\u201cPresident-elect Trump, thank you for your warm friendship and your clear-cut support of Israel,\u201d gushed Bibi Netanyahu, after he berated John Kerry in a fashion that would once have resulted in a rupture of diplomatic relations.<\/p>\n
Netanyahu accused Kerry of \u201ccolluding\u201d in and \u201corchestrating\u201d an anti-Israel, stab-in-the-back resolution in the Security Council, then lying about it. He offered to provide evidence of Kerry\u2019s complicity and mendacity to President Trump.<\/p>\n
Bibi then called in the U.S. ambassador and read him the riot act for 40 minutes. Israel\u2019s ambassador to the U.S., Ron Dermer, charged that not only did the U.S. not \u201cstand up to and oppose the gang-up\u201d at the UN, \u201cthe United States was actually behind that gang-up.\u201d<\/p>\n
When Ben Rhodes of the National Security Council called the charges false, Dermer dismissed President Obama\u2019s man as a \u201cmaster of fiction.\u201d<\/p>\n
Query: why is Dermer not on a plane back to Tel Aviv?<\/p>\n
Some of us can recall how Eisenhower ordered David Ben-Gurion to get his army out of Sinai in 1957, or face sanctions.<\/p>\n
Ben-Gurion did as told. Had he and his ambassador castigated Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, as the Israelis dissed John Kerry, Ike would have called the U.S. ambassador home.<\/p>\n
Indeed, Ike\u2019s threat of sanctions against Prime Minister Anthony Eden\u2019s government, which had also invaded Egypt, brought Eden down.<\/p>\n
But then Dwight Eisenhower was not Barack Obama, and the America of 1956 was a more self-respecting nation.<\/p>\n
Still, this week of rancorous exchanges between two nations that endlessly express their love for each other certainly clears the air.<\/p>\n
While Kerry has been denounced for abstaining on the UN resolution calling Israeli settlements on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem illegal and an impediment to peace, this has been U.S. policy for years.<\/p>\n
And Kerry\u2019s warning in his Wednesday speech that at the end of this road of continuous settlement-building lies an Israel that is either a non-Jewish or a non-democratic state is scarcely anti-Semitic.<\/p>\n
Prime Minister Ehud Barak, the most decorated soldier in Israel\u2019s history, has warned his countrymen, \u201cAs long as in this territory west of the Jordan River there is only one political entity called Israel, it is going to be either non-Jewish, or non-democratic.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIf the bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote\u201d added Barak, \u201cthis will be an apartheid state.\u201d Of John Kerry\u2019s speech, Barak said, \u201cPowerful, lucid \u2026 World & majority in Israel think the same.\u201d<\/p>\n
Defense Secretary-designate Gen. James Mattis warned in 2013 that Israeli settlements were leading to an \u201capartheid\u201d state.<\/p>\n
After Joe Biden visited Israel in 2010, to learn that Netanyahu just approved 1,600 new units in East Jerusalem, Gen. David Petraeus warned: \u201cArab anger on the Palestine question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnership with governments and people in the region.\u201d<\/p>\n
Yet facts and reality, however unpleasant, cannot be denied.<\/p>\n
The two-state solution is almost surely dead. <\/span>Netanyahu is not going to remove scores of thousands of Jewish settlers from Judea and Samaria to cede the land to a Palestinian state. After all, Bibi opposed Ariel Sharon\u2019s removal of 8,000 Jewish settlers from Gaza.<\/p>\n How will all this impact the new Trump administration?<\/p>\n Having tweeted, \u201cStay strong Israel, January 20th is fast approaching,\u201d and having named a militant Zionist as his ambassador, Trump is certain to tilt U.S. policy heavily toward Israel.<\/p>\n Politically, this will bring rewards in the U.S. Jewish community.<\/p>\n The Republican Party will become the \u201cpro-Israel\u201d party, while the Democrats can be portrayed as divided and conflicted, with a left wing that is pro-Palestine and sympathetic to sanctions on Israel.<\/p>\n And the problem for Trump in a full embrace of Bibi?<\/p>\n Britain and France, which voted for the resolution where the U.S. abstained, are going to go their separate way on the Israeli-Palestinian issue, as is the world.<\/p>\n Egypt, Jordan, and the Gulf Arabs will be pressured by their peoples and by the militant states of the region like Iran, to distance themselves from the Americans or face internal troubles.<\/p>\n And once U.S. pressure ends and settlement building in the West Bank proceeds, Netanyahu, his hawkish cabinet, the Israeli lobby, the neocons, and the congressional Republicans will start beating the drums for Trump to terminate what he himself has called that \u201chorrible Iran deal.\u201d<\/p>\n Calls are already coming for the cancellation of the sale of 80 Boeing jets to Iran. Yet, any U.S. withdrawal from the nuclear deal, or reimposition of sanctions on Iran, will further split us off from our European allies. Not only did Britain and France vote for the Security Council resolution, both are party, as is Germany, to the Iran deal.<\/p>\n Having America publicly reassert herself as Israel\u2019s best friend, with \u201cno daylight\u201d between us, could have us ending up as Israel\u2019s only friend\u2014and Israel as our only friend in the Middle East.<\/p>\n Bibi\u2019s Israel First policy must one day collide with America First.<\/p>\n Patrick J. Buchanan is a founding editor of<\/em>\u00a0<\/em>The American Conservative\u00a0<\/em>and the author of the book<\/em>\u00a0<\/em>The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose From Defeat to Create the New Majority<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n <\/p>\n