President Trump gives a Hanukka gift to the Jewish people and a Christmas gift to the American people.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/268661/trumps-great-and-ingenious-gifts-caroline-glick
Trump's gift to Israel is not merely that 68 years after Israel declared Jerusalem its capital, the US finally recognized Israel's capital.
In his declaration, Trump said, "Israel has made its capital in the city of Jerusalem, the capital the Jewish people established in ancient times."
By stating this simple truth, Trump fully rejected the anti-Israel legacy of his predecessor Barack Obama.
In his speech in Cairo in 2009, Obama intimated that Israel's legitimacy is rooted in the Holocaust, rather than in the Jewish nation's millennial attachment to the Land of Israel. Whereas the Balfour Declaration and the League of Nations Mandate rooted the Jewish people's sovereign rights to the Land of Israel in its 3,500-year relationship with it, Obama said that Israel is nothing more than a refugee camp located in an inconvenient area. In so doing, he gave credence to the anti-Israel slander that Israel is a colonialist power.
By asserting the real basis for Israel's legitimacy, Trump made clear that the Jewish people is indigenous to the Land of Israel. He also made it US policy to view Israel's right to exist, like its right to its capital city, as unconditional.
Trump's extraordinary gift to Israel was an act of political and moral courage. It was also a stroke of strategic brilliance.
To understand why it was both courageous and wise, consider the political, institutional and geopolitical contexts in which Trump acted.
Politically, Trump made his declaration in a poisonous political environment at home.
The Democrats responded to Trump's victory last year over Hillary Clinton by seeking to delegitimize his victory. To this end, they chose to oppose everything that he says and does.
And so, despite their long-held and recently voiced support for US recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital, leading Democratic senators including New Jersey's Cory Booker and California's Diane Feinstein condemned Trump's declaration.
Trump had to know the Democrats would oppose him. And he also had to know that in their opposition, they would empower US allies in Europe and the Arab world to publicly condemn his move in a manner they would be loath to do if the Democrats supported him. And still, despite this sure knowledge, Trump took action.
And it wasn't only the Democrats, the Europeans and the Arabs Trump willingly opposed. His chief opposition came from within his own government. ...
Over the years, various presidents have taken issue with the State Department's policy toward Israel. These disputes have been informed both by genuine disagreement with Foggy Bottom's institutional hostility toward Israel and by political concerns. The American people have been supportive of Israel, and that support has only grown over the years.
But despite their genuine disputes and political concerns, no president who opposed State Department hostility toward Israel seized control over US Israel policy from the State Department.
That is, no one did until Trump did. ...
The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted. ~ D.H. Lawrence
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