OpEd: Meshugenah International Politics

PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania — Meshugenahs  are bound to think alike, as with President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Netanyahu nominated Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize two weeks ago and last week Trump’s man in Israel, Mike Huckabee, appeared at the prime minister’s ongoing trial for bribery, fraud and breach of trust when he characterized some of Netanyahu’s judges as “totally unfair.”

These events lend new meaning to the “special relationship” between America and Israel. We need to support Israel’s existence and progress while working toward peace with its neighbors. However, the relationship has moved from “special” to, as television’s Night Court’s sleazy prosecutor Dan Fielding would say, “up close and personal.”

It smacks of a “big fat bribe,” as The Late Show’s Stephen Colbert on CBS put it in a monologue about his employer’s deal with Trump two days before he was sacked last Wednesday.

Many Americans abruptly suspected that Paramount, owner of CBS, left Colbert and his 200-person staff out in the cold to satisfy Trump’s lust for vengeance. However, both The New York Times and The New York Post reported that Colbert’s show will likely no longer be self-sustaining, which makes sense. The decision possibly results from both the “bribe” comment and the show’s financial condition.

What Trump might have done to Colbert aligns with his pattern of weird workings that infect most of his relationships. He punishes his perceived enemies and rewards his friends. Maybe Trump and Netanyahu believe their moves will mutually bolster their popularity.

Wanna bet on it? Trump enraged many of his own voters with his abusive style of governing during the last six months. Netanyahu’s standing mutates back and forth, but Israelis will remember that he failed to protect southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, when terrorists swooped in, murdered 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped 251 others.

The twin spectacles at the White House and an Israeli courtroom should cause anyone to cringe. A massive number of Israelis and Palestinians have died in the military conflict, not to mention casualties on other fronts. Trump and Netanyahu are not keeping their eyes on the ball. They need to focus on their roles in resolving the present tragedy and, if humanly possible, the long term struggle that has persisted for more than three-quarters of a century.

I gagged when I watched a tape from July 7 of Netanyahu handing Trump “the letter I sent to the Nobel Prize committee. It’s nominating you for the Peace Prize. It’s well deserved, and you should get it.” Who cares? Who will not consider the source of the nomination?

What does the Nobel have to do with the presidency? Somehow the Nobel has become a prerequisite in the making of a world leader’s legacy, and their pursuit of it could influence their approach to any given conflict they are charged with solving.

Last Wednesday, newly-minted Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee trumpeted himself as an expert on the Israeli judiciary after three months on the job. Trump last month urged that Netanyahu’s trial be canceled.

Huckabee said that his visit was “an act of friendship” that would signal “we want Israel to be successful.” We want Israel to succeed, and the former Arkansas governor painfully sought to explain what his legal intervention had to do with it.

“It’s an unprecedented thing that in the midst of holding office, during an incredibly tense time, that you would spend a lot of your time – as our president had to do – sitting in a courtroom, often before judges who are totally unfair,” said Huckabee, as quoted in The New York Times.

Whose fault is it that the prime minister is spending time in a courtroom during “an incredibly tense time?” How is the ambassador aware that some Israeli judges are “totally unfair?”

That is easy to answer. Most judges the world over must be unfair.  Consider how the judges along with the prosecutors persecuted our president in most of the four cases against him. Huckabee needs to know nothing more about the law. So Israeli judges are likewise persecuting our buddy Bibi, Netanyahu’s nickname.

The Times reports that political observers believe that softening Bibi’s fear of being convicted would permit him to gamble on a pact to end the war. Huckabee claimed that Trump was not “trying to pick a side.”

Pick a side in a court case? There are no sides. There is the persecution…er, the prosecution…presenting evidence that the defendant committed a crime. The defendant needs to show the court that the prosecutors have no proof.

If there are any sides in a trial, it is between truth and lies. We all know which side Trump would pick.

It is frustrating that we must live with leaders like this. After all, we may not get to live much longer with those like Donald and Bibi in charge. I appreciate Trump’s support of Israel and some aspects of Netanyahu’s leadership in fighting this war.

However, our confidence in their ability is severely limited. It is bad enough that they entered the fray with somewhat tawdry records, but then they waste time with a Nobel nomination and an attack on the judiciary of a foreign country.

Not to mention other leaders who have probably made Russia more treacherous than it was before the Soviet Union collapsed; expanding China’s oppression to new lands like Hong Kong and threatening to conquer a peaceful island nation, Taiwan; and a gang of religious fanatics who insist on controlling Iran’s populace, much of which yearns for democracy.

We cannot control Russian President Vladimir Putin; Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party; or Ali Khamenei, supreme leader of Iran, but we do not even have a way through the democratic process to replace Trump and Netanyahu in a timely manner.

Our president and the prime minister must think their antics will help the Jewish community. We do not need their concept of help.