Biden & Trump
Updated 2024-08-24
2024-06-18 Trump and Biden on Israel Asked about the likely choice in November between Biden and Donald Trump, the consensus among the demonstrators was that they wouldn’t vote for “Genocide Joe,” and that there was nothing to choose from between Biden and Trump when it comes to Middle East policy. Some would simply stay home, while some might vote for the Green Party or another third party, and even those who might eventually pull the lever for Biden pledged to vote “uncommitted” in any primary to “send a message to the White House.”
Still, no matter the horrors — and they are horrors — of Gaza and of the low-intensity war Israel is also waging in the occupied West Bank, and despite Israel’s regular artillery and bombing runs against targets in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and even Iran, those who argue that there’s no difference between Biden and Trump when it comes to Israel are deeply mistaken.
Trump, on the other hand — ever transactional, with distinctly bizarre attitudes toward American Jews and, in particular, Jewish supporters of Israel — has gone out of his way to cultivate his connection to Netanyahu and the most extreme wing of Israel’s governing parties. To placate Christian Zionists, who comprise a substantial chunk of his base, he’s donned the cloak of an uber-Zionist himself. During his administration, in fact, he named his son-in-law Jared Kushner as his Middle East “czar.” Kushner has lifelong ties to Netanyahu, who even slept in his bedroom when Kushner was young. (“Jared Kushner once lent Benjamin Netanyahu his bed,” is how the Jerusalem Post put it.)
So, while pro-Palestinian demonstrators are focusing their anger on Biden, they may, all too ironically, find themselves targeted for deportation by Donald Trump, should he win a second term in office. “One thing I do is, any student that protests, I throw them out of the country,” was his comment on the Gaza protests. “You know, there are a lot of foreign students. As soon as they hear that, they’re going to behave.”
Jared Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, promoted moving the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, which President Trump indeed did. That move, supported by radical-right Republicans, many ultra-Orthodox Jews, and Christian Zionists, was a calculated provocation of the Palestinians, and would be condemned by the Pope, the United Nations, and much of the world.
Throughout his presidency, Trump made it clear that he supported a radical revision of U.S. policy toward the Israel-Palestine issue. In 2019, in a move that drew outrage and derision, Trump signed an order recognizing Israel’s illegal annexation of Syria’s Golan Heights, seized in 1967. And later that year, in a political “gift” to Netanyahu, Trump discarded decades of U.S. policy by declaring that Israel’s massive project to build illegal settlements in the West Bank did not violate international law. “We’ve recognized the reality on the ground,” was the way Secretary of State Mike Pompeo put it.
In addition, the president unilaterally shut down the Washington office of the Palestine Liberation Organization, while halting $200 million in direct U.S. aid to the Palestinian Authority and $300 million owed to the United Nations Relief & Works Agency (UNRWA), which supports Palestinian refugees in the West Bank, Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan.
Trump’s wrecking-ball approach to the Middle East culminated in January 2020 when he and Netanyahu jointly released a “Middle East peace plan” hammered out by Kushner, Friedman, Greenblatt, and Avi Berkowitz (plucked from the Kushner Companies with zero experience in the region). Among other provisions, it green-lit Israeli annexation of the Jordan Valley and a web of illegal settlements that house hundreds of thousands of Jewish occupiers. https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/06/18/trump-and-biden-on-israel/
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Categorized Directory: News and Articles about Israel- Palestine Conflict
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