The senior Israeli diplomatic correspondent Shimon Shiffer minced no words in his column “Knife in our backs [in Hebrew]” published in Israel’s biggest-selling Hebrew-language daily Yedioth Ahronoth on the eve of Yom Kippur. Writing about Trump’s recent decision to turn his back on the US’s Kurdish allies, Shiffer wrote that the conclusion for Israel “needs to be unequivocal: Trump has become unreliable for Israel. He can no longer be trusted.” Shiffer’s column finishes with “Trump's latest statements and their meaning are not just a knife in the Kurds' backs but also a knife in our backs.”
As Israeli editor David Horovitz notes in his piece “Trump’s new actions, inactions on Kurds, Syria, Iran have Israel deeply worried” in yesterday’s The Times of Israel, Shiffer’s opinion is not alone. After Trump declined to organize any response to the big drone and missile strike on Saudi Arabia’s Abqaiq plant last month, the concern in Israel is that Trump will also do little or nothing if Iran launches a similar attack by proxy on Israel, say from western Iraq where Iran-backed militias hold sway. Uzi Even, one of the founding scientists of Israel’s Dimona nuclear reactor complex, wrote earlier in this week in the Israeli daily Haaretz that because of this new threat from Iran:
… operation of the Dimona nuclear reactor should be halted. It has now been shown to be vulnerable, and the harm it could cause would likely exceed its benefits.
And if this isn’t enough to keep Israelis up at night, Horovitz’s piece ends with a note comparing what Trump said to Kurds and Israelis on Tuesday:
On Tuesday, shortly before the start of Yom Kippur, Trump issued a presidential message to the Jewish people, saying that “Melania and I pray that He may seal you in the Book of Life for the coming year.”
The president’s words will have been warmly received in the Jewish state. He had very nice things to say about the Kurds, too, that same day: “in no way have we Abandoned the Kurds, who are special people and wonderful fighters,” he tweeted.
Hey Israel! Welcome to the club. Everything Trump touches dies. Trump’s actions have been knives in the backs of Kurds, Palestinians, Ukrainians, Americans, etc., etc., and they’ll be knives in your backs too. The only people that Trump doesn’t knife-in-the-back are autocrats like Putin, autocrats that make Trump cower. But you’re not in Putin’s league — and even if you were, Trump wouldn’t be competent enough to help should Iran attack you.