israeli presence there at the expense of efforts to reach a two-state solution.

Look at Trump and You'll See the Israelis

Gideon Levy

Published on 08.11.2020

Standing in line Friday in the Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat Aviv Gimel to pick up the weekend edition of Israel Hayom, affluent residents discussed the likely defeat. “We’re screwed,” one man said sadly; his companions nodded in agreement. It’s a dark day for Israel: Donald Trump has lost the election.

No other country in the world, with the possible exception of the Philippines or Nebraska, was as saddened by his fall. A poll by Israel’s Mitvim think tank found that 70 percent of Israelis support Trump. A survey by the Washington-based Pew Research Center had similar findings. Whereas 75 percent of West Europeans are fed up with the U.S. president, in Israel a large majority – including centrists and some leftists – admires him.

It can be argued, of course, that this support is a way of saying thanks for moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, recognizing Israeli sovereignty in the Golan Heights and withdrawing from the Iranian nuclear deal. But these events caused little excitement in Israel. No one jumped into a fountain in a city square to celebrate the recognition of Majdal Shams as an Israeli town, and only a few people were moved by Ambassador David Friedman’s change of address.

The explanation for Trump’s rising popularity in Israel goes much deeper; its roots are much more disturbing. Israel admires Trump not despite his many repellent shortcomings but because of them. Trump is the embodiment of everything that’s bad and ugly about Israel while normalizing and whitewashing them for us. Look at him and you’ll see ourselves. This is who we are, or who we’d like to be. Most of us, anyway.

Trump is the embodiment of Israel the unbeautiful; he could easily be elected prime minister. The vulgarity, coarseness, belligerence, ignorance, scheming and lies; the contempt for the weak, for the law, for justice, the media, science and the environment – all this fits us like a glove.

Who wouldn’t want a prime minister condescending to everyone, someone who always knows best, who will make Israel great again? Who wouldn’t want a prime minister who’s nobody’s fool, who made his fortune through guile and cunning, just the way we like it?

Who wouldn’t want a prime minister who scoffs at political correctness and will bring back the good old days of male chauvinism unhindered by feminism; who won’t bother us with all those threats to the planet and nature, who’ll also bring back racism?

Who wouldn’t want a real man like him? Who wouldn’t like someone who will scorn international institutions, human rights groups and international law, who will violate signed agreements and deride arrogant Europe and its universal liberal values, just as in the secret dreams of many Israelis? Even Benjamin Netanyahu, who’s as similar to Trump as he can be, can’t attain that level of making dreams come true.

Take the typical Israeli driver. He isn’t Trump? The Israeli road isn’t Trumplike? Cut somebody off, honk, curse, break the law, park anywhere, don’t think about anyone but yourself, yours is the biggest, strongest and fastest; look at me.

Take Israeli politics, especially politicians on the right. That isn’t Trump? They wouldn’t want to be like him?

Combine Avigdor Lieberman, Miri Regev, Osnat Mark, Miki Zohar and David Amsalem and you get Trump in Hebrew. Combine their bullying, ignorance, populism, superficiality, populism and vulgarity and you get Israeli Trumpism.

As an encore, add the way Trump humiliated the Palestinians, ignored their very existence. Their rights meant nothing to him, just as they mean nothing to most Israelis, simply because they’re weak. It’s a dream.

It’s an Israeli dream to stop aid to the weak and give it to the strong, as Trump did – from the UNRWA refugee agency to the Israeli army, from the refugees to the force that expelled them. And it’s an Israeli dream to deport asylum seekers, as Trump has, to keep hundreds of children separated from their parents and leave tens of thousands of frightened adults.

That’s Trumpian justice, and it’s Israeli justice. That’s why we’ve loved him so much. That’s why it’s such a pity that he’ll be leaving.

In shadow of patriarchs, settler leaders gather in Hebron to pray for Trump win

West Bank mayors recite psalms, hoping for four more years; cite incumbent’s recognition of Golan Heights and Jerusalem, support for Israel against threats like Iran and BDS

November 2020, 4:53 pm

Hebron spokesman Yishai Fleisher, right, and Marc Zell, the head of Republicans Overseas Israel, blow shofars to show their support for Trump November, 2, 2020. (Courtesy Har Hevron regional council spokesperson)

Settler leaders held a special prayer session Monday outside the Tomb of the Patriarchs in the West Bank city of Hebron, at which they thanked US President Donald Trump for his support of the settlement movement and wished him success in Tuesday’s elections. 

Psalms and other prayers meant to aid the incumbent president to victory were recited at the Monday event, during which Har Hevron Regional Council chairman Yochai Damri and Marc Zell, the head of Republicans Overseas Israel, blew shofars to show their support for Trump.

At the event, Damri explained why the US president meant so much to the settler movement.

 “We came here today to say to President Trump thank you,” he said. 

“Thank you for your special relationship to the land of Israel, for the recognition of the Golan Heights and of the settlement enterprise. Thank you for your war against Iran and the BDS movement. Thank you for strengthening the settlement of the land of the Bible. We pray and hope that you will continue to another four years of strengthening the settlement enterprise.” 

Israeli Trump Supporter heads to Jerusalem

Marc Zell, the head of Republicans Overseas Israel at the Cave of the patriarchs, November 2, 2020. (Courtesy: Har hebron regional council spokesperson)

Kiryat Arba Local Council chairman Eliyahu Libman said, “Trump proved his friendship toward the people of Israel by moving the American embassy to Jerusalem, and recognizing our sovereignty in the Golan Heights and the right of Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria.”

Those moves on behalf of the settler enterprise were lauded as “tremendous and daring” by Binyamin Regional Council chairman Yisrael Gantz.

Also adding their voices to the reelect Trump prayer meeting were Gush Etzion Regional Council chairman Shlomo Ne’eman and the mayor of Hebron, Rabbi Hillel Horowitz.

The Tomb of the Patriarchs, where the prayer session took place, is sanctified by Jews and Muslims as the burial place of the biblical patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; and matriarchs Sarah, Rebecca and Leah.

Hebron is home to approximately 1,000 settlers, who live in a series of enclaves surrounded by some 215,000 Palestinians. Large numbers of Israeli security forces protect Jewish residents in the city, which is frequently the scene of violence.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1323218530427408385

 

While Jews in the United States — except for the Orthodox — are expected to vote overwhelmingly for Democrat Joe Biden, Trump is a popular figure in Israel. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has described him as the “greatest friend” Israel has ever had in the White House.

Many in Israel view Trump as a staunch supporter of the Jewish state, especially in the wake of the Washington-brokered Abraham Accords, which led to normalization deals between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Sudan.

A poll published by Channel 12 news Friday showed 54% percent of Israelis favor Trump, compared to 21% who favor Biden and 25% who were undecided or did not know. No methodology or margin of error was provided by Channel 12 for the survey.

Settlers in particular have been outspoken supporters of Trump for his policies that appear to support Israeli annexation of parts of the West Bank. In addition, he has earned accolades for his administration’s decisions to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights.

US ambassador to Israel David Friedman (L) with Efrat Mayor Oded Revivi in Efrat on February 20, 2020. (Gershon Elinson/Flash90)

Still, many settler leaders, Damri included, rejected Trump’s Israeli-Palestinian peace plan over the fact that it included the possibility of the creation of a Palestinian state on parts of the West Bank not annexed by Israel. The reaction was reportedly met by anger in the White House.

Oded Revivi, the influential head of the Efrat settlement who was one of the settler leaders who embraced the Trump plan, said Sunday that he would not participate in the rally out of respect for the US political process.

“President Trump has proven over four years that he is a big friend of Israel and during his term ties between Israel and the US have grown stronger. However, just as we warn off foreign influences from internal debates and elections… so it is not correct for the leadership to express a stance on the US elections,”

he tweeted.