Innocents abroad: Trump and Temple Mount

We see them again as if in an old news loop.

Shaking hands, nodding assuredly and bent piously at the Western Wall as if we have been seeing the same play and action for four decades or more with a barely modified script.

President Trump in his kippa, Palestine President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu bearing platitudes as dead as December leafs. 

Platitudes which are lost to many Israeli Jews under the age of 40 and have been for at least a decade now.

And Israel is a state in waiting. 

{mosads}Waiting for the old men; the old thinking, the old generations, to fade away so the world can begin again. Like John Mayer, waiting for the world to change. And it has been said by prophets and poets for five millennia now, if the world is to begin again it will begin again in Israel.

Israel is waiting. There was a little thinking that she was even waiting of Trump. But she will have to wait longer.

I speak as an outsider; a Buddhist and a northern New Englander, but if Trump had any convictions and the character to back those convictions he might have listened to the honest pleas of the simple and sincere Texas preacher, John Hagee of the Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, as existential to Heartland Evangelicals as anyone could possibly be, who calls for moving the American embassy to Jerusalem and reassures his followers that Trump will do that. Because Trump told them he would and would such a forthright politician as Trump deceive on such an important and sacred issue?

Like so many things from this little man, it was never going to happen. 

From here, we see Israel with Western eyes but the case can be made that Israel is no longer and was never intended to be a Western European nation or an American substate. And influential Jews in Israel today will tell you that Israel has no bearing on America at all and America no bearing on Israel.

Israel might be seen by American politicians of both parties as our most cherished global substate; our “jewel in our crown” as India was to Victorian Britain. A fully free and independent state is unlikely to emerge in such a situation. Israel doesn’t need Trump. Israel needs an awakening moment and an awakener; a Jefferson or a Gandhi to be free to be itself.

And suppose Trump had thrown down all the cards, walked past the Western Wall a minutes’s walk to Temple Mount, the birthplace of Judaism and subsequently its younger offspring, Christianity and Islam, and prayed there as Rabbi Yehuda Glick, who was gunned down and left near death with four bullets in him for advocating the right of Jews to pray at Temple Mount, had hoped he would.

Trump sees a “new first” trophy for being the first American president to pray at the Western Wall, again reinforcing an American vision of Israel from the ’50s when Israel was a secular, socialist state, as Trump, Netanyahu and Abbas are all from the ’50s. 

If there is any such thing as “the West” today it began at Temple Mount. Had he prayed at Temple Mount his political career would likely be over — it may be over anyway — but he could have been a contender. He would have been remembered as long as Ruth, Daniel or Jeremiah will be remembered which is always.

For today, as the most influential Israeli columnist Caroline Glick wrote in January 2013:

“Israel is in the midst of the Second Zionist Revolution. The first Zionist revolution was a socialist revolution. The second Zionist revolution is Jewish. Israel is coming into its own. Judaism is flourishing, changing, living and breathing here like it never has anywhere since the destruction of the Second Commonwealth. The secular Left has been eclipsed by the Jewish Right. I don’t call it the religious Right because that is too limiting. What’s happening isn’t just about religion, it’s about everything and that is why non-observant hipsters in Tel Aviv are voting for the Jewish Home party. Non-observant and observant Jews are joining forces and the anti-religious are being left behind.”

Guess they didn’t get the memo at Trump Tower. 

But men at the end of their life’s work like Trump, Abbas and Netanyahu do not do brave things. They tend to compensate.

They tend to spend their last years and hours with unfulfilled longings, nursing old hurts, scheming vengeance, reenacting, reinforcing what has long gone before even after the water under the bridge has all dried up.

They should have sent U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley.

Referring to what Jerusalem sees as an anti-Israel bias at the United Nations Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked said at The Jerusalem Post’s annual conference in New York this month, “Today, we have a partner in the Trump administration in fighting it, and all unnecessary and illegal UN resolutions.”

“Israel is not the United Nations’ punching bag anymore. We can see change with Nikki Haley as the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. This is the best news to come out of that building in years.”

But she appears to have little faith in Trump’s peace push with the Palestinians.

“We need also to remember that every time that there was a peace process and it failed, after that there was a terror wave,” she said in a speech in Washington at the beginning of the month.

Israel is ready for the world but America may not be ready for Israel. Maybe when Nikki Haley is President and Ayelet Shaked is Prime Minister of Israel.

Which may not be that long a wait.

Bernie Quigley is a prize-winning writer who has worked more than 35 years as a book and magazine editor, political commentator and reviewer.

The views expressed by contributors are their own and are not the views of The Hill.