Many Israelis initially viewed Trump's return with optimism. After all, this was the president associated with the recognition of Jerusalem, the Abraham Accords, and a generally confrontational posture toward Iran. But Jews should know better than to confuse tactical victories with strategic realities. The question is never what happens this week. The question is what happens five years from now.
Among the oldest mistakes in Jewish history is the belief that history moves in straight lines. It never does. The Jews left Egypt and found themselves in the wilderness. They returned from Babylon and discovered new enemies waiting at the gates. Every apparent victory carried within it the seeds of a future crisis. American politics has proven no different.
For many American Jews, the election of Barack Obama represented the triumph of a certain vision of America—cosmopolitan, educated, internationalist, and confident. Yet politics abhors a vacuum. The cultural and political backlash that accumulated during the Obama years did not disappear; it exploded. Out of that backlash emerged Donald Trump, a political force unlike anything America had seen in modern times. The irony is almost biblical. The movement that believed it was burying old forms of populism ended up awakening them with unprecedented force.
Then came Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, promising a restoration of normalcy. Yet instead of ending the Trump era, they unintentionally preserved it. Every inflationary shock, every border controversy, every cultural battle, every perception of governmental weakness became fuel for Trump's political resurrection. What was supposed to be a political funeral became a resurrection. Trump did not crawl out of the grave himself. His opponents helped dig him out.
Many Israelis initially viewed Trump's return with optimism. After all, this was the president associated with the recognition of Jerusalem, the Abraham Accords, and a generally confrontational posture toward Iran. But Jews should know better than to confuse tactical victories with strategic realities. The question is never what happens this week. The question is what happens five years from now.
Israel's greatest strategic asset has never been a single American president. It has been a stable American-led international order. For eighty years, America's alliances, deterrence, military strength, and political predictability created a world in which Israel could thrive. Once that order begins to crack, everyone feels the consequences—especially a small Jewish state surrounded by adversaries.
The tragedy is that global instability rarely announces itself dramatically at first. It appears as uncertainty. Allies become nervous. Enemies become adventurous. Deterrence becomes ambiguous. Every actor starts testing limits. Iran tests. China tests. Russia tests. Terrorist organizations test. The world becomes less about rules and more about guessing who is willing to enforce them.
The Jewish people should be particularly sensitive to this danger because Jewish history is largely the story of what happens when great powers become distracted, divided, or exhausted. Jews prosper under stability. We suffer under chaos. The twentieth century taught that lesson in blood. The twenty-first century seems determined to teach it again.
And then comes the domestic consequence. Political instability never stays confined to foreign policy. It eventually transforms the internal politics of a nation. Figures such as Zohran Mamdani and others on the progressive left do not emerge in a vacuum. They are products of a political system that has lost its center of gravity. When institutions lose credibility, ideological movements rush to fill the void. The result is a political landscape increasingly hostile to the broad pro-Israel consensus that once united Democrats and Republicans alike.
This should concern American Jews far more than the daily partisan warfare dominating cable news. Presidents come and go. Coalitions rise and fall. What matters is whether the cultural and political foundations supporting Israel remain intact. A generation ago, support for Israel was one of the few issues capable of bridging partisan divides. Today, that consensus is under pressure from both extremes.
The lesson for Jews and Israelis is therefore uncomfortable but necessary. Do not place your faith in political messiahs. Not in Obama. Not in Biden. Not in Trump. Jewish history contains a standing prohibition against the worship of golden calves, yet every generation seems determined to manufacture new ones.
Obama's era helped create the conditions for Trump. Biden's era helped bring Trump back. Trump's return may create conditions that strengthen forces his supporters never intended to empower. History is filled with such ironies.
The Jewish people have survived Pharohs, Caesars, Inquisitors, Czars, Nazis, Soviet commissars, and countless political saviors who promised to reshape the world. The enduring lesson is not to place faith in personalities but in realities. For Israel, the reality that matters most is not who occupies the White House today. It is whether the international order remains stable enough tomorrow for the Jewish state to defend itself, prosper, and endure.
That is the question Israelis should be asking. Everything else is merely the noise of the moment.
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| REPUBLISHED |
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/obama-gave-us-trump-biden-brought-him-back-plus-mamdani-friends/
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