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Trump and ‘Pro-Israel’ Hard-liners

Trump is even more absurdly one-sided in his view of the conflict than any previous major party nominee.
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Molly O’Toole reports on the people behind the changes to the Republican platform plank on Israel that deleted any reference to a two-state solution and denied the existence of the occupation of Palestinian territory:

The new platform language was drafted with not only the blessing but the intimate involvement of two of Trump’s closest aides [bold mine-DL], Jason Greenblatt and David Friedman, according to several sources behind the effort. The two men are Trump’s primary Israel advisors.

The successful push to eliminate the two-state language was led by a broad if seemingly unlikely coalition that included Sen. Ted Cruz’s national security advisor; a Mormon state representative from South Carolina; and a Jewish former media executive who runs a super PAC called Iron Dome Alliance, a reference to Israel’s storied Iron Dome missile defense system.

It is strange to think that Trump repeatedly came under attack from many of his primary rivals for supposedly wanting to be “neutral” between Israel and Palestine, and as recently as last month Hillary Clinton attacked Trump in similar terms. The reality always was that Trump was very aggressively hawkish in his views on Israel and boasted about this whenever the subject came up, but his detractors (and probably a few fans) didn’t want to believe him.

As we can see from the platform language, Trump is even more absurdly one-sided in his view of the conflict than any previous major party nominee, and his advisers are directly responsible for crafting the new language in the platform. The hard-liners and “pro-Israel” hawks that spent the last six months pretending that Trump was “anti-Israel” (i.e., not slavishly supportive of hard-line Israeli policies) have put on quite a show of denouncing a candidate who holds views that they find completely acceptable.

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