Elections, Gaza and the Corbynization of the Democratic party - by Caroline Glick

The Israeli public cannot influence the outcome of the US elections. But on Monday, it will determine how Israel will respond to aggression against it – whether that aggression emanates from Gaza or from Washington.

Caroline Glick..
Israel Hayom..
28 February '20..
Link: https://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/gaza-elections-and-the-corbynization-of-the-democratic-party/



The hundred rockets and missiles that Gazan terrorists launched into Israel this week served as yet another reminder that we have an account to manage with Gaza.

"Manage," not "settle," because we lack the opportunity to settle our score with Gaza. There is not today, and for the foreseeable future, there will not be any regime in Gaza that will agree to set aside its war with Israel and leave us alone.

Gaza, like Judea and Samaria, is a long-term problem that requires management, not resolution. To understand what needs to be done, we have to focus on the two sides of the problem.

First, Gaza is a military problem. To successfully and permanently quell the security threat Gaza poses to Israel, the IDF requires the capacity to operate freely in Gaza – as it does in Judea and Samaria. Israel built its capacity to operate throughout Judea and Samaria during Operation Defensive Shield in 2002.

In 1995, Israel signed the Interim Agreement with the PLO. The deal set out the basis for the transfer of authorities and powers to the Palestinian Authority in Judea and Samaria.

The PLO agreed to combat terrorism in all the areas transferred to its authority. Area A, which encompasses the Palestinian cities in Judea and Samaria was an area under full Palestinian security and civilian authority. In Area B, which includes the Palestinian villages, the PLO received full civil authority and police authorities, while Israel retained what was referred to as "overriding security authority," or, in plain English, the authority to conduct counterterrorism operations at will.

Area C encompasses the rest of Judea and Samaria, including all Israeli military installations, Israeli cities, towns and villages and Jordan Valley. There the PLO received limited civil authority and no military authority.

From 1996, when the PLO set up shop in Judea and Samaria until Operation Defensive Shield in 2002, the PLO transformed Area A into one large terrorist infrastructure. The suicide bombers that massacred Israeli civilians on a near-daily basis from 2000 through 2002 were trained and equipped in the bomb factories and terror bases in Area A.

Following a month in which 130 Israelis were slaughtered in suicide bombings and shootings, including 30 in the Seder massacre at the Park Hotel in Netanya, in April 2002, the government ordered the IDF to destroy the terrorist infrastructure in Judea and Samaria.

The implication was clear. The strategic goal of the operation was to militarily transform Area A, where the PLO had a free hand to behave like the Taliban, into Area B, where the IDF was capable of breaking up terror cells before they got up and running.

US Election Coverage Is a Wake Up Call for Israel’s Supporters - by Pesach Benson

...consider one last question. With the news industry admitting it blew the biggest story of 2016, isn’t it just possible that journalists are just as capable of having botched other areas of coverage, be it Brexit, nuclear Iran, the Arab Spring, Russia’s rise, the war in Iraq, the economy, issues of race, gender, sexuality, or, of course, Israel and the Palestinians?

Pesach Benson..
Honest Reporting..
13 November '16..

The dust is still settling on the most divisive presidential election campaign in recent memory.

Shocking not just the US but the rest of the world, Donald Trump will be the next president of the United States.

There’s a lot of media introspection (or more aptly, post-mortems) as editors and journalists try to figure out why they didn’t see this coming. Some of the chatter is very relevant for those of us who support Israel.

So where did the media go wrong? Journalists didn’t take Trump seriously, nor did they appreciate the depth of American anger at “the establishment.” Polls failed or were misinterpreted. The list goes on.

And in a Dewey defeats Truman moment, the Newsweek brand took a hit when a special commemorative issue was prematurely released featuring Hillary Clinton on the cover with the words, “Madam President.” Thousands of copies had to be recalled.

“Like everybody else, we got it wrong,” said Tony Romando, CEO of Topix Media, the Newsweek partner which produces special issues under the popular brand.

(Continue to Full Story)

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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Jabotinsky, Netanyahu, and the American debates - by Vic Rosenthal

Jabotinsky also stressed the importance for a leader to display hadar, a difficult word to translate, but it connotes dignity, gravitas, self-respect, and maybe honesty too. My own opinion is that Netanyahu, despite his faults, is a pretty good heir to the Jabotinsky tradition, and I think he is aware of the history and the responsibility that this places on his shoulders. I watched the debate. There were no big surprises. Donald was Donald and Hillary put on a polished, empty performance. Two “leaders” without a sense of history, without responsibility to anyone but themselves. Without hadar.

Vic Rosenthal..
Abu Yehuda..
27 September '16..

When I arose at 0330 this morning to watch the American presidential debates, I couldn’t help but think about the concept of leadership – what makes a good leader and why it’s rare to find one who is also a good politician. So I was pleased to run into this very interesting article by Elliott Jager about a man who was a great leader of the Jewish people, although he was not successful as a politician and unfortunately died far too soon.

The man, of course, was Ze’ev Jabotinsky, whom generations of left-leaning politicians dismissed as a fascist and an extremist, and whom many still think of as a footnote in Zionist history that is best kept at the bottom of the page.

But Jager points out that Jabotinsky’s positions were more nuanced than many think today. As a classical liberal, he was absolutely committed to the protection of individual rights (something that the Left likes to talk about a great deal while doing the precise opposite).

This includes the rights of Arabs in the Jewish state. Jabotinsky clearly saw the distinction between civil rights, such as those enumerated in the American Bill of Rights, and national or collective rights, the most obvious example of which is the Law of Return for Jews alone. Those who insist that the Jewishness of the state is essentially undemocratic elide this distinction. Jabotinsky’s demand for a state with national rights for the Jewish people was uncompromising, but he would never have accepted discrimination against minorities within the state.

Jabotinsky would not have agreed to limitations on where any citizen could live, but he would also have rejected Arab demands to change the flag and the national anthem, which are clearly national issues. And while he lived a secular life and was opposed to any kind of religious coercion, he nevertheless respected Judaism. Jager notes that the food at his Betar youth movement camps was kosher and “Shabbat was respected.”

One of the themes that Jabotinsky returned to throughout his life was the centrality of Jewish self-sufficiency and self-defense, and the importance of military power in the survival of a state. I suspect that he would be as uncomfortable with Israel’s degree of dependence on the US as I am.

(Continue to Full Post)

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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A Reality v. Democrats’ Israel Debate - by Jonathan Tobin

...To the contrary, rather than encouraging peace, stands such as those of Sanders, and the European countries that he cites as backing up his slurs about the Gaza war, are instead giving the Palestinians the impression that they should redouble their terror efforts rather than make peace. As unrealistic as Sanders’ economic positions may be, his opinions about the Middle East that are being applauded on the left as a refreshing dissent from the bipartisan support for Israel that exists in this country, are based on even greater fantasies.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
18 April '16..

Last week, the split within the Democratic Party was put on display during the debate in Brooklyn between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. Given his well-known critical views, Sanders’ full-throated attack against Prime Minister Netanyahu, as well as his re-floating of the smear that Israeli Defense Forces’ efforts to suppress missile fire and terror tunnels from Hamas terrorists in Gaza were “disproportionate,” to say nothing of his statement blaming the continuation of the conflict on Israel rather than, as Clinton pointed, squarely on the Palestinians where it belongs, was hardly surprising. But his willingness to go on the offensive against the pro-Israel community in this way just days before the New York primary illustrated his belief that the liberal base of the party — and a vocal left-wing minority of Jews — agree with him. The problem with his stands though — and that of many in his party as well as the Obama administration — is that they are not so much at variance with Clinton’s beliefs as they are with the reality of the Middle East, as a series of recent events, including today’s Jerusalem bus bombing, illustrate.

Sanders’s stand may not win him as many votes as he thinks since even most liberal New York Jewish voters aren’t that comfortable with his willingness to embrace the “disproportionate” canard even if they also don’t like Netanyahu. But it was widely applauded by veteran Israel-bashers like the New York Times’ Roger Cohen (who also has doubled at times as an apologist for Iran) as well as the left-wing J Street lobby. Though at times it has maintained the pretense that its goal is to replace AIPAC as the voice of the pro-Israel community, the group has a fraction of that mainstream group’s support and influence. Yet it is being propped up by the administration, which is sending both Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State John Kerry to a J Street event tonight as a signal of its desire to encourage those Jews who are critical of Netanyahu.

But as weak as the arguments in favor of Sanders’ stands were, the bombing in Jerusalem and the discovery of a new terror tunnel were more reminders of how out of touch with reality, the Vermont senator, the administration and their left-wing cheering sections are.

The bombing, which injured 21 people, represented a marked escalation in the conflict just at a time when many in Israel thought a decline in attacks showed that the “stabbing intifada” might be coming to an end. The bombing was applauded by Hamas, which spoke of it as appropriate retaliation for supposed “desecration” of the mosques on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, a lie that has been consistently sounded by the Palestinian Authority, too, as it has both applauded and encouraged terror attacks during the past several months. While there is no telling whether this is an isolated incident or the start of a new terror offensive that will return to more bloody tactics used during the second intifada that took thousands of lives in the last decade, it is nevertheless a troubling development.

Who's prepared to stand silent as a mob preaching hate advances their campaign to delegitimize Israel?

...Are they prepared to respect the people of Israel in their just struggle for survival? Or are they prepared to stand silent as a mob preaching hate that is forming around left-wingers like Zimmerman advance their campaign to delegitimize Israel and its democratically elected government? If Sanders’ youthful supporters are the future of the Democratic Party then that is something Jewish Democrats and all Americans who care about Israel must worry about.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
14 April '16..

Update: Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders suspended his new Jewish outreach coordinator Simone Zimmerman, his campaign said Thursday night, after reports surfaced of her harsh and foul-mouthed criticism of Israeli policies and of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “She has been suspended while we investigate the matter,” spokesman Michael Briggs told the New York Times.

We already know that Bernie Sanders has already positioned himself as the presidential candidate that is the most hostile to Israel’s government in either party. He not only stated a wildly inflated number of “innocent” Palestinians that he claimed Israel had killed in the 2014 Gaza war that was several times the figure put out by Hamas terrorists. Though he backtracked on that claim, it’s more important to note that he doubled down on the inflammatory and false charge that Israel’s campaign of self-defense against Hamas terrorists in Gaza was “disproportionate.” In neither his full length Middle East policy speech (that he chose not to give at the AIPAC conference) nor his subsequent statements has he demonstrated any interest in noting that it’s the Palestinians that continue to turn down Israeli peace offers rather than the Israelis saying no to an end to the conflict.

Given these facts, it can hardly be considered a surprise that the person his campaign hired to be in charge of outreach to Jewish voters is a vicious opponent of the Netanyahu government. Simone Zimmerman has achieved a degree of notoriety for having put out statements in which she profanely denounced Prime Minister Netanyahu in which she accused him, the state of Israel and the Israel Defense Forces of “murder” and “war mongering” because he opposed the Iran nuclear deal.

Zimmerman’s comments weren’t merely wrong-headed. They were disgusting and an outrageous attempt to delegitimize not merely Netanyahu but also consensus positions held by Israeli parties across the political spectrum.

In response to criticisms of Zimmerman, Sanders’ campaign has no apologies. To the contrary, a Twitter account that goes under the name of “Jews for Bernie” claimed that all those who opposed her hiring had “far right connections.”

Let’s concede that Zimmerman isn’t important in and of herself. She’s a minor functionary in a campaign that has zero chance of success. Which is to say that no one should expect her to be serving as a White House liaison to the Jewish community next year. But there’s more to this story than just one nasty piece of work that is flogging one of the Democratic candidates.

One of the primary talking points of left-wing critics of Israel is the charge that democracy is under assault from Netanyahu and his supporters. There is very little substance to this accusation. What there is of it generally revolves around claims that efforts to create more transparency and accountable for leftist non-governmental organizations is a grave offense to the spirit of democracy. But the main point to be gleaned from such controversies is that the groups involved are unpopular because they get most of their funding from hostile foreign governments and seem to have as their purpose to either harass or spy on Israeli forces defending the country against terrorists.

But there’s a more important conclusion to be drawn from the willingness of so many on the left — even someone who works for a candidate who claims to be very “pro-Israel” as Sanders does — is that their main complaint isn’t so much with Netanyahu as it is with the people of Israel.

Why Bernie Exaggerates About Gaza - by Jonathan Tobin

It might be comforting if we could put Bernie Sanders’ comments about Israel in an interview with New York Daily News editorial board down to the same kind of appalling ignorance that characterizes so much of what Donald Trump says about foreign policy. But Sanders, who has spent the last 26 years of his life in Congress, can’t plead ignorance when it comes to his distortions of the record regarding the 2014 war with Gaza. Instead, we must acknowledge that Sanders’ willingness to believe the lies that are put forth by the Jewish state’s worst critics is part of something even more ominous than Trump’s lack of knowledge and isolationist instincts.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
05 March '16..

It might be comforting if we could put Bernie Sanders’ comments about Israel in an interview with New York Daily News editorial board down to the same kind of appalling ignorance that characterizes so much of what Donald Trump says about foreign policy. But Sanders, who has spent the last 26 years of his life in Congress, can’t plead ignorance when it comes to his distortions of the record regarding the 2014 war with Gaza. Instead, we must acknowledge that Sanders’ willingness to believe the lies that are put forth by the Jewish state’s worst critics is part of something even more ominous than Trump’s lack of knowledge and isolationist instincts. Sanders’ comments reflect a mindset of the left-wing base of the Democratic Party, which views the Middle East conflict through the prism of Israel’s foes. By failing to acknowledge the real reason for the lack of peace and instead focusing obsessively on canards about “disproportionate” attacks and distorted arguments about settlements, Sanders isn’t being merely wrongheaded. He’s showing us the future of the Democratic Party’s foreign policy in an anti-Israel trend that has been slowly building for decades.

There’s a lot to digest in the Daily News interview. But let’s leave Sanders’ socialist dialectic about the evils of profits, corporations, and banks for another day. Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party leadership may have been forced to follow him to the left on economic issues during the primary campaign. But Democratic superdelegates have no intention of letting Sanders sink their party by having it led by a socialist.

But Sanders’ comments about the Middle East deserve special notice because while we are used to the candidate’s left-wing rants on economics, he’s said very little about his foreign policy views during his challenge to Clinton other than boasting of his opposing the Iraq War.

After going on about forcing Israel to withdraw from areas where he considers their presence to be illegal, Sanders got to his critique of Israeli self-defense against a Hamas terror offensive, which included the use of tunnels for kidnapping and murder and firing thousands of rockets at Israeli cities and towns:

I think it is fair to say that the level of [Israeli] attacks against civilian areas…and I do know that the Palestinians, some of them, were using civilian areas to launch missiles. Makes it very difficult. But I think most international observers would say that the attacks against Gaza were indiscriminate and that a lot of innocent people were killed who should not have been killed. Look, we are living, for better or worse, in a world of high technology, whether it’s drones out there that could, you know, take your nose off, and Israel has that technology. And I think there is a general belief that, with that technology, they could have been more discriminate in terms of taking out weapons that were threatening them.

I’m just telling you that I happen to believe … anybody help me out here, because I don’t remember the figures, but my recollection is over 10,000 innocent people were killed in Gaza. Does that sound right?

Daily News: I think it’s probably high, but we can look at that.

Sanders: I don’t have it in my number…but I think it’s over 10,000. My understanding is that a whole lot of apartment houses were leveled. Hospitals, I think, were bombed. So yeah, I do believe and I don’t think I’m alone in believing that Israel’s force was more indiscriminate than it should have been.

There’s a lot here to unravel, but let’s start with the level of exaggeration involved with the claim of 10,000 “innocent people killed in Gaza.” The pro-Palestinian United Nations Human Rights Council claims that 1,462 civilians out of the 2,251 people in Gaza were counted as fatalities during the 50-day war. The UNHRC is hopelessly biased against Israel and devotes more of its efforts to attacking the Jewish state than in dealing with the human rights catastrophe in Syria, where deaths can be counted in the hundreds of thousands and the refugees in the millions. But even if we took their figures to be true, Sanders is still blaming Israel for seven times more dead civilians than its worst critics.

But the truth about civilian casualties is more complicated than that. Israel has claimed, with good reason, that at least half of those claimed as civilian deaths were, in fact, Hamas personnel. That means the number of deaths is far lower than even that 1,462 number. All unnecessary deaths in war are tragic, but what is troubling is Sanders’ willingness to accept anti-Israel propaganda at face value and to wrongly assume that Israel wasn’t doing its best with the technology it has to minimize civilian casualties.

AIPAC’s Post-Trump Hangover - by Jonathan Tobin

...The job of a bipartisan lobby in age of hyper-partisanship is not easy. But it must be done. Pinkus should save her tears and her apologies. Once the Trump hangover wears off friends of Israel are going to have their work cut out for them in trying to maintain the alliance between these two great democracies no matter who wins in November. That’s going to mean working with lots of people that a lot of don’t like. AIPAC activists and their critics need to get used to it. It’s called democracy.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
23 March '16..

Donald Trump surprised a lot of people on Monday night when he read a fairly standard pro-Israel speech at the AIPAC conference. But while his performance got mixed reviews as even those, like me, who were willing to give him some credit for repudiating his claim of “neutrality” and saying a lot of sensible things about the conflict with the Palestinians and the Iran nuclear deal, understood that the gap between scripted Donald Trump and the unscripted version that has said very different things is too great to be ignored. In the aftermath of the speech, Trump has gone on to say more outrageous things about different subjects (the latest being a thuggish threat aimed at Ted Cruz’s wife) but the pro-Israel lobby seems to have been shaken by the criticism the organization received for applauding the candidate’s address.

The best evidence of this came the morning after when Lillian Pinkus, the new president of AIPAC took the stage at the conference and tearfully apologized for some of the things Trump said. The GOP frontrunner had taken some harsh shots at President Obama about his policies toward Iran and Israel. He cheered the notion that it was the president’s final year in office and then added, in a deviation from his script, that Obama was, “maybe the worst thing to happen to Israel.” Obviously, that last line was a piece of classic Trump hyperbole. If compared to Yasir Arafat, Hamas and Mahmoud Abbas, Obama doesn’t seem quite so bad even to his critics.

But Pinkus’s apology wasn’t so much about what Trump said but the fact that the vast majority of the 18,000 AIPAC conference attendees applauded him. The expectation prior to the speech was that a great many of those at the event would walk out as the candidate spoke or that he might be booed or heckled. That was a not unreasonable expectation since Trump is despised by a great many Jewish conservatives as well as liberals. But while a few staged a symbolic walkout or stayed away — something that was barely noticed in a packed arena — the AIPAC crowd gave him a respectful hearing as they did the other candidates.

More than that, when Trump told them things they wanted to hear about support for Israel, the Iran deal or even Obama, they didn’t sit on their hands. They laughed at his jokes and applauded. Trump’s appeal as a performer is a lot greater than his critics, including me, have been willing to acknowledge. And for some, including apparently some of AIPAC’s leaders, that applause was an unforgivable sin for which the organization must make amends.

Let’s specify that by naming Obama in the way that he did, Trump used what we might term unparliamentary language in a setting where even partisans understand that bipartisanship is the order of the day. But, to be fair, despite Pinkus’ tearful apology about “ad hominem attacks” that were “levied against the president of the United States from our stage,” this wasn’t the first time a sitting president was criticized at an AIPAC conference. Moreover, by Trump’s admittedly debased standards, merely saying Obama was the “worst thing” or saying “yay,” about the prospect of him leaving office barely registered even as a mild insult. But Pinkus’s apology for a guest speaker that spoke only for himself and not AIPAC was, as the Washington Post noted, unprecedented.

Why did she do it?

Election Campaigns, Israel and Trump - by Jonathan Tobin

...What people say when campaigning — especially when trying to seduce Jewish and other pro-Israel voters — often has little to do with what they’ll do once in office. We can go back decades to analyze presidential candidates and discover more than a few who ran as ardent friends of Israel and then turned out to be a horse of a very different color....But given the stakes involved for Israel in preserving the alliance with the Jewish state, its friends have no choice but to think hard about a candidate’s bona fides on the issue.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
03 March '16..

With each primary victory, the debate about Donald Trump’s fitness for the presidency grows more heated. After beguiling or outraging the nation (depending on your point of view) for months, the discussion about the unexpected and often perplexing Trump phenomenon has not entirely abated, but his supporters and detractors are now finally getting down to the business of arguing about the specifics of his stands on the issues. One such argument concerns whether not only whether Trump can be considered a friend of Israel but also whether he can be judged as stronger on the issue than Hillary Clinton.

Let’s start any such discussion by recognizing that the quadrennial attempt to handicap how any presidential candidate will work with and treat Israel is a purely speculative enterprise. What people say when campaigning — especially when trying to seduce Jewish and other pro-Israel voters — often has little to do with what they’ll do once in office. We can go back decades to analyze presidential candidates and discover more than a few who ran as ardent friends of Israel and then turned out to be a horse of a very different color.

His Jewish supporters assumed Jimmy Carter would be a garden variety pro-Israel Democrat and discovered he was nothing of the kind once in the White House. Jewish Republicans had the same experience with the first President Bush. Jewish Democrats vouched for President Obama on Israel but have spent the last seven years spinning elaborate excuses for his Middle East policy. On the other hand, there are always pleasant surprises too. George W. Bush was assumed by man in the pro-Israel community to be a carbon copy of his father but turned to be such a strong friend of the Jewish state that his successor made the effort to reverse that stance and create more daylight between the U.S. and Israel it a cornerstone of his foreign policy.

But given the stakes involved for Israel in preserving the alliance with the Jewish state, its friends have no choice but to think hard about a candidate’s bona fides on the issue.

Yet what is truly interesting about Trump is that his supporters are doing the opposite of what most of those whose candidates’ stand on Israel has been called into question. When it came to a candidate like Barack Obama, his backers told us to ignore his background and associations and to focus only the policy statements that his team was churning out on the Middle East. In that way, Obama’s clear animus for Israeli leaders and their policy choices as well as his desire to make friends with the Arab and Muslim world and to initiate a new détente with Iran were buried underneath boilerplate pro-Israel campaign rhetoric churned out by staffers.

But in Trump’s case, it’s just the opposite. When it comes to Israel, his supporters are at pains to tell us to ignore the things he’s said on the campaign trail. Though Trump’s foreign policy statements are generally all over the map as he improvises positions that are, at one and the same time, extremely aggressive (his threats to kick ISIS’s ass) and neo-isolationist (pull back from war on Islamist terror while conducting trade wars), he has been consistent about his stance on the peace process. There he has repeatedly vowed that he would be “neutral” with regards to Israel and the Palestinians. He also expressed doubts about whether Israel was ready to take risks for peace.

Such a position makes Trump an outlier among Republicans. Virtually every other GOP presidential candidate and the overwhelming majority of Republicans in the House and the Senate have affirmed their support for Israel in a way that makes clear that they believe the U.S. strongly backs Israel against the repeated Palestinian refusal to make peace. If anything, Trump’s stance strongly resembles the policy position taken by the Obama administration over the last 7+years.

Trump, the EU crack-up and Israel - by Caroline Glick

...In the final analysis, Trump’s rise in America and the rise of the populists in Europe is yet another indication of the West’s growing identity crisis fueled by its economic, social, military and cultural weakness. Israel needs to read the writing on the wall and act appropriately lest we become a casualty of that identity crisis.

Caroline Glick..
Column One/JPost..
25 February '16..

After smashing back-to-back victories in the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries and the Nevada caucuses, going into next week’s Super Tuesday contests in 12 states, Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump looks increasingly unbeatable.

What accounts for the billionaire populist’s success? And if Trump does become the next US president, what sort of leader will the former reality television star be? Trump is popular because he has a rare ability to channel the deep-seated frustrations that much of the American public harbors toward its political and cultural elites.

Trump’s presidential bid isn’t based on specific, defined economic or foreign policy platforms or plans. Indeed, it isn’t clear that he even has any.

Trump’s campaign is based on his capacity to resonate two deeply felt frustrations harbored by a large cross-section of American citizens.

As The Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Henninger explained recently, a very large group of Americans is frustrated – or enraged – by the intellectual and social terror exercised upon them by the commissars of political correctness.

Trump’s support levels rise each time he says something “politically incorrect.” His candidacy took off last summer when he promised to build a wall along the Mexican border. It rose again last November when, following the Islamic massacre in Paris, he said that if elected he will ban Muslim immigration to the US.

The many millions of Americans who are sick of being called racist, chauvinist, homophobic, privileged or extremist every time they breathe feel that in Trump they have found their voice.

Then there is that gnawing sense that under Obama, America has been transformed from history’s greatest winner into history’s biggest sucker.

Trump’s continuous exposition on his superhuman deal-making talents speaks to this fear.

Trump’s ability to viscerally connect to the deep-seated concerns of American voters and assuage them frees him from the normal campaign requirement of developing plans to accomplish his campaign promises.

Trump’s supporters don’t care that his economic policies contradict one another. They don’t care that his foreign policy declarations are a muddle of contradictions.

They hate the establishment and they want to believe him.

This then brings us to the question of how a president Donald Trump would govern.

Because he knows how to viscerally connect to the public, Trump will undoubtedly be a popular president. But since he has no clear philosophical or ideological underpinning, his policies will likely be inconsistent and opportunistic.

In this, a Trump presidency will be a stark contrast to Obama’s hyper-ideological tenure in office.

So, too, his presidency will be a marked contrast to a similarly ideologically driven Clinton or Sanders administration, since both will more or less continue to enact Obama’s domestic and foreign policies.

The US is far from the only country steeped in uncertainty and frustration today.

Today, the peoples of Western Europe are behaving much like the Americans in their increased rejection of the political and cultural elites. Like Trump’s growing band of supporters, Western Europeans are increasingly embracing populists.

Whether these leaders come from the Right or the Left, they all make a similar pledge to restore their nations to a previous glory.

These promises are based as well on a common rejection of the European Union. Like their voters, populist European politicians believe that the EU is a bureaucratic monstrosity that has pulverized and seeks to blot out their national characters while it seizes their national sovereignty.

Due to this growing popular opposition to the EU, establishment leaders throughout Western Europe find themselves fighting for their political survival. Whether their desire to exit the EU owes to its open borders policies in the face of massive Muslim immigration or to the euro debt crisis, with each passing month, the very concept of a unified Europe loses its appeal for more and more Europeans.

On June 23, this growing disenchantment is liable to bring about the beginning of the EU’s breakup. That day, British voters will determine whether or not the United Kingdom will remain in the EU.

Popular London Mayor and Conservative MP Boris Johnson is now leading the campaign calling for Britain to leave the EU against the will of Prime Minister David Cameron and the Conservative party establishment.

In recent days, several commentators have claimed that Johnson is Britain’s Donald Trump.

Like Trump, Johnson is able to tap into deep-seated public dissatisfaction with the political and cultural elites and serve as a voice for the disaffected.

If Johnson is able to convince a majority of British voters to support an exit from the EU, then several other EU member states are likely to follow in Britain’s wake.

The exit of states from the EU will cause a political and economic upheaval in Europe with repercussions far beyond its borders. Just as a Trump presidency will usher in an era of high turbulence and uncertainty in US economic and foreign policies, so a post-breakup EU and Western Europe will replace Brussels’ consistent policies with policies that are more varied, and unstable.

For Israel, instability is not necessarily a bad thing. For the past several years, we have consistently suffered under the stable, unswerving anti-Israel policies of both the EU and the Obama administration.

Our inability to influence these policies was brought home last week with the government’s announcement that it is renewing Israel’s diplomatic dialogue with the EU.