Tag: Donald Trump

Netanyahu lost the Iran argument—until he didn’t

On By Martin Kramer

There is much talk about how Israel promoted the idea of regime change in Iran to the Trump administration. It’s been particularly primed by a New York Times piece by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan (“How Trump Took the U.S. to War With Iran,” April 7), based on interviews with participants. First, here’s a recap of that report.

On February 11, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made his case to Trump in the White House Situation Room. Haberman and Swan:

Mr. Netanyahu and his team outlined conditions they portrayed as pointing to near-certain victory: Iran’s ballistic missile program could be destroyed in a few weeks. The regime would be so weakened that it could not choke off the Strait of Hormuz, and the likelihood that Iran would land blows against U.S. interests in neighboring countries was assessed as minimal.

Besides, Mossad’s intelligence indicated that street protests inside Iran would begin again and—with the impetus of the Israeli spy agency helping to foment riots and rebellion—an intense bombing campaign could foster the conditions for the Iranian opposition to overthrow the regime.

According to the Times report, “Netanyahu delivered his presentation in a confident monotone. It seemed to land well with the most important person in the room, the American president.”

The next day, in a meeting with Trump, CIA Director John Ratcliffe called the Israeli regime-change scenarios “farcical”—a judgment Secretary of State Marco Rubio restated more bluntly as “bullshit.” But Trump signed off on the operation anyway, more drawn to decapitating and degrading the regime than to changing it.

Reading the Times report left me with an acute sense of déjà vu, as if I’d seen this exchange before. After a bit of digging, I found the reason: this conversation had already taken place. Specifically, on July 27, 2009, in Jerusalem, between Netanyahu and Robert Gates, then Secretary of Defense and former CIA director. The evidence is on the bookshelf: Gates’s memoir, Duty (published in 2014), and Netanyahu’s autobiography, Bibi: My Story (published in 2022). The parallels are uncanny.

In mid-2009, Iran had just experienced an aborted “Green Revolution,” which brought protesters into the streets and raised hopes for change. Barack Obama had been president since January, but Gates was not part of his original team. He had served as defense secretary under George W. Bush and was the first defense secretary retained by a president of the opposing party, carrying over into the Obama administration.

In his memoir, Gates called the July 2009 meeting with Netanyahu “our first no-punches-pulled discussion of Iran.” According to him,

Bibi was convinced the Iranian regime was extremely fragile and that a strike on their nuclear facilities very likely would trigger the regime’s overthrow by the Iranian people. I strongly disagreed, convinced that a foreign military attack would instead rally the Iranian people behind their government.

“All the experts can be wrong”

Netanyahu, in his autobiography, gives a slightly more colorful version:

“Besides,” [Gates] said, “all the experts tell us that an American strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities would unite the Iranian public behind the regime. Can all the experts be wrong?”

“Yes,” I said, “all the experts can be wrong. They often are. Most Iranians hate this tyranny. They just tried to rebel against it. They’ll cheer when you deliver a knockout punch to the regime. It would be a tremendous psychological blow to the mullahs’ image of invincibility!”

I related to Gates what President Museveni of Uganda told me of the psychological effect of the [Israeli] raid in Entebbe [in 1976, to free hijacked passengers], that before the raid Ugandans had “believed Idi Amin was invincible” and after it they knew they could “bring him down.”

“You have the power to achieve the same result with the Iranian regime,” I said to Gates. “You are Gulliver.”

The conversation shifted to how Iran might respond to an attack. Gates:

Netanyahu also believed Iranian retaliation after a strike would be pro forma, perhaps the launch of a few dozen missiles at Israel and some rocket salvos from Lebanese-based Hizballah. He argued that the Iranians were realists and would not want to provoke a larger military attack by the United States by going after American targets—especially our ships in the Gulf—or by attacking other countries’ oil facilities. Closing the Gulf to oil exports, he said, would cut the Iranians’ own economic throats. Again I disagreed, telling him he was misled by the lack of an Iraqi response to Israel’s destruction of their Osirak reactor in 1981 and the absence of any Syrian reaction to destruction of their reactor in 2007. I said the Iranians—the Persians—were very different from Iraqis and Syrians. He was assuming a lot in anticipating a mild Iranian reaction, and if he was wrong, an attack on the Iranian nuclear facilities would spark a war in the region, I said.

Netanyahu’s account of this exchange is brief in comparison and frames it more as a disagreement over whether Iran would rebuild its nuclear program after an attack:

Gates argued that the delaying effects of any Israeli military action against Iran’s nuclear capabilities would be short-lived. I noted that the same thing was said of Israel’s strike on Saddam Hussein’s Osirak reactor, referring to our successful 1981 operation against a nuclear facility that never resumed operation. Gates countered that an Israeli strike would result in a full-scale war.

To which Netanyahu added this aside: “Whether it would or not, I was willing to sustain a conventional war with Iran in order to avoid a war with a nuclear-armed Iran.”

For at least sixteen years, Netanyahu’s arguments—regime fragility, decisive action, and limited retaliation—failed to carry the day in Washington. They were countered by U.S. objections: regime resilience, the rally effect, and the risk of escalation. At any point, Netanyahu might have left the political stage without achieving his prime objective. But he held on to power long enough for the churn of American politics to finally produce a president willing to take the leap.


Header image: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meets U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates at the Prime Minister’s Office, Jerusalem, July 27, 2009. Photograph: Moshe Milner / Government Press Office (Israel).

Kissinger, Kerry, Kushner

On By Martin Kramer

During the recent Gaza skirmish (so it will go down in history, I predict), some journalists and opinion writers rushed to declare the demise of the Abraham Accords. 

I won’t mention names, but these were some of the headlines: “The mirage of Trump’s ’peace’ deals” (Washington Post), “Violence Shakes Trump’s Boast of ‘New Middle East’” (New York Times), “Not worth the paper they are written on” (Independent), “Jared Kushner’s Middle East fantasy explodes” (CNN), etc. At least two headlines went even further: “How the Abraham Accords Precipitated New Israeli-Palestinian Violence” (US News), and “So much for the Abraham Accords. Trump made things worse in the Middle East” (Washington Post).

I don’t take any of this seriously, and neither should you. I wrote the following at the invitation of a student-run publication, the Journal of Middle Eastern Politics and Policy, at the Harvard Kennedy School. The message, especially to surly folks liable to dismiss anything achieved by the Trump administration, is this: get over it and build on the Abraham Accords. They’re one of the best things America has going for it in the Middle East.

Title of the piece, reproduced below: “Kissinger, Kerry, Kushner: Making and Missing Peace in the Middle East.” (And please excuse all the Harvard references. I couldn’t resist.)

_____

After Henry Kissinger (class of 1950), the Harvard undergraduate alumnus who has had the most profound effect on the Middle East to date is Jared Kushner (class of 2003), son-in-law of President Donald Trump and architect of the 2020 Abraham Accords. Ponder the irony. Harvard has produced a cavalcade of experts on the Middle East, both practitioners and scholars, with far more knowledge of the region than Kushner’s. “I’ve been studying this now for three years,” Kushner said of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict last year. “I’ve read 25 books on it, I’ve spoken to every leader in the region, I’ve spoken to everyone who’s been involved in this.”[1] That was his primer for his role as broker, first, of Trump’s “Vision for Peace” (aka “The Deal of the Century”) and later, the breakthrough agreements between Israel and four Arab states. 

By conventional standards, Kushner was “winging it.” But in policy making, as in real estate, success begins with location. Kushner (and his sidekick, Harvard Law alumnus Avi Berkowitz, class of 2016), ended up in the White House riding an unpredictable wave in American politics. These twists of fate are not rare; to the contrary, they are par for the course of history. The events that put Kissinger in the Middle Eastern cockpit fifty years ago were no more predictable. 

Still, being in the right place is never enough. One has to grasp the meaning of the moment. Jared Kushner understood something fundamental about the Middle East that had eluded the long line of secretaries, deputy secretaries, advisers, envoys, and ambassadors who had preceded him. Having read his 25 books about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he realized that not all Arabs were in its grip. 

This was a truth that Barack Obama’s secretary of state, John Kerry, hadn’t fathomed. Kerry, who had tried his hand in the Middle East right before Kushner, will never live down his 2016 statement, preserved on YouTube and gleefully retweeted thousands of times this past year: 

There will be no separate peace between Israel and the Arab world. I want to make that very clear with all of you. I’ve heard several prominent politicians in Israel sometimes saying, “Well, the Arab world is in a different place now. We just have to reach out to them. We can work some things with the Arab world, and we’ll deal with the Palestinians.” No. No, no, and no.[2]

Kushner didn’t dismiss the view of Israel’s “prominent politicians,” but actually put it to the test, and ended up eliciting four “yeses,” first from the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, then followed by Sudan and Morocco. 

Why did Kerry miss what Kushner saw? Some commentators have portrayed Kerry, and indeed the entire “peace process” establishment, as blinded by bias. But the simpler explanation is a generational difference in the American view of the Arabs. There is an older generation for whom the Arab world appeared driven by ideologies and passions, and a younger generation who see it governed by states and interests. 

Kerry, born in 1943, studied political science at Yale when Gamal Abdul Nasser was still riding the crest of pan-Arab sentiment. After 1967, following the emasculation of Nasser, the Arabs seemed to have invested every thought and emotion in the cause of the Palestinians, who violently burst upon the world scene beginning with Black September in 1970. Kerry belonged to the tail-end of the generation that saw the Arabs through the Palestinian prism. “Is the Israel-Palestine conflict still the key to peace in the whole region?” Jimmy Carter was once asked. “Without doubt,” he answered, “the path to peace in the Middle East goes through Jerusalem.”[3] In the estimate of the late Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s national security adviser, “the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the single most combustible and galvanizing issue in the Arab world.”[4] And to be fair, in the past the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was both combustible and galvanizing. 

But it ceased to be that over time. Thanks to the deal-brokering begun by Kissinger, Israel stopped being regarded in the Arab world as the prime threat to the integrity and stability of Arab states. Peace agreements and American patronage hemmed Israel in. In the place of the Israeli danger, other threats arose: Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, which in 1990 briefly erased an Arab state, Kuwait, from the map; and Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran, which energized Shiite minorities against Arab governments. 

When Kushner, born in 1981, came to study at Harvard, the Middle East looked entirely different than it had to Kerry at Yale. The Palestinians had lost their privileged position among the Arabs, first by allying with Saddam, and then by entering the Oslo Accords. State interests had washed ideology and passion out of Arab politics. 

Of course, Arab states had been making their own calculations for years. Egypt and Jordan had reached peace agreements with Israel, and other Arab states had low-profile ties. But while the trajectory was clear, the old hands still couldn’t trace the arc. Kushner, on the other hand, saw the obvious: many Arabs had more important priorities than rallying around the Palestinians.

He also located the tipping point of this sentiment in the Arab Gulf states. For Americans of Kerry’s generation, “the Arabs” came from Beirut and Cairo, Damascus and Baghdad. Americans had a foothold in oil-producing Saudi Arabia, but the rest of the littoral of the Arab Gulf was “flyover country” run by the British. 

The United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Qatar didn’t gain independence until 1971. Even then, they weren’t much to write home about. The late Roger Owen, professor of Middle Eastern history at Harvard, evoked the ambience in recalling a visit he made to two of the Emirates in the 1970s: “Abu Dhabi and Sharjah seemed only to come alive when a British Overseas Airways—after 1974, a British Air plane—arrived at dusk, when Land Rovers raced out to meet it, and the passengers disbursed slowly in the evening heat.”[5]

By Kushner’s time, these same emirates had become the Arab world’s glittering “Gold Coast,” centers of fabulous wealth wedded to unashamed pragmatism. The old ideologies that had grown like weeds elsewhere in the Arab world never struck root in the sands surrounding the skyscrapers of the Arab Gulf. Here were places that had “come alive” in a spectacular way, and where Arabs broke taboos every day. 

Yet even this wouldn’t have sufficed to produce a breakthrough. Kushner understood the dread felt by these small Arab states over Iran, and how Israel’s sounding of the alarm resonated with them. In the game with Iran, Arab Gulf states and Israel stood near one another on the scrimmage line, and neither had full confidence in the parade of American quarterbacks, each with a different game plan. 

A question facing any future historian will be this: was the “Deal of the Century,” with its implicit endorsement of Israeli annexation of parts of the West Bank, designed in advance as a throwaway, to facilitate the Abraham Accords? Whatever the answer, that is precisely the purpose it ultimately served. “We had been talking to both sides for 18 months,” said a senior American official, “but the annexation issue created the atmosphere which was conducive for getting a deal.”[6] If it was so designed in advance, then far from being a “dead-on-arrival” plan, it was a strategic feint worthy of a Kissinger. If not, it was a deft last-minute shift of gears. 

Whatever the back story, however, the Abraham Accords and their sequels have introduced a new vector in the Middle East. The most creative and dynamic shorelines on the Mediterranean and the Gulf are now linked. They are the counter to the forty-year bond between Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah, which also links the Mediterranean and the Gulf. There is much potential in this fledgling alignment; how much of it will be realized depends on the ingenuity of Israelis and Gulf Arabs alike. 

But it also depends on the attitude of the United States. Certainly, it has been hard for the old hands of the Democratic foreign policy establishment to concede that Kushner, wet behind the ears, achieved something that had eluded them. They should get over it. One doesn’t have to believe that Kushner (and Berkowitz) deserve the Nobel Peace Prize, though Harvard emeritus professor Alan Dershowitz has nominated them for one, but one must admit that they got this right. 

Remember that Jimmy Carter didn’t toss out the Middle East achievements of Richard Nixon and Kissinger, but built them out into a new security architecture for the Middle East. President Biden should consider that precedent and think hard about how to capitalize on the achievements of Trump and Kushner. That need not mean abandoning the quest for a resolution of the Palestinian question. It need not mean locking the door to Iran forever. It does mean nurturing the cooperative spirit of the Abraham Accords. These US-brokered agreements give the United States a strategic edge. In the Middle East, America needs that more than ever. 

Martin Kramer is chair of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at Shalem College in Jerusalem, and the Walter P. Stern Fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He co-founded and edited the website Middle East Strategy at Harvard (MESH) in the late 2000s.

Endnotes 

1. Kushner interview with Sky News Arabia, January 29, 2020.

2. “Remarks at the Saban Forum,” U.S. Department of State, 4 December 2016, https://2009-2017.state.gov/secretary/remarks/2016/12/264824.htm

3. Nathaniel Gardels, “Jimmy Carter takes on Israel’s Apartheid Policies and the Pro-Israeli Lobby in the US,” Huffington Post, 12 December 2006. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/jimmy-carter-takes-on-isr_b_36134

4. Zbigniew Brzezinski, “Lowered Vision,” The New Republic, 7 June 2004. https://newrepublic.com/article/67609/lowered-vision

5. Roger Owen, A Life in Middle East Studies (Fairfax, VA: Tadween Publishing, 2016), p. 117. 

6. Barak Ravid, “Behind the scenes: How the Israel-UAE deal came together,” Axios, 13 August 2020. https://www.axios.com/how-the-israel-uae-recognition-deal-came-together-d0d45b2e-b2c7-4593-b72a-0ef99ec96233.html

Repudiated presidents and Israel

On By Martin Kramer

The end of the Trump Administration has prompted much stock-taking. Many have argued that Donald Trump was good for Israel. Moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, brokering the Abraham Accords, applying “maximum pressure” on Iran—it’s no wonder that most Israelis would have preferred a second term for Trump.

Yet by the usual measure of presidential success, he was a dud. He joins the short list of only five American presidents who failed to win reelection over the past century. And he has the unique ignominy of having been impeached twice. Many pundits, partisan and otherwise, are predicting that he’ll go down in history as “the worst president ever.”

In truth, nothing is as unpredictable as history. But at the moment, Trump looks like yet another variation on a familiar type: the repudiated president who’s done well by Israel. Scanning the past half-century, the previous two presidents who did the most to secure Israel and bring it peace also were cast aside by the American public. The comparison is revealing, although its lessons are elusive.

“Nixon did not break a single promise…”

The first case is Richard Nixon. From the outset, Israeli leaders and officials liked what they saw in Nixon—none more so than Israel’s ambassador in Washington, Yitzhak Rabin. In a 1972 interview, he said of Nixon that “never in America’s history had any president gone so far in his pro-Israeli declarations or in expressing America’s commitment to Israel’s security.” Coming in an election year, that caused a firestorm, and led to a Washington Post editorial decrying Rabin as an “undiplomatic diplomat.”

At the time, Rabin insisted he had no intention of playing favorites. But in his memoirs, he described Nixon as “the more desirable candidate from Israel’s point of view” even as compared to Democrat Hubert Humphrey in 1968, and expressed disappointment that “America’s Jews did not share my opinion.” He worried that this dearth of Jewish supporters might turn Nixon against Israel. To his relief, he found that Nixon’s views on Israel “were founded on more than political expediency. My fears proved to be groundless.”

The proof arrived in October 1973, when Israel came under a combined, surprise attack by Egypt and Syria. It was Nixon who, in the words of some Israelis, “saved Israel,” first by sending Israel massive arms shipments by air and sea, and then by facing down the Soviet backers of Egypt, to the point of threatening nuclear war. Nor did Nixon flinch when Arab oil states retaliated with a punishing oil boycott.

Israelis felt vindicated for trusting a man many Americans reviled as “Tricky Dick.” “I knew that President Nixon had promised to help us,” wrote Israel’s then-prime minister, Golda Meir, in her memoirs,

and I knew from my past experience with him that he would not let us down. Let me, at this point, repeat something that I have said often before (usually to the extreme annoyance of many of my American friends). However history judges Richard Nixon—and it is probable that the verdict will be very harsh—it must also be put on the record forever that he did not break a single one of the promises he made to us.

When Nixon ultimately resigned in disgrace over Watergate, it pained Meir:

It should not come as a surprise that his resignation—under circumstances unprecedented in American history—caused me deep regret. I was familiar with his virtues and his faults, both of which he possessed in abundance. But above all I had great respect for his broad vision and understanding of global politics…. [H]is doctrine that the United States should help those nations willing to help themselves found very concrete expression in regard to Israel…. Nixon helped to provide Israel with more arms than any other American president. For this, and for his strict avoidance of imposing an unwanted political solution on Israel, he is deserving of this country’s profound gratitude.

In rankings by presidential historians, Nixon has risen a bit over the years, but he still figures in the bottom third of all presidents. In contrast, he would be at or near the top of the list of “best friends” of Israel in the White House.

“Carter has done more and gone farther….”

The second case is Jimmy Carter. Today, it’s usual to view Carter as hostile to Israel, based on the harsh criticism he leveled at Israeli policy after leaving the White House. His 2006 New York Times bestseller, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, made him anathema to supporters of Israel.

But that wasn’t the perception of Carter when he was president, and Carter’s success in brokering Israel’s peace with Egypt at Camp David today looms large, in comparison with the many failures of subsequent presidents. Without Carter’s unique set of skills, Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem in 1977 might have led nowhere.

In late 1979, Moshe Dayan, who had been at Camp David, sang Carter’s praises. “Carter has done more and gone farther than any former president in order to bring peace between us and the Arabs,” he announced. As part of that peace deal, “we have achieved first-class agreements, better than Israel ever had with the United States.”

The later praise by Israeli future-president Ezer Weizman, who also witnessed Carter at Camp David, carried even more weight, since he offered it long after Carter’s political demise: “From an Israeli viewpoint,” he wrote,

Jimmy Carter had been a good president. He was the prime mover in the conclusion of the Camp David agreements and in the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty that resulted. He granted Israel lavish economic and military aid.

But as in the case of Nixon, here, too, American Jews didn’t appreciate what Carter had done:

There was no reason why American Jews should not have supported [Carter in 1980], as they had supported other Democratic candidates like Humphrey, Johnson, and Kennedy—and Carter himself in 1976. But that was not how it worked out. Only 54 percent of Jewish voters opted for Carter [over Republican Ronald Reagan]—a relatively low proportion of Jewish backing for a Democratic candidate.

Of course, it wasn’t only the Jews. No incumbent president was repudiated by the electorate as decisively as Carter in 1980. Reagan’s electoral college victory, 489 to 49, represented the highest number of electoral votes ever won by a non-incumbent.

Carter’s presidency also ended in humiliation. Iran freed the U.S. diplomatic hostages it had held for 444 days only as Carter left the White House on his last day in office. He is regularly ranked by presidential historians in the bottom half of the class.

But the Egyptian-Israeli peace, his greatest achievement, is still considered the gold standard of peacemaking in the Middle East. Another president, Bill Clinton, ached to replicate that miracle in his own Camp David talks with Israel and the Palestinians in 2000. When he fell short, he angrily told Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat: “I’m a colossal failure, and you made me one.”

No one today would call Carter a “great friend of Israel” (although Menachem Begin did just that in 1977). But just as Nixon rescued Israel in its most desperate war, Carter secured for Israel its most precious peace.

“The best friend Israel has ever had…”

Donald Trump now joins the short list of repudiated presidents who did well by Israel.

It will take some time to sort out just how much good he did. As it now looks, Trump’s actions regarding Israel don’t rise to the level of Nixon’s or Carter’s, for sheer impact. That’s because circumstances didn’t present him with an opportunity to make a comparable kind of difference. “We have the best friend Israel has ever had in the White House,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced a year ago. But Trump’s “best friendship” was never stress-tested, so we’ll never know.

That’s the role of chance in history. One man, Egypt’s Sadat, created opportunities for both Nixon and Carter. On Nixon’s watch, he launched a war that shook Israel’s foundations. On Carter’s watch, he shook Israel again with a surprise visit to Jerusalem. If Sadat hadn’t acted, there would have been no openings for Nixon and Carter to exploit.

Nothing of similar magnitude happened on Trump’s watch, and his initiatives toward Israel were mostly cost-free acts of recognition. His most substantive achievement, the Abraham Accords, required real diplomatic ingenuity, but it’s too early to judge their long-term significance for Israel, or gauge their resilience in crisis conditions. All that’s certain is that as Trump leaves Washington, he has the potential to be remembered as a president who made a historic difference to Israel. But that’s a call only future historians will be positioned to make.

Not the president you’d like to have

So is there some explanatory connection between leaving the White House under a cloud, and having done exceptional good for Israel? Or is it just coincidence?

If there’s a connection, it’s not obvious, at least to me. But even if there isn’t one, there may still be a few lessons here, for both Israelis and American Jews.

In each election cycle, there is much brouhaha over which candidate is the greater “friend of Israel.” But the evidence is that doing right by Israel counts for only so much in American politics. As we’ve seen, a gallant president can rescue Israel from peril or bring its adversaries to the peace table, but neither will compensate for mistakes he makes arising from vanity, arrogance, or miscalculation.

But even a floundering president must protect U.S. strategic interests. And a wounded one is more prone to obsess over posterity’s judgment. It’s in these two realms that helping Israel adds value to a president, and it’s here that Israel and its supporters should focus their appeals. The political payoff for supporting Israel may be negligible, but the other rationales are persuasive, and deserve greater emphasis.

For Israel, it’s vital to remain non-partisan and non-judgmental when it comes to presidents. Not only does Israel have no decisive influence over who will be president. Israel doesn’t fully control the timing of crises that might require presidential intervention.

When that happens, it shouldn’t matter to Israel what controversies or scandals embroil the president. It shouldn’t matter if he’s a self-righteous prig (like Carter) or a “grab ’em by the pussy” bully (like Trump) or even a country-club antisemite (like Nixon). To paraphrase a quotable American, you go to war with the president you have, not the president you’d like to have.

These failings do matter to American Jews: unlike Israelis, they have the right to take sides, pass judgment, and cast votes. But if they care about the well-being of Israel, they shouldn’t busily delegitimate supporters of Israel on the other side of the partisan aisle. It’s self-defeating, because you don’t know whether your hero or your antihero will be in the Oval Office precisely at the moment of crisis for Israel. If it’s not your hero, Israel will have to rely not on you, but on your opponents.

A certain dispassion may be especially hard to maintain when you view the president as insufferable, as many American Jews viewed Nixon, Carter, and Trump. That’s the time to take a deep breath, remember past precedents, and repeat: “The work of the righteous is done by others.”

Cross-posted at Times of Israel, here.