Chemi Shalev: Analysis Netanyahu's Lovefest for Pence to Highlight Religious-nationalist Domination of U.S.-Israel Relations
Netanyahu's Lovefest for Pence to Highlight Religious-nationalist Domination of U.S.-Israel Relations
U.S. Vice President Mike Pence will be accorded a hero’s welcome when he lands
at Ben-Gurion Airport on Sunday night, but for Palestinians he is more
of a villain, or at least his deputy. Pence will receive an unusually
warm embrace from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government, but will be shown an ice-cold shoulder by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas
and the Palestinians. In Jerusalem, Pence is seen as playing a central
role in the positive change in America’s Middle East policies, but in
Ramallah and other Arab capitals, he is recognized as one of the prime
movers behind U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to betray the Palestinians with his one-sided decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
Pence’s visit, even more so than Trump’s in May,
symbolizes the new alliance – words that in Hebrew are identical to New
Testament – between the right-wing governments in Israel and the U.S.
and authoritarian Sunni countries such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia. The
Palestinians believe, not without a few valid reasons, that the new
Middle Eastern power axis is being built on their backs and cemented at
their expense.
Unlike
Pence, Trump is only a temporary member in the legions of Israel’s
admirers. If and when Jerusalem dares challenge or insult him, it could
easily find itself consigned by presidential tweets to the list of
"shithole countries." Pence, on the other hand, is a true believer, the
real deal, a messianic Evangelical whose faith compels him to
unequivocally support Israel and its most maximalist demands, up to and
including, if the need ever arises, full annexation of the Jews’
biblical homeland in Judea and Samaria. Even without the benefit of
listening devices, one can rest assured that when Netanyahu and his
cohorts contemplate the theoretical impeachment of Trump, they do not
break out in cries of desperation nor do they appeal to the almighty to
prevent such a catastrophe frMike Pence loves Israel. But it's a reckless love, which threatens Israel's survival | Opinion
Pence postponed his original visit,
scheduled for late December, because his vote may have been needed to
break a Senate tie over tax reform, which was ultimately approved
without him. He was allowed to depart to the Middle East in the midst of
the latest crisis because he can do nothing to help Republicans get the
60 votes needed to break a filibuster and avert a federal government
shutdown. Nonetheless, instead of arriving with the passage of tax
reform and the high point of Trump’s achievements in his first year in
office behind him, Pence comes to the Middle East as the Sancho Panza of
a president who bills himself as the world’s greatest deal maker, among
other things, but who couldn’t even broker the relatively simple deal
needed to keep his own government going. And on his first anniversary
yet, to Trump’s great embarrassment.
The
warring sides in Washington are now engaged in the blame game, trying
to pin responsibility for the shutdown fiasco, as long as it lasts,
solely on each other. Polls indicate that more Americans blame Trump and
the GOP, who control the White House and both Houses of Congress,
though their "base" is convinced, of course, that it’s all the
Democrats’ fault. Experience gained from previous shutdowns – the last
was in 2013 under former U.S. President Barack Obama – indicates that
most Americans end up believing both sides, or "a plague on both your
houses," as Mercutio puts it in Romeo and Juliet. Previous shutdowns had
very little economic or political fallout, though they do tend to feed
the kind of popular outrage at everything and everyone in Washington
that Trump exploited on his way to the White House, but for which he is
now being held responsible.
The
bitter battle over the shutdown is mainly indicative of the
increasingly radical polarization of American politics. The "base," on
both sides now, is running the show. The Republican base’s fierce
hostility toward Obama drove the GOP to break the rules of the game and
to avoid collaboration in Congress at literally any cost, come what may.
The energized Democratic base detests Trump no less passionately,
deterring any rational party representative from even thinking of
compromising with him instead of scoring points against him. And just as
whatever Obama held dear immediately turned abominable in the eyes of
his haters, anything that Trump – and by extension, his often
embarrassingly kowtowing vice president – happens to covet immediately
transforms into the devil’s spawn in the eyes of devoted anti-Trumpers.
Pence’s visit, in this regard, will drive another nail into the coffin
of the once-warm ties between Israel and most American liberals.
In
Israeli eyes, Pence is a true friend who comes with the added bonus of
positions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that place him somewhere
on the right of Likud. In Palestinian eyes, he symbolizes the unholy
fusion of Christian messianic beliefs with Jewish political influence.
In the eyes of many American liberals, Pence is the worst of all worlds:
a radical reactionary who fights abortions and gay marriage; a
religious fundamentalist who wants to foist church on state; a cynical
politician who wants to endear himself to party faithful by being the
servile chief-enabler of the base’s populist boss. For many secular
Americans, Pence is the high commissioner of holier-than-thou
Evangelicals who turn a blind eye to Trump’s unending sins and
transgressions because he is advancing their social and religious
agenda, including unyielding support for Israel in an effort to advance
the End of Days. Israelis are all too familiar with supposedly righteous
rabbis who have absolved Netanyahu of all present and future crimes for
the sake of the Land of Israel, as well as with religious
fundamentalists who wish to impose their values on an unbelieving
population no matter what.
Pence’s
visit, more so than Trump’s, offers a distilled view of the triumph of
the fundamentalist-nationalist conversation that now dominates both
Israel and the United States and its emergence as the essential crux of
the relationship between the two countries. Like everything he’s
involved in, Trump’s visit to Israel was mainly about Trump and the
general suspense whether he’d say or tweet something embarrassing or
inflammatory that would create a scandal and change the narrative of his
stay. Pence is almost the exact opposite. The former Indiana governor
is cautious to the point of perpetual boredom and hardly ever says
anything that is retained in memory for more than five minutes, unless
it's something that induces nausea like the vice president’s occasional
blessings for the divine gift that is Trump.
Trump,
you will recall, did visit the Palestinians and was received with
proper pomp and fanfare, though his talks with them, it later emerged,
were harsh and acrimonious. Pence, on the other hand, is persona non
grata from the outset, both for his personal views and as a
representative of the perfidious president he serves. Even if there is
an actual peace plan about to be presented by Trump and even if it does
contain formulations that Netanyahu would ostensibly be uncomfortable
with, Pence is not the man and Trump’s is not the plan that can persuade
the Palestinians to stop smoldering and to start treating the U.S. as
reasonably honest brokers anytime in the near future.
Pence’s
visit highlights the underpinnings of the current honeymoon between
Netanyahu’s Israel and Trump-dominated and Pence-influenced United
States. These include: A united front against Iran and against radical
Islam – in its loosest definition – along with full-throated support for
the president who takes them on; a joint effort to lower the
expectations of Palestinians to a bare minimum – if not to extinguish
them altogether – and concurrently bully international organizations
that support them; the deployment of Evangelicals as Israel’s weapon of
choice in exerting its influence in Washington, at the expense, by
definition, of the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC, which is too tame and
bipartisan in the eyes of some decision makers and their whisperers,
including Sheldon Adelson; and most of all, a wide array of deeply
shared values including hyper-nationalism, a cult of personality, hatred
of the media, denial of the rule of law, an ongoing culture war against
decadent secular and liberal values and an earnest belief in what they
describe as the Judeo-Christian Western civilization as superior to all
the rest.
True,
the visit also marks the ongoing excellent relations between the people
of Israel and the people for the United States, which should make any
Israel-loving Zionist proud, but for those who don’t share the common
beliefs that bind Trump, Pence, Netanyahu and, let’s say, Habayit
Hayehudi leader Naftali Bennet together, Pence’s historic visit is bound
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