The following article is by Hillel Shenker, a senior member of the Next Century Foundation and co-editor of the Palestine – Israel Journal. It was published in the Times of Israel and we have been given permission by the author to republish it on our blog.

There are two toxic words for Israeli liberal democrats, someone said at a recent meeting of Israeli and Palestinian peace activists: “genocide” and “Trump.”

I don’t intend to deal with the “genocide” question in this article. The focus will be on Trump.

President Trump was the only one capable of forcing Netanyahu to end the “forever war” that he was continuing to wage to remain in power. He also declared that formal annexation of the West Bank, which Smotrich was claiming would be the price for the wave of recognition of a Palestinian state at the UN General Assembly by France, the UK, Canada, Australia and others, was off the table.

President Trump at the Sharm El-Sheikh summit with the Arab & international leaders (Photo: Wikipedia Commons)
Yet, in his home country, Trump is actively undermining the very foundations of American democracy, ravaging the human infrastructure that enables general services to function, depriving important institutions of higher education of necessary funding, ignoring rulings of the courts, attacking innocent immigrants, carrying out a revenge campaign against all perceived internal enemies who disagree with him, the list is endless.

This dissonance is particularly felt by liberal democratic dual Israeli-American citizens like myself. Prof. Yael Sternhell, whose father Prof. Zeev Sternhell was an expert in European fascism, while she teaches American history at Tel Aviv University, says that this is particularly true for Israelis who are connected to the reality of what is happening in America today.

The Art of the Deal

When I was chair of Democrats Abroad – Israel, which was the Israeli branch of the American Democratic Party, in 2016, in a debate with a representative of Republicans in Israel at the American Embassy on the eve of the elections, I compared the depth of Barack Obama’s books and Hillary Clinton’s “It Takes A Village” to the lack of seriousness of Trump’s “The Art of the Deal.”

And yet, as Palestinian analyst Hussein Agha has noted, the leaders of the Arab countries have only respected Republican leaders like Dwight Eisenhower, who forced Israel to withdraw from Sinai in 1957 after the Suez crisis; Henry Kissinger, who prevented Israel from destroying the 3rd Egyptian army enabling Egypt to retain its pride leading eventually to the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty; Bush and Baker, who forced Shamir to go to the Madrid Conference, eventually leading to his defeat in favor of Yitzhak Rabin; and now Trump.

When Netanyahu made the fatal mistake of attacking Hamas negotiators in Qatar, a major American ally with the biggest American military base in the Middle East, it became clear to Trump that Netanyahu had gone too far, saying, “Bibi, you can’t fight the world…the world’s against you. And Israel is a very small place.”

Biden and Obama Couldn’t Do It

Democratic President Biden wasn’t able or willing to rein in Netanyahu and end the war, even though his post-war plan was very similar to Trump’s 20 Point Plan and the Sharm El-Sheikh Declaration. Barack Obama probably had a greater understanding than any American president of the realities of the Middle East and the need for a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict based upon a two-state solution. He also had a greater empathy for both the Israelis and the Palestinians than almost any other president, but when the chips were down and Secretary of State John Kerry was trying to promote a peace process in 2013-14, he didn’t give him the presidential backing and clout needed to succeed. The only Democratic president who played an important role in promoting Israeli-Arab peace was President Jimmy Carter, who micromanaged the Camp David process and remained deeply involved until the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty was signed. The title of his book, “Peace or Apartheid,” remains very relevant to this day.

“We focused on interests rather than values”

It was President Trump’s much-mocked deal-making, transactional approach, which enabled us to reach the current moment, with the hoped-for end of the horrific bloodletting, the release of the Israeli hostages and the Palestinian prisoners, and the current possibilities opened up by the 20 Point Plan and the Sharm El-Sheikh Declaration. His two main envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, incidentally both Jewish and also businessmen/deal-makers, were the ones who helped make the end of the “forever war” happen. It’s important to note that, unlike all the Jewish envoys who helped the Democratic presidents and Biden’s Jewish Secretary of State Blinken, they have more interests and contacts in the Arab world than in Israel. That definitely helped us to reach the moment we are at today. As Kushner said in the “60 Minutes” interview, “we focused on interests, rather than values.”

Of course, the leaders of the Arab world are not exactly paragons of democracy, but as Hussein Agha notes, they respect and relate to power. That clearly should be a lesson for future Democratic leaders, who have to learn how to combine values with power.

Yet when I say there is reason for Israeli peace activists to congratulate President Trump, many American friends can’t understand how it’s possible to congratulate Trump for anything, considering how he is destroying the very fabric of American society.

Congratulate Trump – Defeat Trump and Trumpism

My answer is that we can and should congratulate Trump for what he is doing in the Middle East, and yes, if he stays the course, which will not be easy for him to do given his tendency to jump from focus to focus, he deserves to get the Nobel Peace Prize. After all, Obama got the Prize simply for not being George Bush, not for doing anything in particular.

At the same time, all efforts should be made to win Democratic control of the Congress in the midterm elections and to defeat Trump and Trumpism in the 2028 elections, for the sake of the future of American democracy. The mass “No Kings” protests on October 18 said it all.

There is a clear parallel between the situation in Israel and the United States. Here, many people are saying that the next elections, scheduled now at the latest for October 2026, will be critical for the future of Israel. If Netanyahu and his extreme right-wing coalition are not defeated, we will really be in dire straits. The same is true for the future of American society in terms of the 2026 and 2028 elections, if Trump and Trumpism aren’t defeated. As civil rights hero and late Representative John Lewis famously said, we are all required to continue to make “good trouble,” to ensure the democratic future of our two societies.