A photo popped up on the internet last week which was a bit surprising even for those of us who have been overly obsessed with the seemingly aimless and highly dangerous comedy routine that describes itself as the United States of America’s Foreign Policy. The US has confronted no real security threats since the Cold War ended but has done so many things that were against its own interests that it now finds itself seconds away from nuclear immolation as registered on the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock.
Recently there has been much discussion of what Trump will do re the wars he has inherited from Joe Biden in Ukraine and the Middle East. Bear in mind that The Donald thinks he is a tough guy and believes that by throwing around threats he will inevitably get his way. Concerning Ukraine, he has repeatedly promised to end the war in one day, though he has not exactly provided details on how he expects to accomplish that. Sebastian Gorka, the new Deputy Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Counter Terrorism, has explained that Trump will use the threat of increasing military aid to Ukraine as a tactic to bring Russia to the negotiating table. Gorka called Putin a “murderous former KGB colonel” and said that Putin must “negotiate now or the aid that we have given to Ukraine thus far will look like peanuts.” The comment is so preposterous that those monitoring the situation are waiting to hear something from President Trump himself to provide some clarity.
Trump’s connection with Israel suggests that he, like Biden, will do whatever Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants. On the campaign trail, he has openly and ostentatiously bonded closely with Israel and its Jewish and Christian Zionist supporters, describing himself as the Jewish state’s best friend. Nevertheless, on at least one occasion he rebuffed Netanyahu when, following the 2020 election, the soon-to-be ex-president lashed out at the prime minister for being, in his words, “the first person that congratulated” Biden.
The internet photo that appeared last week showed a festive gathering at Mar-a-Lago, featuring a beaming Donald Trump seated with Senator Lindsey Graham standing behind him also with a big smile on his face. Seated next to Trump were two grinning apparent guests of Trump whose faces would not be familiar to most Americans. The woman was Sara, the wife of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and seated next to her was her son Yair, who reportedly has been living in Miami Florida. The presence of the prime minister’s wife and son at Mar-a-Lago on Friday signaled a clear desire by the Israelis to maintain the much-needed warmth in the personal relationship with the American president.
The back story to how Sara and Yair arrived at Mar-a-Lago is a bit murky, but it appears that Graham, a passionate and outspoken advocate for all things Israeli, was on one of his frequent trips to that country a few days before the dinner and may have brought Sara back with him to meet personally with the president-elect and to suggest to the incoming administration that the ties that bind the Netanyahus and the Trumps transcend politics.
In that light, it is perhaps no coincidence that so soon after the arrival of Sara Netanyahu, President-elect Donald Trump issued a grave warning to Hamas which is still holding in Gaza something like 100 Israeli hostages “violently, inhumanely, and against the will of the entire world.” In a Truth Social post Monday afternoon, Trump said that if they [the hostages] are not released by his inauguration – January 20, 2025 – “there will be all hell to pay in the Middle East [for] those in charge who perpetrated these atrocities against humanity.” Trump concluded “Those responsible will be hit harder than anybody has been hit in the long and storied History of the United States of America. RELEASE THE HOSTAGES NOW!”
As the United States used nuclear weapons twice on Japan in 1945, one presumes that Trump intends to outdo that performance, possibly by nuking entire countries or regions or even the world. Or maybe he is just so ignorant of history that he doesn’t know about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And his threat comes even though Trump has also promised to “bring peace to the Middle East” on the campaign trail. Since he has never made any attempt to reach a Palestinian audience, it is clear that his call to release the hostages was not intended to include the upwards of 10,000 Palestinian prisoners that Israel is holding without any criminal charges or trials, and subjected to arbitrary killing, torture, rape and starvation. Nor was there any mention of possibly as many as 200,000 dead Arabs, most of whom are still lying under the rubble of their homes in Gaza, who have been on the receiving end of American bombs and artillery shells delivered by Israeli planes and tanks. Indeed, Trump’s failure to understand the whole story relating to what is going on in Gaza, Palestine, Lebanon and now Syria means that he will always be speaking to his Israeli and MAGA American audience and his words will not materially affect developments on the ground in the Middle East, which continue to spiral out of control. Nor does he appreciate, due to his own ignorance and arrogance, how his own utterances only add fuel to the fire, rousing passions among peoples who should be thinking instead of restraint. On Monday, a ceasefire engineered by Washington and signed between Israel and Hezbollah was already on the brink of collapse as it de facto ceded to Israel the right to define what constituted a violation of the understanding, allowing Netanyahu to resume the conflict as he sees fit. Inevitably, Israel began attacking Lebanese targets immediately, enabling a shift to the next target, Syria. It is to be presumed that the final target will be Iran with the United States doing the heavy lifting, paying the costs and absorbing most of the casualties. Will Trump be suckered into such a development? Probably.
The desire to ensure that the United States resumes its status as Israel’s poodle with the new administration makes Sara Netanyahu’s presence at Mar-a-Lago all the more important as her husband is busy coordinating the genocide of the Palestinians and the seizure of all their land and property. If the wars against Hamas, Hezbollah and Syria continue, the Israeli government will actively seek Trump’s full cooperation in the transformation of today’s Israel into the Eretz version stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates and also incorporating southern Lebanon to the Litani River. Luxury villas constructed by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and inhabited by Jews only will line the Mediterranean coast on top of the remains of a place that was once referred to as Gaza and the oil and gas deposits offshore as well as in newly occupied territories inland plus the Ben Gurion project pipeline that will bypass the Suez Canal will make every Jewish Israeli rich.
Trump’s proposed cabinet is meanwhile composed nearly completely of Zionists, suggesting that Israel’s friends have had a hand of vetting who should be offered a seat at the table, but of course, by some measures Biden’s group was even more Judeo-friendly, with something like 80% of the key posts being held by Jews or by someone married to a Jew. Pam Bondi, the incoming Attorney General, echoing her new boss’s record for inane comments, urged in a Newsmax interview shortly after Hamas’ October 7th attack on Israel, that federal officials get tougher with pro-Palestinian protesters on college campuses and revoke the visas of those who are not US citizens. “Frankly, they need to be taken out of our country or the FBI needs to be interviewing them right away,” she said. She also called antisemitism “rampant” in the US and said it’s “heartbreaking to see what’s happening to all of our Jewish friends in this country.”
Trump, sharing Bondi’s view, instituted in his first term a travel ban on people from several majority-Muslim countries. It is a policy which Trump has said he intends to bring back when he returns to the White House. So let’s accept that we Americans will be dominated by Zionists no matter which party we vote for and let’s look forward to the disappearance of free speech, or rather the banning and even criminalizing of the First Amendment by Bondi and her associates if one chooses to criticize a certain foreign country. Americans who dislike what is happening have little recourse since the deck has been cunningly stacked against us, but I will recommend for the umpteenth time that voters put pressure on Congress and the White House to take on the so-called Israel Lobby by forcing it to register on the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938 (FARA). It would to a large extent compel groups like AIPAC to become transparent and not allow them to get involved in disbursing huge donations to influence US elections, which is the source of much of their control over Congress and the political establishment.
There have in fact been brave American politicians who have spoken up against Zionist domination and their voices have been heard, including William Fullbright, Pat Buchanan, James Traficant, Paul Findley and Cynthia McKinney. Israeli dominance of the corrupt American political system has become so total, so visible and so openly exercised that I keep hearing from associates that the tide is beginning to turn in terms of what ordinary people are willing to put up with. Hopefully a few voices right now will become millions demanding change and the monstrous Netanyahu and his supporters can go to Hell, where they belong.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected].
