Betrayal
By Jim Fletcher
Those of us that see things through a Bible prophecy lens are almost shaking on the inside. We are living in those times, man! Unsettling. Anxious a bit. Off-kilter at times.
But right there on the front row, center-stage. What a privilege.
Likewise, the American official turn away from Israel is absolutely stunning. Though it seems someone living in a different reality is running the White House PR team, us in the real world are alarmed, at least, by the sea change in the last six months.
In the spring, the West was on the verge of an historic win against Iran. Inches away was a fundamental change in the opposite direction of the sinister Barack Obama. We let ourselves just dance in that moment for a few minutes. The possibilities were tantalizing.
And end to Iran’s state-sponsored terrorism.
Then Donald Trump began listening to a different set of advisors.
In a whirlwind, next came the odious “Memorandum of Understanding,” crafted by probably a shadowy team, but owned publicly by the hapless Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner, and now, sadly, J.D. Vance. Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth have been sidelined. All of a sudden, we are negotiating with Iran. And they are winning.
Now here, I’d like to play devil’s advocate some. The President knows more than we do. He also knows that dismantling the gargoyle system in Tehran was going to be more complex. Just like the Soviets, the mullahs have spent many decades setting up their multiple defenses. Trump knows the world economy would be shaken by that effort. Plus, I read this week a poll that says only about half of the Iranians are on the side of freedom. Presumably, the other half likes totalitarian terrorism.
That’s about 50 million people.
So he decided to try diplomacy (and area of failure for us since the 1970s). Also incredibly, Trump and Vance have very publicly sidelined Israel and treated Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu like trash.
Let us look then at our history with Israel, perhaps most affected by this diplomacy. The brilliant Rafael Medoff makes some important notes:
“Israeli leaders have been the targets of such diplomatic ambushes on more than one occasion. In 1975, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger tried to pressure Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to make risky concessions to Egypt, by telling reporters (as ‘a senior American official’) that Rabin was being ‘intransigent’ and therefore the U.S. had no choice but to ‘reassess’ its relationship with Israel. That included suspending American arms shipments to Israel for several months.
“In 1990, Secretary of State James Baker—acting on a suggestion made by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman—sarcastically recited the White House telephone number in front of the news media and declared that Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir should call ‘when he is serious about peace.’
“In 1991, President George H.W. Bush tried to intimidate American Jews who were seeking U.S. loan guarantees for Israel. He complained to reporters that he was ‘one lonely little guy’ who was surrounded by ‘something like a thousand lobbyists.’
[Let us remember too, Bush Sr. made the catastrophic mistake of hauling Yasser Arafat out of exile, to make him a statesman. Many Jews were murdered as a result of that gaffe.]
“In 2010, President Barack Obama abruptly left a meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu and kept him waiting for hours while he went to dine with the First Lady and their children. Obama’s aides then leaked the snub to reporters to show how the president had put the Israeli leader in his place.”
This list would be incomplete if we didn’t mention LBJ’s disingenuous offer of help to Levi Eshkol in the spring of 1967, and Ike’s strong-arming of Israel in the Sinai in 1956. Simply put, after Truman’s marvelous recognition of Israel in 1948, it’s mostly been downhill since for American presidents, vis a vis Israel.
As I said before, the White House and many conservative news outlets are working overtime to paint this MOU as a landmark success. In reality, this monstrosity saves the necks of the mullahs yet again. They will maneuver embarrassing American concessions into new and emboldened terror acts.
We are learning now every week that only God is our salvation when it comes to geopolitics. And everything else, of course.
I no longer have any expectations from our government. If they do something right for Israel occasionally, all the good. But as the Word clearly tells us, the salvation of the Jews will come from her Creator.
And no one else.