Trump Eyes Trip to Israel <br>As Centenary Approaches <br>Of the Balfour Declaration

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News that President Trump is eying a possible trip to Israel at the end of May certainly puts a spring in the step. Then again, too, if it happens, the Democrats can be expected to mark the occasion by siding with the Arabs.

Think I’m kidding? Just this week a New York Times editor chastised the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum for permitting the president to participate in one of its events — on a day set aside for remembering the Shoah.

“I understand why the museum’s leaders invited him, but they have effectively invested in Trump by doing so,” the editor, David Leonhardt, wrote. Never mind that the president delivered at the Capitol a speech that even some of his skeptics are hailing.

What strikes me about Mr. Trump’s speech is how straightforward it was — and philo-Semitic. And how clearly the president comprehends the role of Israel in the redemption of the Jewish people. Plus America’s heroic deeds.

Mr. Trump ended by telling the story of Gerda Klein, the young Polish Jewish woman who was rescued in World War II by an American Jewish GI, whom she married. “Today,” Mr. Trump said, “we mourn. We remember. We pray. And we pledge: Never again.”

“Today we kvetch,” the liberal press might have added. Columnist Peter Beinart of the Forward suggested that if Mr. Trump had been president in the 1940s, America wouldn’t have helped the Jews because Mr. Trump would have sided with the isolationists.

He clobbers Mr. Trump, as others have, for using “America First,” the slogan that the pre-war isolationists used. No mention of the fact that as soon as war did break out, the America Firsters enlisted to fight on our side.

Mr. Beinart chastises Mr. Trump for calling for budget cuts for the United Nations. He does this without mentioning that one reason the president is against the United Nations in the first place is its unrelenting hostility to Israel.

Could it be that the stridence of the critique of Mr. Trump is a signal that the president has begun to win the day?

The Trump administration, to liberals’ consternation, has become impossible to write off as anti-Israel. Mr. Trump’s United Nations envoy, Nikki Haley, has emerged as the highest-octane defender of Israel since Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

Mr. Trump’s ambassador in Israel is the first with a record of support for Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria. He was opposed by nearly all the Senate Democrats, but won confirmation and is on the job.

All this could set the stage for Mr. Trump to make a dramatic visit to Israel. And just when it’s preparing to mark the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, Britain’s statement of support for the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.

Israel will also be marking the 70th anniversary of Partition, the vote by the United Nations (at Lake Success, NY) that led to Israel’s independence. And if Trump travels to Israel in late May, he could also be there for Jerusalem Day.

It would be unwise to omit a word of caution. The trip is likely, reports say, but not a done deal. And, more substantively, there’s a risk that Mr. Trump could be tempted to press his luck at peace-making.

Prime Minister Netanyahu this week abruptly canceled a meeting with Germany’s foreign minister. That came after the minister, Sigmar Gabriel, who has called Israel an apartheid regime, set meetings with left-wing pressure groups that oppose his premiership.

If Mr. Trump does go to Israel it will be important that he avoid positioning himself between Israel and her enemies but, rather, that he shadow Israel to the hawkish side. It’s a mission for which few presidents have set themselves up so well.

This column first appeared in the New York Post.


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