TRUMP BREAKS WITH BIBI
The memorandum of understanding between the US and Iran marks a historic rupture
Last week President Donald Trump walked away from a postwar alliance dating back almost eight decades by telling Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu that America’s romance with Israel is over. The bond between the two nations, officially dating back to 1948, when Israel was recognized by the United Nations, was shredded. Perhaps forever. Trump has told the New York Times and its columnists who bemoan what they fear will be a bereft and vulnerable Israel, in constant peril from a potential Iranian nuclear weapon, that Israel is on its own.
It had been an American political ritual, like kissing babies when campaigning, to support Israel in all things, as did President Joe Biden after the horrific Hamas attack inside Israel on October 7, 2023. There was no second guessing then from Washington, only a commitment of US arms, as Netanyahu initiated what would become years of bombing in Gaza, a campaign that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinian women and children, leading to public censure of Israel around the world.
Trump has done little in his second term to push Israel to stop either its bombing or the constant encroachment of the Israeli military into Gaza, where it now controls as much as 70 percent of the territory. Nor has he raised significant opposition to the steadily increasing Israeli settler violence and plundering of long-held Palestinian property in the West Bank.
But such support no longer provides solace to the now shell shocked and frightened Israeli public because a US president has finally drawn the line as Netanyahu, defying Washington and the terms of the recent memorandum of understanding with Tehran, has continued to bomb in the south of Lebanon. Israel, which has no reserves of oil, was daring to interfere with Trump’s master plan, as seen in the US intervention in Venezuela, to gain control of a majority of the world’s oil. Iran has more than 200 billion barrels of oil in proven reserves, behind only Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. “Trump believes,” I was told by a knowledgeable US official, “that if you can control the oil you can control the world. That’s his life—control.”
