The Jewish Right is worried about Trump's Middle East tour

The "only democracy in the Middle East" faces an administration that doesn't care about democracy

Donald Trump with Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman

Welcome to a special, rank punditry edition of Dr. Small Talk! Donald Trump’s tour of the Middle East kicked off earlier this week with stops in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE. As Muhammad Bazzi writes for The Guardian, the trip seemed less about diplomacy than expanding the business prospects of the Trump family and his allies, offering a barefaced look at the patronage market in action. I want to focus on a different aspect of this trip though, namely what it reveals about the administration’s evolving relationship to Israel.

It goes without saying that the Trump administration’s strong support for Israel is the latter’s single greatest material and diplomatic advantage, and that Republican opposition to the US’s continued military funding of Israel remains a fringe position.

Still, some tea-leaf readers see signs of a possible rift between allies. Points of friction include a long and growing list of headaches for Israel’s ruling party: 1. Bibi’s largely unsuccessful visit to Washington in April, during which he failed to either earn Israel an exemption from the Trump tariffs or gain approval for a strike against Iran; 2. the Trump administration’s move toward direct negotiations with Iran about its nuclear program; 3. the Trump administration’s choice to cut a separate deal with Hamas to release Edan Alexander, the last remaining American hostage; 4. the cessation of American hostilities against the Houthis on the condition that the militant group ends its attacks on shipping lanes (but not on Israel); and finally, 5. the fact that the Trump is not visiting Israel as part of his Middle East tour.

Nowhere is the concern more evident than at Commentary, the stridently Zionist magazine that is one of the last neocon holdouts. In a podcast episode recorded on Tuesday featuring John Podhoretz (whose shilling for Quince during the ad break made me cackle), Tevi Troy, Abe Greenwald, Seth Mandel, and Christine Rosen, the vibes were decidedly off. Everyone was troubled that the president was not stopping in Israel. The parallels, Troy noted, were disconcerting:

Remember, Barack Obama did this at the beginning of his administration. His first trip abroad was to the Middle East, didn’t go to Israel, and we, you guys at Commentary and myself, we rightly gave him a lot of guff for doing that because we thought it was a really bad signal and I think it’s a bad signal here as well.

For his part, Podhoretz expressed discomfort at President Trump’s “emotionally wrongheaded” response to Alexander’s release before claiming to not know how to pronounce Adam Boehler’s name (the Trump administration’s lead negotiator with Hamas). “I have a weird block on his name because he disgusts me.” Boehler, who is Jewish himself (and was Jared Kushner’s roommate at U Penn), has become a key target of scorn among Israel’s supporters after he met directly with Hamas officials back in March and reported them to be actual human beings with their own strategic aspirations rather than the pathological monsters depicted in most media portrayals. As he said of his meeting at the time, “I understand why Israelis are angry, but the United States is not an agent of Israel. We have our own interests." That’s precisely what Podhoretz and friends are worried about.

Over a decade ago, I had a conversation with a Jewish friend at the State Department who freely admitted that American interests in the region were not aligned with those of Israel. It has long been the role of Commentary and its allied institutions to convince Americans otherwise. But the U.S. benefits from regional calm, stable oil and gas prices, open shipping lanes, and a friendly environment for doing business, and has lost a great deal of blood and treasure pursuing grand, romantic adventures like “bringing democracy to the Middle East.” Foreign policy realists have long argued as such, and to the extent that they gain any influence in shaping the America First State Department, that realization is likely to expand.

The problem is that Zionism is a grand, romantic adventure — less about interests than affect, a cosmic struggle to restore God’s people to Zion. It was this bundle of emotions that compelled Great Britain to support the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine regardless of the practical hardships involved. In the infamous words of Arthur Balfour:

Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs and future hopes of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.

We find traces of this sentiment in the idea that U.S. support for Israel’s messianic, overtly fascist politics is an ethical imperative that overcomes considerations of realpolitik. For the Commentary crew, it is self-evident that Israel must “destroy Hamas” and that doing so represents a moral, as opposed to merely strategic, quest. Yet they fear that “Israel has lost the plot” over the course of 18 months of fighting, that both the Israeli public and the Trump administration have grown tired of war, and that the notoriously transactional U.S. president might push hard for a deal. Per Rosen:

Well, and that’s where the tone and talk of deal making is really startling, when what we should still be hearing - I mean, you, you can talk about the deal making, but every time there should be the moral obligation to destroy Hamas, end Hamas, eliminate Hamas. That I don’t hear coming from anyone, even from the leakers or from Trump himself.

At no point does Rosen or any of the other discussants stop to ask the obvious question: Can one really eliminate Hamas? Critics of Israel’s approach have long pointed to the impossibility of doing so for the simple reason that the militant group has become synonymous with the idea of resistance, and that a dispossessed people living under occupation and siege will inevitably rise up against their oppressors. What has been true for the Irish, the Algerians, the Vietnamese, and the Iraqis also applies to the Palestinians. The idea that anyone would consent to living under such conditions is on its face absurd unless you have fully dehumanized the people concerned. To the extent the Trump administration abandons this war aim, it will be on account of the realists overpowering the ideologues.

Fighting Hamas is ultimately a game of whack-o-mole, as indicated by the estimated 15,000 new fighters they have secured, as the war itself functions as a giant recruitment drive. If history is any guide, there are really only two ways out of this mess: 1. the occupying force abandons the territory (as in most colonial settings); or 2. the occupying force eliminates resistance through genocide (as in the case of settler colonies like the United States). Israeli leaders like Ben-Gvir are much more honest about their endorsement of option #2 than American boosters like Podhoretz (with the caveat that they will settle with genocide mixed with expulsion).

The apotheosis of Neocon influence was undoubtedly the Iraq War, when they were able to seize upon 9/11 to reorient U.S. foreign policy toward transforming the Middle East into a haven of democracy - one at peace with Israel. But the material conditions of concern within the American Republican party have shifted decidedly in the last two decades. Donald Trump rode public anger about the Iraq War into the White House in 2016, a strong nationalist wing stands opposed to foreign entanglements, and the project of liberal internationalism lies in shatters. The U.S. has military bases in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, Jordan, Iraq, and Turkey - it does not need Israel for any sort of geo-strategic reason. Finally, on the ideological front, Israel’s claim to be “the only democracy in the Middle East” matters much less at a time when the Right has soured on democracy.

What Trump and his supporters have come to realize is that we can have capitalism without the democracy part — in fact, it’s even better when the unwashed voting masses can’t make demands on the state for redistribution. Between MBS’s social reforms and the billionaires taking up residence in Dubai, today’s Arab gulf region has experienced a major glow-up. Sovereign wealths funds have overtaken sharia law as the object of Western fascination, and it’s getting harder for the Commentary crew to navigate this landscape.

It is far too early to say with certainly if Trump will depart from decades of American policy precedent in his relationship with Israel, or if Palestinians will accrue any material advantage from the president’s AI deals or new jumbo jet. But the concern is real and worth noting.