There are something like 3 million Palestinians living in the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and 2.2 million in Gaza. An ascendant Israeli right— backed by American evangelicals and the AIPAC pro-genocide coalition— is looking to make those areas part of Greater Israel and would like to force the Palestinians out. The current genocide in Gaza— not counting people dying from starvation and lack of medical care, at least 43,000 Gazans this year— is seen as “impractical” and not the way much of Israel society wants to proceed, even if extremists like Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, head of the Religious Zionism Party, and Otzma Yehudit party leader Itamar Ben-Gvir Israel's Minister of National Security do. Both seem to see genocide as a viable “final solution.”
The Israeli extreme right— along with AIPAC and American evangelicals— deny not just Palestinian statehood but, much more dangerously, Palestinians’ humanity. They want Gaza and the West Bank cleared on Palestinians— other than, in effect, a relatively small number of wage slaves. Jordan, Lebanon and Syria have already taken in millions of Palestinians since the 1948 Nakba and the 1967 war. However, Palestinian leadership— and Palestinian public opinion— resists the idea of mass resettlement outside their historic homeland, understanding how it would undermine their claims to self-determination and the right of return.
Even if Jordan, Lebanon and Syria— nor Saudi Arabia or Egypt— can feasibly take in more Palestinians, Israeli and American extremists would like to see them move to places that might want them, like Sudan, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkey, Malaysia, Canada and other countries looking for skilled and well-educated refugees.
Muslim Americans who helped Trump win Michigan and Pennsylvania are waking up to the tremendous strategic error they made. “Trump’s foreign policy picks,” wrote Weisman, “have dismayed liberal Jews and Arab Americans alike, including Arab and Muslim voters sided with Trump as a rebuke to the Biden administration’s support of Israel in its war in Gaza. Some Muslim supporters, such as Rabiul Chowdhury, a founder of Muslims for Trump, said they had been led to believe that the man leading the outreach to them, Richard Grenell, Trump’s former ambassador to Germany and onetime acting intelligence chief, would be made secretary of state. Samraa Luqman, an environmental justice activist in Dearborn, Mich., and a co-chair of the Abandon Harris campaign among Arab American voters, said she still believed ‘anything is better’ than the Biden administration officials who ‘led us into a downward spiral in the last year or so.’ But she conceded, ‘I’m not thrilled about the appointments of war hawks and neo-cons, and have been very vocal about my support for Ambassador Richard Grenell to become the next secretary of state.’”
Layla Elabed, a founder of Uncommitted, a Palestinian-rights group that initially broke with Democrats and then just weeks before Election Day Day declared that another Trump presidency would be worse than a Kamala Harris one, said she was not surprised by what she likened to a bait-and-switch.
“Trump’s team lied to a community in anger and despair?” she asked ironically. “Isn’t that his whole thing?”
There can be little doubt how Trump’s nominees would steer American policy in the region.
Rubio, the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, is staunchly pro-Israel and aligned squarely behind Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
… Stefanik [arguably, the most grotesque opportunist in American politics] has led Republican attacks on university presidents over antisemitism on campuses where pro-Palestinian protests flourished after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel started the continuing wars in Gaza and Lebanon.
Huckabee, an evangelical Christian who has frequently visited Israel, has said that its government has every right to annex the occupied West Bank, though the Palestinians have demanded that land for a future state and much of the world treats Israeli settlements there as illegal under international law.
“There is no such thing as the West Bank— it’s Judea and Samaria,” Huckabee has said, using the biblical names for the territory. “There is no such thing as settlements— they’re communities, they’re neighborhoods, they’re cities. There is no such thing as an occupation.”
In 2008, Huckabee even rejected the idea that Palestinian was a distinct Arab identity, instead arguing that the term was a “political tool to try to force land away from Israel.”
Witkoff, who served as a liaison for Trump to the Jewish business community during the campaign, has praised Netanyahu and castigated Democrats who have given the prime minister a cold shoulder. He expressed disgust for the dozens of Democrats who skipped Netanyahu’s address to Congress in July.
For good measure, John Ratcliffe, Trump’s pick to direct the Central Intelligence Agency, recently went on Fox News to praise Israel for putting its foot on the throat of Iran and its proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah. “We should be assisting Israel in doing so,” he said.
The new team can expect support among Jewish Republicans and the most stalwart defenders of Israel. Brooks noted that the Biden administration had, at times, tried to pressure Israel to curtail its attacks in Gaza by threatening to withhold arms and aid, and by “creating daylight between the U.S. and Israel.”
“Under the Trump team,” he said, “there will be no daylight, and Israel will be fully supported to do what it needs to do to eliminate Hamas and Hezbollah and curtail Iran’s nuclear ambitions and support of terror proxies.”
Jonathan Greenblatt, the chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish-led human rights group and an outspoken critic of “anti-Zionism,” congratulated Huckabee on his selection, advising, “It’s critical that the president’s envoy ensure stalwart U.S.-Israel relations.”
But a majority of American Jews voted once again against Trump, and liberal Jews reacted with dismay to his choices. Exit polls found that between 66 percent and 78 percent of Jewish voters cast their ballots for Harris, in line with or considerably higher than the last three presidential elections.
Trump and his campaign tried hard to use his ardent support for Israel and his accusations of antisemitism within the Democratic Party to peel off Jewish support— though he may well have hurt his cause when he said that Jews would be to blame if he lost.
But as in past years, Jewish voters largely proved more concerned with other issues, including the threat that another Trump term could pose to democratic pluralism and to the position of Jews within an intolerant state, said Amy Spitalnick, the chief executive of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs.
American Jews were repelled, Spitalnick said, by the idea of “a broader white Christian nationalism backing Trump that would undermine separation of church and state and roll back policies that have made Jews safe.”
Most American Jews also still support a long-term peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians, for which Palestinian sovereignty has long been seen by many as a prerequisite. For those Jews, the Trump team and its consequences could herald a reckoning, as they weigh their love for the world’s only Jewish state with an aversion to policies that could destroy any remaining hope of a two-state solution.
Bezalel Smotrich, a far-right minister in the Netanyahu cabinet, said on Monday that Trump’s election meant 2025 would be the year for Israel to begin annexing the West Bank.
“I intend, with God’s help, to lead a government decision that says that the government of Israel will work with the new administration of President Trump and the international community to apply Israeli sovereignty over Judea and Samaria,” he said.
If, with Trump’s assent, the Israeli right makes good on threats to annex large parts of the West Bank, to return settlers to Gaza and to begin to evict Palestinians, American and Israeli Jews could be driven apart irrevocably, said Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of the liberal Zionist group J Street.
“There’s a big, big philosophical question brewing here, a generational question about the concept of Jewish unity,” Ben-Ami said. The coming years, he added, could herald “a fundamental break between the threads of international Judaism.”
If American Muslims are beginning to understand what a tragic mistake they made in helping Trump, Latino Trump voters haven’t had to face that ugly realization yet. They will… and very soon. Trump’s immigration policies, which he has vowed to make even more draconian, stand as a direct assault on many Latino families. His plans to massively escalate deportations, restrict asylum, end the DACA program and undermine pathways to citizenship are already causing anxiety in communities that foolishly trusted his economic promises since 2020. Moreover, Trump’s leadership of far-right, xenophobic, racist, authoritarian movements— both domestically and internationally— will be sending a chilling message to Latino voters who value democracy, justice and— soon— their own well-being. Latinos, a diverse and growing political force, will be pivotal in shaping the 2026 and '28 elections. Just as the reckless foreign policy vision of Trump’s new team alienates Arab Americans, his domestic agenda will inevitably deepen the divide between his administration and Latino voters. Trump may soon discover that building walls— literal or figurative— doesn’t win hearts. And Latino Trump voters— whose fates will rest in the hands of Nazis like Stephen Miller, Tom Homan, Ken Cuccinelli, Kristi Noem, Matt Gaetz, and Mark Morgan— will discover something much, much worse.
Americans have been trying to vote for change for decades now. Democrats had several chances to reform a broken system. Obama balied out the criminal banks and passed a few old Republican ideas. Bernie got blocked twice. Biden backed the failed system up to the hilt. In our duopoly, when one party fails, all a voter can do is vote for the other party or stay home. Too bad for us.
The Latinos and Muslims had tons of info about the horrors of Trump. They went with him anyway. Fools all. They are adults responsible for their decisions and their votes and they will get their just desserts, very unfortunately along with the rest of the USA. Fuck anyone who voted for him. Trump would be nothing without the support of these fools. He offered them absolutely nothing but hate.