Meet the meteor
When Barack Obama rose like a meteor in American politics, Israelis too looked at him in wonder. He had enormous charisma, but no public positions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Netanyahu, for example, hoped that Hillary Clinton would not be the nominee, regardless of who would. In the end, the who-would turned out to be one of the toughest US presidents toward Israel, from the settlement freeze, through the Iran nuclear deal, to his refusal to veto an anti-Israel resolution at the UN in the final days of his presidency. The moral is clear: it is worth getting to know the next meteor, and the way he thinks.
One serious candidate for that role is JD Vance, the 41-year-old vice president. His book offers significant insight into him. Until I read it, I didn’t understand how a bearded and relatively unknown politician could crush all his rivals for the Republican nomination in 2028, and consistently poll higher than all of them, combined.
Vance, second only to Obama and secretly an admirer of him, as revealed in his book, is the updated embodiment of the American Dream – even if in his book it reads more like a nightmare. He describes the forgotten corners of the United States and the struggles of the white hillbilly community living in the Rust Belt states, and narrates its political shift from the Democratic left to the conservative right. If Obama’s message to America was that it is the land of opportunity, Vance’s message is that it is the land of limitations. Social mobility does not really exist, he argues, and his own story is the exception, not the rule.
Born to a Democratic family, Vance is the most effective messenger to America’s swing voters, a mix of Ben Shapiro and Barack Obama. From Obama’s early statements, it should have been clear that he viewed the world through the lens of oppressors and oppressed, and that nothing good for Israel would come of it. Until his last day in office, he saw Israel as a colonialist state and the Palestinians as indigenous. In his infamous Cairo speech, which set in motion the Tahrir Square revolution a year and a half later and the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, he explained to his audience that Israel was essentially compensation for the Holocaust.
From Vance’s book, despite its silence on foreign policy, Israel would be wise to learn how to adapt to the new Republican Party: It supports Israel, but in a platonic way. The underlying assumption is that every spare cent should stay in America, not be spent on grand illusions abroad. There is sympathy for strength and a visceral loathing of radical Islam – Vance recently quipped that “Britain is the first Islamist country with nuclear weapons” – but this does not mean a blank check or an endless weapons supply. Israel’s challenge with Republicans is not hostility, but indifference.
Israel would do well to prepare for this new era, for instance, by considering phasing out military aid, just as Netanyahu phased out civilian aid three decades ago. Speak the language of cooperation rather than patronage, of mutual benefit and security innovation. The old Republican Party was about the Bible; the new one connects equally to the gun.
And now for something completely different
From the Ali Monter hills, the challenge has never been clearer. Shujaiyya, lying at its foot, is a heap of rubble from what was once a massive building, now dotted with garbage. A bit further away, in the Zeitoun neighborhood, some buildings are still standing, but the vast majority are uninhabitable. On the horizon is central Gaza City, where most buildings remain intact and populated. Beyond that, the sea. After Operation Protective Edge in 2014, in an attempt to justify the failure to decisively defeat the Hamas terrorist organization, then-Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon said: “A battalion entered a high-rise, and it was as if it disappeared inside.”
The Gaza question: Not necessarily a deal or an occupation None
Gaza still has plenty of high-rises, far more than one might think after two years of war. The reserves are already mobilized, the IDF chief of staff is talking about victory, and the cabinet has announced there will be no pause. Yet there is a puzzling gap in the timetable. On one hand, Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu argued that Israel cannot agree to a 60-day deal, because afterward even President Donald Trump would not be able to provide legitimacy to continue the fighting. On the other hand, clearing the Gaza capital, both above ground and below it, will take months, just as it did in Rafah and Khan Younis. And that is without mentioning “Gideon Chariots C,” the clearing of the central refugee camps. How can the two be reconciled? The answer is that they cannot. This is one of the reasons it is worth abandoning the binary thinking of either a temporary deal or a full occupation. There is a significant chance that this time, something different is taking shape. Operationally, and within the limits of military censorship, the next stage is expected to differ from the first. An IDF document published this week explained that the army had disregarded the international timetable.
This time, it is supposed to be different. Politically, and this is the key point, a new American diplomatic initiative is slowly taking shape. The hope is that the fall of Gaza City, combined with a concluding diplomatic move involving moderate Sunni states, will lead to the end of the war. Trump’s plans resemble Apple products: iPhones are manufactured in China, then shipped to the US where they are packaged and labeled “Made in the USA.” The American initiatives, from the “Deal of the Century,” to plans for the migration of Gazans, to the “day after” – all originated in Jerusalem. The same applies to the current effort, as Dermer shuttles between Abu Dhabi and Washington, and everywhere in between.
