Getting the big things right

Donald Trump may not be the epitome of refinement, but when it comes to Israel, the Republican candidate is the best choice.

By AMIEL UNGAR
Donald Trump (photo credit: REUTERS)
Donald Trump
(photo credit: REUTERS)
SINCE I made aliya in 1978, I have not voted in an American election and this allows me the privilege of considering the current one from a predominantly Israeli perspective without any compunction.
Still, even from this somewhat vicarious position, I would have wished for a better choice and elsewhere have expressed the naïve hope that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump would bow out and allow their running mates to battle it out. Having vented that frustration, the choice, however, remains either Clinton or Trump and not some Libertarian foreign policy ingénue or Green Israel basher.
Although Clinton won the first debate handily, she still convinced me that I would prefer Trump.
Do I know what I am getting with Trump? I do not.
Nehemia Shtrasler, the economic commentator for Haaretz, is supporting Trump because he thinks Trump is a truly tough customer who can coerce Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu into ending the “occupation.”
I am hoping for a Trump victory for the very opposite reason believing he will end the situation in which an American president prevents Israel from building even in Jerusalem, and the State Department, even on the day of Shimon Peres’s funeral, tells us that Mount Herzl, where Peres is interred, is not part of Israel.
In the event of a Trump victory, one of us will be proven wrong, but the Republican platform, Trump’s pledge to keep Jerusalem united, and those advising him on Israel offer more plausible grounds than Shtrasler. It promises better prospects than the parameters advanced by Bill Clinton in the Camp David talks between Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat that would divide Jerusalem and place the Temple Mount in Arab hands.
In the first debate between Hillary Clinton and Trump, the Republican candidate had one of his few successful moments when he tied his opponent to the Iran deal and, indeed, it was Jake Sullivan, who is projected to have a high position in a Hillary Clinton administration, who began the Oman talks with the Iranians.
We get it that, at this stage of the race, Clinton is wedded to Barack Obama and cannot go off the reservation with remarks such as that made by her husband about Obamacare being the “craziest” thing. However, when it comes to a state that threatens to wipe out Israel, a bit more resolve on her part was expected.
We should have heard her state that, with a nuclear Iran on hold, we can push back in Syria against Iran’s ambitions for regional hegemony, its support for terrorism and its long-range missile program. We got nothing of the sort, but an assertion of ownership to the deal and a giddy self-congratulatory “that’s diplomacy.”
This exchange took me off the fence and into the Trump camp. It placed a big question mark on the consolation offered by the “Never Trump” Republicans that Clinton would mean the return to a muscular foreign policy that would not countenance rogue regimes.
Alas, Trump is not the epitome of refinement – the eidele goy my parents’ generation swooned over ‒ and he can lapse into a boorish grubber ying. But, when confronting a less than ideal choice, our rabbis had a saying: “Jephtha in his generation as Samuel in his generation.”
Jephtha was not the ideal judge in the Samuel mode. He made the injudicious oath to sacrifice the first thing that came out his door and out popped his daughter. I suppose she would have preferred having her pulchritude advertised crudely to being a sacrificial victim.
Jephthah’s lack of finesse resulted in a brief inter-tribal civil war in a situation his predecessor Gideon fended off with placatory compliments to the aggrieved tribe of Ephraim. But Jephtha knew how to reject and fight the Ammonite territorial demands and his generation had to make do with him.
The Trump tape does not make easy listening but these things were not unheard of in Kennedy’s Camelot and in Little Rock Arkansas.
It would be nice if leaders could measure up to the highest moral standards fbut if decency was the main criterion to leadership many presidents would have been invalidated.
We are down to Trump in this election. He is America’s choice against an elite that either denies America’s decline or treats it with acceptance. He gets the big things right, as opposed to an elite that would transform the US into Europe, the sick man.
Contributor Amiel Ungar is also a columnist for the Hebrew weekly Besheva