The Trump 2024 Dilemma: What Would Ben-Gurion Do? He saw the need to help the British fight the Nazis while opposing the British occupation of Palestine.By Ruth R. Wisse
“It is now more urgent than ever to recover and restore the best of America, but also more difficult because the former president fails to embody the greatness of America that he seeks to restore. Sober Americans will therefore defend the Trump record without supporting his candidacy, and deny him re-election while defeating those who did not allow him to govern.”
“We can’t win with Trump and we can’t win without him,” a friend said, echoing many other sober Americans. But I suggested that recent Jewish history shows a way out of the bind Republicans face in regaining the White House without its former incumbent.
In 1939, as World War II began, the Jewish community of Palestine faced simultaneous and competing challenges from Europe and at home.
Adolf Hitler intended to wipe out the Jews of Europe. Jews in the Land of Israel urgently needed to provide refuge for the millions being refused entry everywhere else. They faced resistance in Palestine, where the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin Al-Husseini, was determined to prevent the fleeing Jews from entering their homeland. He incited the local Arab population to violence, warning the British overseers of potential pan-Arab resistance against the British throughout the Middle East.
Britain had been entrusted with the mandate for Palestine after defeating the Ottomans in World War I. Though the mandate was intended to include the establishment of a Jewish national home, three-fourths of the territory was given to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, and British authorities undertook neutral supervision over the rest. The more the Arabs rioted in the 1920s and ’30s, the more the British gave way to their demands and prevented Jews from arming in self-defense. This culminated in the British White Paper of 1939, which severely restricted Jewish immigration and prevented Jews’ rescue from certain death.
The dilemma: The British also were simultaneously leading the fight against Hitler. No matter how cruel, British policy couldn’t outweigh the need to help defeat the Nazis. Faced with these opposite threats, David Ben-Gurion, head of the World Zionist Organization and de facto leader of the Jewish state in formation, declared: “We will help the British in the war as if there were no White Paper, and fight the White Paper as if there were no war.”
The two-pronged struggle allowed for no triangulation, no choice of the lesser evil. The mufti’s alliance with Hitler made it all the more urgent to help end the war, even as British appeasement of the Arabs made it more urgent to end the British occupation. Ben-Gurion’s strategy saw thousands of Palestinian Jews fighting on the Allied side and as many defying British rule to create the state of Israel.
This double imperative I offer my fellow Americans who confront Donald Trump’s bid for the Republican nomination. The need to support the former president and to defend his accomplishments dare not grant him the party’s endorsement, while the need to defeat him in the primaries must not empower those who sabotaged his presidency and remain primed to destroy him.
Without question, great wrongs were committed against the 45th president, who was baited and thwarted from the moment he took office. That abuse was directed no less against the voters who elected him to keep America resilient.
We will never know what more Mr. Trump might have accomplished had his opponents not conspired to prevent him from governing. The near-totalitarian media bias that kept all coverage of him negative makes his achievements all the more admirable.
In the book “The Case for Trump,” which covers only the first half of his presidency, Victor David Hanson touts “massive deregulation, stepped up energy production, tax cuts, increased border enforcement,” as well as near-record-low minority unemployment, a strong stock market and low inflation rates. In foreign affairs, the Abraham Accords are enough to secure Trump’s reputation. Of domestic successes I would single out the influence of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos in trying to keep schools open during the pandemic, promoting charter schools, and shutting down the government’s assault on due process in sexual-misconduct proceedings.
Yet in her letter of resignation dated Jan. 7, 2021, Mrs. DeVos laments the president’s role in blackening the record of those achievements. About the unconscionable behavior of the rioters the previous day, she writes, “There is no mistaking the impact your rhetoric had.” The qualities of leadership that had made Mr. Trump electable, he himself abused more damagingly than his detractors had damaged him.
Moreover, he gives no hint of correcting his poor judgment, and shows his party and its members none of the loyalty he demands of them. The legal cases against him will, one hopes, result in honest verdicts. The political case against him is more consequential.
It is now more urgent than ever to recover and restore the best of America, but also more difficult because the former president fails to embody the greatness of America that he seeks to restore. Sober Americans will therefore defend the Trump record without supporting his candidacy, and deny him re-election while defeating those who did not allow him to govern.
Ms. Wisse is a professor emerita at Harvard and author of the memoir “Free as a Jew.”
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