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Watching From An Israel Aghast,
President Trump Is Just Unthinkable

Greenberg’s View

10 August 25 • 2016

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks at a memorial service on Oct. 26, 2015, to
mark 20 years since the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

YouTube screen capture

bombings in Ashkelon, Jerusalem (twice)
and Tel Aviv killed 67 Israelis. And those
terror attacks remade the national mood —
and the political map.
Instead of a perceived near-obligation to
vote for Peres in solidarity with the assas-
sinated Rabin and in defense of a teetering
democracy, the transformed narrative now
held that the much-mourned Rabin, with
the greatest respect, had all too evidently and
tragically failed to stop Palestinian terrorism;
that if Rabin couldn’t do it, the peace-dream-
er Peres certainly wouldn’t be able to; and
that the hitherto toxic Netanyahu, who had
lambasted Rabin for rehabilitating the ter-
rorist Yasser Arafat, had been right all along
and was now the only man to restore Israel’s
shattered security.
Cross the ocean and flash forward 20
years, and we find Hillary Clinton now pull-
ing further and further ahead of Donald
Trump who, by dint of a relentless assault on
an ever-widening series of demographic sec-
tors, finally seems to be managing to destroy
his prospects of victory. It’s taken an awfully
long time. But the ridiculous candidate, the
blowhard populist who was never going to
survive long in the Republican primaries and
then was certainly never going to be nomi-
nated, and then was absolutely certainly
never going to get elected, seems finally to
be vindicating all the pundits who had pre-
dicted his implosion.
Yet at this point, the tale of Israel in 1996
is worth remembering. Barring some highly
unlikely political machination that produces
a viable third candidate — and nobody
should be writing off the highly unlikely in
these days of American political meltdown,
when even the most outrageous efforts at
satire are outstripped by reality on a daily

AFP/Ro byn Beck/Times of Israel

T

he succession seems inevitable.
We have two politicians from the
same party, longtime colleagues
with broadly similar political stances, with
the surveys emphatic about the result.
Sure, polling day is still a few months off,
but the opposition candidate is regarded as
unelectable — discredited and inexperienced
and widely disliked.
Obviously, I’m thinking here about Barack
Obama, Hillary Clinton
and Donald Trump.
But some of the same
characteristics applied,
20 years ago, to Yitzhak
Rabin, Shimon Peres and
Benjamin Netanyahu.
The period 1995-1996
was not a time of remotely
David Horovitz orderly political transition.
Rabin didn’t routinely
Times of Israel
complete his time in office
and prepare the ground for Peres. Rabin
was assassinated, and Peres took over as the
interim prime minister and then geared up
to cement the would-be peacemaking legacy
of his murdered rival-turned-ally.
But as with the current overwhelming
wisdom surrounding the American elec-
tions, the confirmation of Peres appeared
near-certain as 1995 turned into 1996. In the
traumatic immediate aftermath of Rabin’s
assassination, Netanyahu was regarded as the
emblematic head of the right-wing hierarchy
from whose ranks the assassin had sprung.
To publicly support Netanyahu in those first
post-murder weeks was to risk being per-
ceived as a tacit empathizer with the forces
of darkness.
Only then, over 10 days from late February
to early March 1996, four Hamas suicide

Khizr Khan, right, accompanied by his wife
Ghazala Khan, speaks about their son,
U.S. Army Capt. Humayun Khan, who was
killed by a suicide bomber in Iraq 12 years
ago, on the final night of the Democratic
National Convention at the Wells Fargo
Center, July 28 in Philadelphia.

basis — there are only two people today
with a legitimate chance of winning the
presidency.
And however implausible a victory for
Trump would lately seem to have become,
the fact is that if anything tremendously
dramatic happens to Clinton (legal troubles,
health issues, who-knows-what), or if any-
thing tremendously dramatic happens to
America that is seen to deeply discredit
Hillary Clinton’s political approach (with
the threat of terrorism, heaven forbid, at the
head of the list), Trump would be the last
man standing.
Israel’s savviest political operator by far,
that self-same Netanyahu, still with us 20
years later, has evidently internalized this
inconvenient truth. The prime minister
accused of having bet wrong last time on a
Romney presidency today opts to make no
political capital out of allegations that State
Department funds went indirectly into the
coffers of those who campaigned against
him last year. The prime minister criticized
in Washington for his election day lament
that Israeli Arabs were streaming to the polls
today issues an unlikely video encouraging
Israeli Arabs to take their rightful place in
the Israeli political mosaic. He discourages
a Trump visit to Israel. He scurries to defuse
his defense minister’s incendiary critique
of Obama’s beloved Iran nuclear deal. He
moves to quickly wrap up the 10-year mili-
tary aid package he had previously seemed
willing to leave open for the next U.S.
administration.
Weeks ago, Netanyahu may have warily
calculated that, were he to finalize the aid
deal, this might leave President Obama bet-
ter placed, as a freshly confirmed defender

U.S. billionaire Donald Trump advises
Israelis to vote for Benjamin Netanyahu in
a 2013 campaign video.

of Israel’s security, to utilize the end-of-year
twilight zone between presidential elec-
tions and presidential handover in order
to undermine the right-wing government
in Jerusalem — by backing discomfiting
Security Council resolutions, by speak-
ing at a Paris peace summit, by publishing
Palestinian parameters or some such inter-
vention.
Now, clearly, the sheer, stark, untenable
unpredictability of Trump, and the unlikely
but severe prospect of Trump becoming
president, outweighs such nuanced con-
sideration. For in Trump, America has a
presidential candidate potentially capable of
doing anything and everything — Why don’t
we use those nukes? — and demonstrably
capable of turning on anyone and everyone
— even on the bereaved parents of a casualty
of war.
In this new and frankly insane reality,
for a tiny Israel so dependent on mighty
America amid the seething mass of Middle
Eastern unpredictability, the ostensibly blin-
kered, Palestinian-empathizing, settlement-
bashing, Iran-legitimating Barack Obama
now appears quite the soul of temperate
wisdom. And Hillary Clinton, previously
tarred in right-wing Israeli circles for her
association with and empowering of the
unloved Obama, now looks responsible, seri-
ous, adult.
Compared to Donald Trump, indeed,
Hillary Clinton now stands for Israel as the
near epitome of presidential salvation. He
wouldn’t have predicted it, but Netanyahu
today likely finds himself hoping against
hope that nothing dramatic befalls her or
America — nothing, that is, that might
remake the current, Trump-is-finally-
finished presidential election thinking.

*

David Horovitz is the founding editor of the Times of
Israel.