Welcome to the Trump post-coherent era
One can resist Trump’s fantasies, but Israeli decision-makers prefer to lie on the floor and wait for a pat on the tummy.
By Yonatan Englender • Translated by Sol Salbe
The Post-Coherence Era
He’s a genius, he’s a bloody fool, he’s laughing, he’s serious, he’s against paper straws, he’s in favour of Transfer, he’s good for Jews, he’s bad for Israel, you never know what’s going to happen with him tomorrow, or even in an hour. This is another wonderful day in Donald Trump’s second empire, and how sad it is to live in the circumstances in which the fate of Israeli abductees depends on the volatile mood of the president of the United States.
Ever since Trump “jumped into the fray” of the negotiations for the release of the abductees, even before he entered the White House, strange scenes have befallen Israel: [the quasi-fascist] Channel 14 warns that there are reasons to fear him (Qatari elements have infiltrated the Oval Office!), radical leftists sing songs of praise and glory for him (he humiliated Bibi!) and later on it’s the opposite — the right-wingers identify him as a Messiah, the leftists pick up that he is a Kahanist; Israel’s defence minister instructs the army to prepare to implement a plan that the president of another country pulled out of the air at a media conference; The prime minister seems a bit too enthusiastic about sending Israeli soldiers to die in an operation to liberate land that will be allocated to the Trump family’s golf course project. And perhaps the climax, as Chaim Levinson writes today, is that Netanyahu is working to sabotage a deal for the release of abducted citizens of his country, but Trump may sabotage his efforts. This isn’t reality, it’s a Gerard Butler movie.
Welcome to the post-coherence era. More than ever, the law is irrelevant, morality is of no interest, even reality is not something that needs to be taken into account. Is it possible to forcibly expel hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to countries that are not willing to accept them? Will Jewish soldiers forcibly push the elderly, women and children into buses heading East? Will settlers establish outposts near the Trump Tower Hotel — Gaza? Of course not, but what difference does it make? In the era of post-coherence, there is no policy, there are whims. There are no plans, there are fantasies. There are no manoeuvres taking place in the real world, there are posts on Twitter. In this era, the citizens, abducted or not, are only a sorry superfluous extra to the aspirations of the leaders.
All of this can be opposed. The president of Mexico, the prime minister of Canada, the ruler of Saudi Arabia, the prime minister of Greenland, each in turn has shown in recent weeks some degree of displeasure with the Trumpist mania, and has even set red lines. Today, Reuters reported, according to sources, that Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi will not come to the White House as long as Trump’s plan for mass transfer is on the agenda. And in Israel? All the decision-makers — not statespersons, there are none here — lie on their backs like cute Labradors, waiting for a pat [stet] on the tummy by Uncle Donald. They will discover that just as he knows how to pat, but he also knows how to slap.
