Making Israel less safe again- an echo opinion

This is the road to a form of apartheid.

Trump and "Bibi"- creating uncertainty where there had been stability

This echo opinion is critical of how Donald Trump has deliberately played into the Evangelical playbook, just because he could. In so doing, Trump has created an incendiary situation in an politically combustible area of the world where people need calm leadership, rather than political posturing based on extremist religious ideologies.

Trudy Rubin writes an opinion published in the Madison Wisconsin State Journal newspaper. She is a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer. 

Donald Trump wanted to give Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu a boost in hotly contested Israeli elections, set for April 9.

So, Donald Trump reversed decades of U.S. policy, by tweet of course: He posted that the United States should recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, a rocky plateau that Israel seized from Syria during the 1967 Arab–Israeli war.

This was a purely political gesture to solve a problem that didn’t exist. There was no pressure on Israel from any quarter to return the Golan to Syria, a country wrecked by civil war and penetrated by Iran. Nor will U.S. recognition of Jerusalem’s 1981 annexation of the Golan make Israel any safer.

On the contrary, Trump’s political boon for Bibi will prompt unnecessary new threats to the Jewish state.

To understand why, a little background is helpful. Driving along the western edge of the Golan Heights one can look directly down on towns and villages of northern Israel, practically into the windows of some residential homes. Syrian artillery regularly shelled Israel from the heights between 1948 and 1967.

Since 1974, U.N. observers have patrolled an armistice line on the heights between Israel and Syria. In 1999-2000, Israel offered to return most of the Golan. But peace talks foundered because Syria wanted every inch back.

On my most recent trip to the Golan, 15 months ago, it was apparent why Israel could never return the entire territory in the foreseeable future. Driving along the Israeli side of the armistice line, one could see smoke rising in the distance. The same Iranian-backed militias that helped Syrian President Bashar al-Assad essentially win the civil war were trying to seize turf along the Syrian side of the armistice line. Pro-Iranian Hezbollah fighters were joining that fight, arriving in Syria from Lebanon, just to the north of the Golan. Syrian civilians were crossing daily into Israel for medical treatment.

Yet -- let me emphasize again -- there was no pressure on Israel to return the Golan, not from Syria, not from Arab states, not from the international community. Indeed, life on the Israeli side of the Golan was, and still is, relatively prosperous and peaceful. Israeli troops, and Israeli planes had the area under control.

At least 20,000 Israelis have moved to the Golan, many in prosperous agricultural settlements, featuring apple orchards and high end wineries. The bulk of the Syrian population on the Golan are Druze, a small religious sect that was able to reconnect with many of their brethren who live in northern Israel. With heavy investment, the Druze capital Majdal Shams was booming with restaurants and cafes, and young women shop in western-style dress.

I was told by then Majdal Shams mayor Dolan Abu Saleh that, since the Syrian civil war, Druze had change their attitude toward Assad, perceiving him as a puppet of Iran and Russia. 

They were not eager, he said, to return to Syrian control and Russian hegemony -- or to a simmering civil war.

But very few were willing to take Israeli citizenship (as Saleh had done), because of the negative impact that would have for their Druze relatives on the Syrian side of the border.

So to summarize: before Trump’s tweet on the Golan, the internal situation in that region was stable. Assad had no chance to get the heights back, nor were Sunni Arab states raising the issue. Moreover, Russia, in understandings worked out with Israel, had pressed Iran to keep its proxies far back from the armistice line. The Russians, who control much of Syrian air space, were also letting Israel bomb many Iranian military targets in Syria.

All good for Israel.

U.S. recognition of Israel’s annexation of Golan would upset this positive scenario on several fronts.

First, by formally recognizing Israeli annexation, Trump would raise the issue of Israeli violations of international law. 

Most of the world protested Russia’s annexation of Crimea, a part of Ukraine, so how to avoid chastising Israel for annexing land that is a sovereign part of Syria. Nobody was raising the issue before Trump’s tweet, but now Syria, Iran, Hezbollah and Russia may see an opening (or feel the need) to challenge Israel.

The Syrian Druze on the Golan, caught in between, may be forced to protest.

All for no practical Israeli gains.

Equally adverse, a U.S. nod to Israel’s annexation of the Golan has already emboldened Israeli right wing parties that want Jerusalem to formally annex much or all of the West Bank. Knesset (parliament) speaker Yuli Edelstein told a huge crowd in Tel Aviv last week that U.S. shift on Golan was a first step toward U.S. recognition of Israeli sovereignty there.

Down this annexation path lies a one-state solution to the Palestinian problem in which Israel winds up ruling permanently over a majority of disenfranchised Arabs. 

Forget about any Trump-led peace “deal of the century.” 

This is the road to a form of apartheid.

Trump’s tweet indicates this would cause him no heartburn. His only goal is to help reelect his scandal-plagued counterpart in Israel. Or perhaps to please his evangelical supporters.

Renege on the Iran Treaty ~ American credibility is in decline

Trump blows up the nuclear deal with Iran

• PHIL HANDS phands@madison.com

Echo opinions published in the Madison State Journal, in Wisconsin.

Donald Trump broke the nuclear agreement with Iran, despite pleas from our strongest allies not to do so. 

With the U.S. backing out of this international arrangement, it seems unlikely it will remain in place. This will allow Iran to continue its work developing nuclear weapons.

Chaos! ~ Donald Trump diplomacy

Trump fires the Iran deal live on TV

WASHINGTON — In announcing a U.S. pullout from the Iran nuclear deal Tuesday, President Trump boosted exports of a product his administration manufactures in abundance: chaos (!).

In the Oval Office, standing beneath a portrait of George Washington, Trump spoke at length about the “very weak,” “disastrous,” “poorly negotiated” and “totally unacceptable” deal, which is a “great embarrassment,” a “giant fiction” and a “horrible one-sided deal that should have never, ever been made” with a “sinister,” “malign” and “murderous” regime “of great terror.”

But after that torrent of adjectives, Trump had few words left to say about what would happen next, beyond working with our allies (who oppose the U.S. reversal), economic sanctions on Iran (which does little business with the United States) and threatening Iran with military action for noncompliance (“bigger problems than it has ever had before”).

In other words, he has no idea.

Leaders of Britain, France and Germany had come to Washington in recent weeks to plead with Trump not to withdraw from the accord, warning this could touch off a nuclear arms race and war in the Middle East — an unnecessary risk, given that Iran was in compliance. British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson argued that “Plan B does not seem, to me, to be particularly well-developed at this stage.”

But Trump does have a well-developed Plan B. It's to sow uncertainty. Chaos isn't an unfortunate byproduct; but a Trumponian desirable end.

Will the pullout from the Iran deal result in a “better deal” — or a mushroom cloud? Stay tuned! (MaineWriter ~ HELLO? Stay tuned for nuclear chaos? OMG!) 

For our European cousins who have not watched previous seasons of the Trump show, the president delights in keeping us watching a perpetual (dangerous) cliffhanger.

A conventional president is measured by popularity, or policy achievements. Guess what? Trump has been wanting for both. 

Nevertheless, Trump appears to measure himself by a different yardstick: his ability to command attention. If the metric is TV ratings, the president is winning.

This would explain his delight in constant disruption and churn, even if it produces conventionally bad news. 

On any given day, virtually anybody in the White House might be fired. We could find ourselves in a tiff with any foreign power, friend or foe. Rudy Giuliani might return, or Trump’s doctor, or a porn star, or the villain, Robert Mueller. Can a torture enthusiast be confirmed to run the CIA? Stay tuned!

In the Iran withdrawal, Trump had an opportunity to keep the world in suspense. He set a deadline for the decision — May 12 — and built it up for months. “Nobody knows what I’m going to do on the 12th,” he teased with the French president at his side.

He teed up Tuesday’s announcement as a coming attraction. “I will be announcing my decision on the Iran Deal tomorrow from the White House at 2:00pm,” he tweeted Monday.

This is exactly how he rolled out his decision to pull out of the Paris climate agreement: “I will be announcing my decision on Paris Accord, Thursday at 3:00 P.M. The White House Rose Garden. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” (Wrong decision!)

It’s the same level of gravity he used to tease events such as his “MOST DISHONEST & CORRUPT MEDIA AWARDS” and, before he started his campaign, “The Celebrity Apprentice”: “stay tuned for the 2nd half we have one more firing tonight!”

Trump is now asking us to “stay tuned” for North Korea nuclear and hostage talks, a “great health care plan” to replace Obamacare, and more. The outcomes don’t matter.

Trump delights in his reality-TV presidency. “Welcome back to the studio,” he said at one Cabinet meeting.

In Trump’s view, if he brings the drama, the ratings soar — and, somehow, he wins.

This is how busting up the Iran deal is best understood: drama for the sake of drama. Trump, squinting into the camera Tuesday, recited Iran’s misdeeds — most long before the nuclear deal was signed.

“We will not allow American cities to be threatened with destruction,” Trump said, an echo of pre-Iraq War claims. Using a thick marker, he scrawled an oversize signature on the pullout order.

What happens with Iran now? Who cares? Trump is skipping to the next episode: He announced, at the end of the Iran speech, that the secretary of state was arriving in North Korea.

A reporter asked: Will North Korea release its American captives? (Trump teased this in a tweet last week.)

“We’ll soon be finding out,” Trump said. Stay tuned! (Unfortunately, the suspense was anticlimactic and wrong minded.)

By Dana Milbank writes for The Washington Post: @Milbank.