Melanie Phillips,a British journalist, broadcaster and author, writes a weekly column for JNS. Currently a columnist for The Times of London, her personal and political memoir, Guardian Angel, has been published by Bombardier, which also published her first novel, The Legacy, in 2018. To access her work, go to: melaniephillips.substack.com.
(JNS) A nightmare has been averted, both for Israel and the West.
With the stunning re-election of Donald Trump as president of the United States, Israel has dodged a virtual bullet just as Trump himself was saved this summer from a projectile that came within an inch of assassinating him.
Israelis had been bracing themselves in dread for a Kamala Harris victory. This would have been the fourth administration in which former President Barack Obama, many of whose officials subsequently served the Biden administration and whose worldview has remained dominant within it, was pulling the strings of an anti-Israel, anti-West and anti-white agenda.
There were grave fears that Harris would have thrown Israel to the wolves at the United Nations, cut off arms supplies during the desperate war the Jewish state is fighting for its survival and activated more vindictive sanctions against Israelis, of whose attitudes to sovereignty over the land the Democrats disapprove.
Instead, America will have a president who in his first term was the greatest supporter of Israel ever to have occupied the White House. He will take a far tougher stance towards Iran; he won’t try to prevent Israel from achieving total victory over Hamas and Hezbollah; he will take a very dim view of the United Nations over its support for Hamas; he may sanction the International Criminal Court and International Court of Justice in The Hague over their persecution of Israel; and he is likely to defund the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, whose very existence delegitimizes Israel and that works hand in glove with Hamas.
Not surprisingly, liberals who loathe Israel and who have been having a meltdown over Trump’s victory flew to their keyboards to issue dark warnings that he was a danger to the world through his reckless disdain for international law and human rights.
The immediate danger for Israel, however, is far from over. Trump won’t become president until January, and over the next two months the lame-duck Biden-Harris administration can do it harm. Israel hasn’t forgotten that in 2016, outgoing president Obama vindictively threw the Jewish state under the bus at the United Nations by refusing to veto a Security Council resolution declaring Israeli presence in the disputed territories illegal. (It had no after-effects, ed.)
There are also fears that Iran will choose to launch its long-threatened “retaliatory” missile attack on Israel during this interregnum since it won’t be able much longer to rely on the Biden administration to constrain Israel’s response in turn.
For Israel, neutralizing the Iranian threat remains an urgent and absolute imperative.
Even if the regime stays its hand and doesn’t mount another immediate attack, it remains in a state of active war against Israel and the Jewish people.
Its proxy Hezbollah is still firing rockets from Lebanon at the Jewish state, including salvos on Wednesday that killed a teenager in northern Israel and hit an empty parking lot at Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion International Airport.
Above all, the Iranian regime is racing towards the point at which it can deploy nuclear weapons. Given all this—and the fact that U.S. intelligence has detected Iranian plots to assassinate Trump—Israel hopes that the new president will lend crucial American assistance to destroy Iran’s nuclear program once and for all.
But Trump faces an Iranian problem far closer to home.
The Biden administration, which is suspected of having leaked Israeli war plans to the Iranian regime, is riddled with Obama-era pro-Iran and anti-Israel activists.
These include at least one official, Ariane Tabatabai, who was recruited as an Iranian agent of influence by the Obama-Biden former point man on Iran, Robert Malley, who is now under FBI investigation for reportedly misusing classified information.
Trump must now finally rid his administration of Obama-legacy plants. Just as Netanyahu has been dismantling the Iranian Shia axis in the Middle East, so Trump must now dismantle the Obama axis in the Beltway.
However, America’s cultural crisis is far deeper and wider than this.
As is illustrated by the appalling tsunami of antisemitism, there has been a widespread collapse of rational thinking across a wide range of issues, including the hysteria over Trump’s election.
The idea that a political leader should be judged in the round and assessed on the basis of his deeds both good and bad—or that a bad candidate might be preferred to an even worse one—simply doesn’t seem to apply in Trump’s case. Many, if not most, liberals see no good in him whatever—and see no bad in Kamala Harris or the Democrats.
This leads them to a strange inversion in which they accuse their opponents of behavior of which their own side is guilty.
In The Guardian, commentator Martin Kettle, who denounced American voters for doing a “terrible and unforgivable thing this week” in electing Trump, also wrote this: “For decades, the U.S. has been the free world’s essential and reliable nation. Not any more. It could even one day become them against us.”
Israelis might well rub their eyes at this. For America has stopped being the free world’s “essential and reliable nation.”
Under both Obama and Biden, it has renounced this role and refused to fight the West’s enemies. The United States ignominiously fled Afghanistan, abandoning it to the return of the Taliban and signaling disastrously that America was no longer prepared to defend the West, thus emboldening Russia, China and Iran.
The Obama and Biden administrations groveled to Iran, negotiated the 2015 nuclear deal that would have legitimized Iranian nuclear weapons after only a few years’ delay and refused to respond with more than a token slap on the wrist to hundreds of Iranian attacks on American assets.
During the Iranian proxy war against Israel following the Oct. 7 pogrom, Washington has put Israel under enormous pressure to surrender, causing the war to be protracted and Israeli troops to be needlessly killed. For Israel, under the Biden administration, America has indeed become “them against us.”
Liberals invert facts like these because they can never allow anything to upset the narrative that defines them in their own eyes as moral and decent—such as that Israel is the rogue actor in the Middle East, or Trump is a fascist—even though the opposite is the case.
Psychologists have a term for this. They call it “projection,” and it is a mental disorder.
Most liberals who told themselves and the world that Harris was on course for an overwhelming victory refuse to acknowledge any reasonable cause for the public to vote for Trump in such huge numbers, such as the cost of living, crime or a collapse of border controls.
This capacity for self-delusion is what characterizes the modern liberal. They will find any number of excuses to justify their own belief system based on a fantasy universe that requires them to lie to themselves to maintain the illusion.
In this presidential election, the American people once again rose up in protest against an entire elite class to reclaim their nation and its culture from those who would destroy it. This was an astonishing, country-wide insurrection against a decadent cultural establishment.
Nevertheless, some 68 million people voted for a candidate who couldn’t string a coherent sentence together—a failing they refused to acknowledge because they were locked into their cartoonish fantasy world in which they painted her opponent as a menace to humanity.
Before Trump had even claimed victory, some of these were threatening to pull the same rolling coup stunt with which they had hounded him in his first term. Would they have as much traction this time? Will Trump be more or less indisciplined and impulsive as president than he was in his first term?
We don’t know.
But for the traumatized people of Israel—still under murderous fire from rocket barrages and yet enduring the venomous hostility of much of the so-called civilized world—the election of Donald Trump has punctured their existential loneliness.
Trump is far from perfect. But at this moment, his election feels like deliverance.