Zionism After Trump

The radical shift in policy charted by the Trump administration with regard to Israel-Palestine (the movement of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem and the withdrawal of funds from UNRWA, the United Nations agency that provides support to Palestinian refugees) will likely prove to be a transformative crisis, not just for US-Mideast relations but for the global Zionist movement as a whole. Writing in the New York Times Michelle Goldberg has already asked if, in the wake of Trump's presidency, liberal Zionism is dead? By "liberal Zionism" she means the Labor Zionism of figures like David Ben Gurion and Yitzhak Rabin that had once been the mainstream of Israeli politics. Whether her most dire outcomes are realized or not, there seems little doubt that both the internal politics of Israel and its orientation toward the international community will be permanently changed by current developments.

Donald Trump sells his new policies as obvious course corrections never attempted by his predecessors because they lacked his bold vision and freedom from conventional restraint. He knows that his core voters will admire these moves as characteristic of his strength as a "disrupter" of politics-as-usual. Moreover, there will be very little downside for him politically because, like him, his supporters are not likely to pay attention to or care much about the long-term consequences of his actions.

Trump is operating from a conventional overestimation of U.S. power that is likely to make intuitive good sense to most of his core supporters. By "taking Jerusalem off the table" (that is, by backing the notion that occupied East Jerusalem will forever remain Israeli territory, despite the fact that the Israelis themselves have never gone as far as claiming to have "annexed" it) and by refusing funds to support Palestinian refugees, Trump claims to be forcing a peace resolution in the face of Palestinian intransigence, but none of these gambits will work to that end. Few countries will follow the U.S. in relocating embassy missions to Jerusalem, and Islamic nations or private donors are likely to make up the shortfall in funding for UNRWA.

Rather than creating a show of US strength, Trump has created a show of US bias. The US funded UNRWA, for example, not because the Palestinians were dependent upon US largess, but because doing so helped foster the appearance that the US could serve as an impartial broker between the Israelis, who on a per-capita basis receive many more dollars in aid from the US than any other nation, and the Palestinians, whose own aspirations for sovereignty wait upon a peace settlement with Israel. By asking why the US should give the Palestinians money "without getting anything in return," Donald Trump is effectively declaring that what the US "wants" is peace on Israel's terms. The same logical inference arises from Trump's claim to have "taken Jerusalem off the table".

Michelle Goldberg and others are no doubt correct in asserting that this shift in the dynamism of US-Israeli-Palestinian interaction undermines the forces, already weakened by years of stagnation, that might lead to a two-state solution. As Palestinians abandon the hopes of a two-state solution in the face of explicit US obstruction and as right-wing Israelis, emboldened by Trumpist encouragement, pursue policies of quasi-annexation, the goals and principles of liberal Zionism (the maintenance of a state that is both majority-Jewish and a liberal democracy) will become ever-progressively attenuated. Donald J. Trump may well have finally put a stake through the heart, not only of a two-state solution, but of the Zionist ideal of Herzl, Weizmann, and Ben Gurion.

Is there anything that can be done? Trump's diplomatic ineptitude is facilitated by the fact that few Americans, even among the Jewish community, understand the history and situation of Israel-Palestine any more than he does. Labor Zionist policies and goals are not given robust voice in American politics because (for reasons that I discussed in a previous post) all of the organizations that coordinate lobbying efforts on behalf of Israel (like AIPAC) are much more in sympathy with the ideology of Likud and parties even further to the right on the Israeli political spectrum.

If, in fact, Liberal Zionism is dying, it is in part because it lacks robust and institutionalized representation in the US, Israel's staunchest ally. One potential countermeasure to Trumpism might thus be a campaign of sustained outreach on the part of liberal Israeli political parties among Jews in the US. American Jews need to be better educated about the political differences between Israeli parties and leaders, and they need to be organized to impose political costs (or bestow political rewards) upon US leaders that obstruct or foster policies conducive to a two-state solution.

The imperative for this sort of coordination between American Jews and Israeli leaders is intensified by the possibility that, in fact, a two-state solution has been rendered untenable. If Israel-Palestine will eventually be united as a single commonwealth, demographics will not allow that new entity to be the majority-Jewish state that Theodor Herzl envisioned, but it can and  should still be a true democracy. Such an outcome can only be guaranteed, however, if  activism and leadership in both Israel and the US protects the rights, liberties, and security of all residents living on either side of the "Green Line." For such a process to be safeguarded, it is important that liberal Israeli leaders create channels of dialogue now that can garner the support necessary to mobilize public opinion in the US, whatever shape the Israeli-Palestinian peace process may take moving forward in the wake of the Trump presidency.

Count Me A #NeverOprah (#NeverClooney, #NeverStewart, #NeverYadaYadaCelebrity) Democrat

The brief frenzy set off by Oprah Winfrey's Golden Globes speech is a distressing bellwether of American politics. The notion that the Democratic Party might "fight fire with fire" by nominating a TV celebrity to oppose Donald Trump in 2020 speaks to how far down the rabbit hole our entire political culture has fallen. This is not to suggest that Oprah Winfrey is not far superior to Donald Trump in many respects. She is more articulate, more knowledgeable, more basically decent than the current president. But we must remember what a shockingly low bar that is.

The greatest problem with Ms. Winfrey is not any aspect of her character or intellect, or even her lack of experience in government. It is the raw fact of her celebrity and her career in entertainment. This should be an object lesson drawn from the fate of Al Franken. When the photo of Mr. Franken mock-groping Leeann Tweeden went viral, his apologists argued that we should discount it because it was done when he was a comedian. But they misread the moral of the story, which was not that we should forgive our senators their sins as comedians, but that we should not elect comedians to the Senate.

Much moreso than in the days of Ronald Reagan, our media culture is pervaded by a transgressive "shock and awe" sensibility that invariably causes celebrities to make gestures and statements that are impolitic- that are provocative and tolerably controversial in the context of "infotainment" or gossip but that would be execrably divisive coming from an elected official. Al Franken became the poster child for this phenomenon: a person who is going to wield real power over questions of sexual harassment and discrimination can not be on record as joking about such issues, as it fatally undermines his credibility, both in the eyes of the people hoping for his protection and the people who may be the target of his censure. Oprah Winfrey, if she stepped into the political arena, would be even more freighted with these liabilities, because she has enjoyed a much higher public profile for much longer than Al Franken. One need only briefly peruse the strident postings under the "#NeverOprah" tag on Twitter to see that her long record of public pronouncements is a goldmine of easily-taken-out-of context statements and distortion-prone provocations.

Beyond these admittedly instrumental cautions, we need to forswear celebrity candidates to cultivate our own integrity as an electorate. We have become so vapid, so intellectually lazy as a country, that we are no longer willing to learn anything about a person with whom we have not already been made familiar in a non-challenging medium. "The Apprentice" bottled Donald Trump for millions of voters so that they felt they knew him better than Marcio Rubio, Jeb Bush, or Hillary Clinton. Al Franken was a familiar face from late night television and book jackets. I myself fell into the trap of endorsing a petition asking Jon Stewart to run for my local congressional seat. The Tweeden affair was my come-to-Buddha moment. That way lies Idiocracy.

Our whole body politic has suffered terrible injuries under the Trump presidency, not the least of which is the president's breach of a basic article of the unwritten social contract: he was elected after making direct insults to and threats against whole constituencies of the electorate (Muslims, women, people of color) for which he has never apologized or sought redemption or reconciliation. The resulting climate of fear and anger is insidiously corrosive of our institutional order and must be redressed. An Oprah candidacy would only exacerbate the problem where a remedy is needed. Her entire campaign would be freighted with rationalizations ("she didn't really mean that," "she said that as a joke/provocation, but would never govern that way") and her administration, if it ever occurred, would labor under a credibility deficit from which it could never recover. We need politics to become less impolitic. To that end we must stop nominating and electing entertainers.

This is my message to fellow Democrats: don't nominate Oprah (or George Clooney, or Jon Stewart, or whatever celebrity becomes the flavor-du-jour in the next 35 months). If you do, I will not vote for her (him), even if it means that Trump is re-elected. As disastrous as I know a second Trump term will be, it would be the lesser of two evils weighed against the direction our country would be taken by another celebrity presidency following on the heels of the current one.