It is time Biden resets US relations with Israel.
By Marwan Bishara
9 Nov 2020
No one is as devastated by President Donald Trump’s defeat as Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Not even the crown princes of the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.
These Gulf leaders may have been dependent on Trump for pursuing regional mischief and are sad to see him go, but compared to them, Netanyahu has lost much more than a partner in crime: he lost his soul mate, his American alter ego.
So what made their relationship so special and what does the future hold for Netanyahu now that Trump is passé?
A match made in hell
Trump and Netanyahu saw eye to eye on almost everything, starting with their hatred for Barack Obama and the Obama-Biden administration, which they expressed with much venom.
For four years, they did everything possible to undo all that Obama left behind, starting with reversing his decoupling of the US and Israeli regional strategies and exiting the Iran nuclear deal.
They demonised the Iranian leadership, praised Arab dictators, and worked diligently to establish a new strategic partnership between these autocrats and Israel in order to confront the Arab people and Iran.
Trump and Netanyahu criticised and even humiliated Europe for upholding its liberal values and honouring its foreign policy commitments, especially for abiding by the Iran nuclear agreement.
And they held similar contemptuous and hostile views towards the United Nations and its various international agencies.
Most outrageously, they ganged up on the Palestinians, who have been suffering under Israeli occupation for decades, blackmailing their leaders and stripping them of all aid and stature to force them to submit to their dictates.
In this, they were aided by Trump’s son-in-law and Netanyahu’s family friend, Jared Kushner, the sneaky arriviste who made sure that both egocentric leaders remain on good terms.
A Zionist extremist, Kushner is the architect of Trump’s infamous “deal of the century”, which adopted Netanyahu’s racist colonial logic in Palestine.
But that is not all that made the Trump-Netanyahu bromance so eerie. As I wrote earlier this year, there are other more disturbing personal similarities between the two cynics.
Both are known to be serial liars; both have a history of adultery and have been divorced twice; and both have faced charges of misuse of public office for personal and political gain.
Read more at https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2020/11/9/after-trump-the-end-of/
