Is there a compound German word for the moist, longing looks that authoritarians exchange with one another? The hustlers smile. Why do dictators and wanna-be dictators make such public displays on the international stage of their affections? Even lovers of democracy aren’t nearly as tender with one another. The testosteronal cuddling behavior of authoritarians and authoritarians manqué are well-chronicled. Vladmir loves Jong-un loves Maduro loves Xi likes Netanyahu madly, but adores Trump.
Was it Tolstoi who wrote that all happy members of the authoritarian club are more or less similar? Or was that Chuck Palahniuk?
It does not really matter. Because we appear to be in the early autumnal phase of the global far-right affair, the Middle East edition. No sign of ending just yet. And it is not exactly a romantic or even emotional, heart-based kind of tryst, either. Neither is it the warm intellectual affinity connecting political philosophies — like democracies — from across the multitudinous seas. The “love” shared between authoritarians is largely transactional, to be sure, straight out of the amygdala, which is part of the old lizard brain. Eternally locked in a defensive coping crouch against omnipresent antagonistic forces at the margins, Trump’s lizard brain and Prime Minister Netanyahu’s are not at all dissimilar. Both, for example, are running, quite literally, to avoid some well-earned time in the pokey. Both, quite frankly, are bigots. What else explains the transatlantic, testosteronal attraction that holds these two geopolitical hustlers in its thrall?
Game, it has been said, recognize game. “On the one hand, Netanyahu not only asserts that he alone knows what is best for the people of Israel, but he has also often claimed that as Israel's leader he speaks for all the world's Jews (including those of us in the U.S. and elsewhere who would beg to differ),” writes David Rothkopf in Haaretz. “At the same time, Trump is once again contending that America is broken and ‘(he) alone can fix it’ while postulating that if he does not win not only will it spell disaster for the U.S., ‘Israel will not exist in two years.’” Hence: Trumpanyahu — as I like to call this consensual, transactional relationship — is somewhat complicated by the former American President’s antisemitism. “It is a marriage made in Hell,” Rothkopf concludes of Trumpanyahu.
Still, a little antisemitism has never stopped Netanyahu from allying with men like Vladimir Putin. Until, of course, Putin dumped Netanyahu in the wake of October 7 in favor of Iran. It took a while for Bibi to get over that romantic miscalculation.
This unholy union further explains why Netanyahu appears as if he’s trying to manipulate the political scales in favor of Trump. To complicate matters, President Joe Biden is a lame duck President. So there is little to no incentive for the choleric, stubborn-like-a-mule Prime Minister to yield to any of Biden’s dramatic stick waving. Biden doesn't so much draw red lines for Netanyahu, per se. His color scheme leans more towards the — how does one put this nicely? — salmon-hued. The Biden administration is preparing a plan for a temporary cease fire as I write this, but I remain skeptical.
Especially when megadonor Miriam Adelson is fully on board. “The financial support of one of Trump's mega-donors, billionaire and Dallas Mavericks owner Miriam Adelson, the widow of Macau casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, is reportedly conditioned on Trump allowing Israel to annex the West Bank combined with U.S. recognition of Israel's sovereignty over all of that territory,” notes Professor Menachem Z. Rosensaft at Newsweek. “To say that this is the utopian dream of not just Netanyahu but the entire coterie of right-wing extremists propping up his government would be the understatement of the year.” Which leads me to the question: Why didn’t President Biden take the opportunity link American offensive military aid conditionally to the secession of settler activities? Did anyone think the Netanyahu hug would end in anything other than outright disaster?
Joe Biden’s intellectual, enabling love of Israel is blind. The Holocaust is core to his world-view and to his sense of political being. But that love fails to separate the state of Israel from an authoritarian-manqué like Netanyahu, who is dangerous to the Middle East and, further, to world order. Biden, well intentioned, made sure that every one of his children and grand children went to Dachau when they turned 14. Just as before them, he himself was educated at the dinner table by his father about the Shoa. “He’s a politician of a generation that probably doesn’t exist anymore,” Aaron David Miller, American Middle East analyst, author, and negotiator, told the AP. Netanyahu’s not-so-veiled embrace of Trump exposes, of course, the fragility of Biden’s intellectual love. Just as Putin traded in Netanyahu for the Supreme Leader of Iran, Netanyahu traded in Biden for what can only be properly construed as a fresher piece of political ass (the closer to the election, the better).
There’s another reason for Netanyahu’s continuance and escalation of the war — Guilt. Hamas built itself up in the run-up to October 7th in the wake of Natanyahu’s putrid leadership. Rosensaft continues, reminding us that Netanyahu himself propped up Hamas for years in order to keep the Palestinian Authority from advancing anywhere near a two-state solution:
After all, (Netanyahu) had allowed Hamas to be funded to the tune of billions of dollars since becoming prime minister in 2009, a position he has held ever since with the exception of one year when he was out of power. And it was Netanyahu who allowed the security of the kibbutzim and towns on the Israel-Gaza border to be compromised by shifting military units to the West Bank at the insistence of his fascisti-like coalition partners. And it was he who believed that by allowing Hamas to control Gaza, he would be able to continue avoiding talking with the Palestinian Authority about any kind of political path forward.
And yet, Netanyahu, like Trump, is psychologically, perhaps congenitally, incapable of ever admitting that he might, just might, have made a mistake.
Love means never having to say you’re sorry. And yet President Biden continues, naively, to hope in vain that Netanyahu one day reciprocates his selfless love. “The definition of insanity attributed to Albert Einstein is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result,” Ed Luce notes in FT. Later he adds flourish: “With Netanyahu, Biden seems trapped in a perpetual quid pro nihilo (something for nothing).”
Luce then drops a very pessimistic assessment as to where Biden’s Middle Eastern repetitive compulsion could end up:
On Monday (Biden) called for Israeli restraint while at the same time announcing he was beefing up the US military presence in the Middle East. The latter provides Israel with an extra layer of protection to ignore Biden’s exhortations. From Harris’s point of view, Netanyahu’s brinkmanship is ominous. Should Israel occupy a strip of southern Lebanon to create a buffer zone against the Hizbollah threat — as some around Netanyahu are urging — it could change the US electoral weather. Higher oil prices would hit US consumer sentiment, undoing some of the stimulative effect of last week’s half a percentage point rate cut by the US Federal Reserve. It goes without saying that Donald Trump has an interest in egging Netanyahu on.
So, here we are in this moment of exigency. Biden is caught in a repetitive loop of bygone behavior, largely a result of his age, of his familial history, thus endangering the party’s nominee, possibly in Michigan, where she holds a slim lead.
There is little doubt that both Netanyahu and Putin are hoping for a Trump win. There is no actual proof of this because it would be stupid to say so aloud. But, obviously, both of their geopolitical ambitions have a greater chance of coming to realization in a Trump administration. In July, Harris made a lukewarm plea for peace, something Trump would never do. “The first phase of the deal would bring about a full ceasefire, including a withdrawal of the Israeli military from population centers in Gaza,” she said following a meeting with Netanyahu. “In the second phase, the Israeli military would withdraw from Gaza entirely, and it would lead to a permanent end to the hostilities.”
Netanyahu, by contrast, offers obstacles to getting to any “day after” scenarios. With the Lebanon escalation Netanyahu has, in fact, expanded his war goals. And he has been naught else but defiant about Israel’s withdrawal from the Philadelphi Corridor, the demilitarized area on the border between Gaza and Egypt. Former diplomat Alon Pinkas last week told Al Jazeera that Netanyahu is essentially using the Philadelphi Corridor as a pretext to avoid a ceasefire deal altogether. Someone might want to alert the Biden administration, which is still working in good faith on such an agreement.
Good luck with that, when your partner in peace is politically unfaithful with Donald J Trump.
“I am a reality TV editor, and I know firsthand how dire the state of the industry is right now. Eighteen months ago, I started getting random calls from producers and editors I hadn’t worked with in years, asking me if I knew of any jobs. The calls became more regular; one or two colleagues a month looking for work turned into two or three a week. Sadly, I could not help them. Nobody could find any work. Those of us with jobs were beginning to notice changes as well. Budgets were being slashed, staff was being cut, and airdates were being pushed up so more ad dollars could flow into networks. Yes, I was thankful to be employed, but having to post-produce and edit the same content in less time — with fewer people to help — became a Herculean task. In December 2023, my contract was ending on a very popular prison love story series that I had worked on for three years. I had just finished my first novel, which took forever to write while I was working 50-plus hours cutting shows, and I was burned out. Instead of renewing my contract, I decided to take some time off to get my manuscript ready to send out to agents. My superiors and coworkers warned me that this was not a wise move in the current state of the reality TV job market, but I decided to do it anyway … Maybe this slowdown is karma for creating TV that is as far from reality as you can get. We’ve all been instructed by network executives to amp up drama — cheat this, make her say that at this moment, make that argument look more epic. Audiences should know by now that what they’re watching is about 20% reality and 80% tricks of the trade. The drama is amped up, with perfectly placed sound effects, strongly percussive music tracks, stolen looks from 10 minutes prior — edited to make you think she’s pissed at her enemy when, in actuality, she was rolling her eyes because the sound guy had to pee. We’re even instructed to cobble together scraps of footage to create entire scenes that never happened at all.” (Timothy Hedden/Huff Post)
“With Biden stepping down in a matter of months, there is no way that U.N. members will work out a reform deal on his watch. If Vice President Kamala Harris wins the November election, she might take the initiative forward, though given political and legal hurdles it would be a steeply uphill climb. If Trump returns to office, the whole idea is likely to go nowhere, and the U.S. will go back to the sort of confrontational U.N. diplomacy that was the hallmark of Trump’s first term. Nonetheless, the Biden administration deserves some credit for being willing to envisage changes to the U.N. architecture, rather than clinging to the status quo. The administration has not been as keen to promote reforms in some other areas. Washington has resisted calls from Global South countries and U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to give the organization a role in reshaping the governance of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. It has also opposed proposals by Guterres for a new international agency with the power to regulate AI. This has led some U.N. officials and foreign diplomats to grumble that the U.S. is still pursuing a ‘pick and choose’ approach to multilateralism, only intermittently paying heed to other states’ interests. But for most U.N. members, the administration’s greatest sin has been its repeated refusal to back Security Council and General Assembly calls for a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas in late 2023 and early 2024. Biden’s staunch line against giving the U.N. a political role in resolving the war in Gaza alienated even many U.S. allies and made it harder for Western powers to secure support for Ukraine in the General Assembly.” (Richard Gowan/WPR)
“The FBI's 2023 crime report, which the agency releases annually, uses crime statistics from law enforcement agencies and partners throughout the country to outline the crime landscape nationwide. In 2023, the data was submitted by more than 16,000 agencies. This year's report comes just weeks ahead of the presidential election, where crime has become a key issue on the campaign trail. Violent crime — which includes murder and non-negligent manslaughter, rape, aggravated assault and robbery — decreased by around 3% from 2022 to 2023 nationwide, the report found. Among the findings, murder and non-negligent manslaughter saw a decrease of 11.6% from the previous year, along with a 9.4% decrease in rape, a 0.3% decrease in robberies and a 2.8% decrease in aggravated assault. The declining violent crime rates come after a spike in violent crime during the COVID-19 pandemic. Violent crime also waned in 2022, falling by 1.7%. Overall, more than 1.2 million violent crimes were committed in 2023, the report estimated. The decrease in the murder rate between 2022 and 2023 represents the ‘largest drop’ in the rate in the last 20 years, an FBI official said.” (Kaia Hubbard/CBSNews)