Trump renounces two-state solution, fudges on anti-Semitism

This says all you need to know. In his first press conference with Benjamin Netanyahu during the Israeli prime minister's visit to the White House Feb. 15, President Trump explicitly said he is not committed to a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “I’m looking at two-state and one-state, and I like the one that both parties like,” Trump said, eliciting open chuckles from Netanyahu. "I can live with either one." Referring to Netanyahu by his nickname, he added: "I thought for a while that the two-state looked like it may be the easier of the two, but honestly if Bibi, if Israel and the Palestinians are happy, I'm happy with the one they like the best." As Ma'an News notes, this is a radical departure from the long-held US position, and it comes a day after similar comments from a White House official. The official was unnamed, but the comment that the White house is "not going to dictate what the terms of peace will be" was widely reported—e.g. by JTA and The Hill.

Trump did tell Netanyahu: "As far as settlements, I'd like to see you to hold back on settlements for a little bit." But this was posed as a temporary move pending a deal—which Trump of course said "might be a bigger and better deal than people in this room might understand." 

Of course this follows similar noises from Israeli officialdom about how "the era of the two-state solution has ended." The "bigger and better deal" might be code for the annexationist agenda of the Netanyahu government. 

We are not attached to a two-state solution. Those who advocate a single, secular, democratic state in historic Palestine also reject the two-state solution. But activist scholar Sarah Schulman draws the critical distinction between a future single state "where everyone has equal citizenship rights regardless of race or religion," and the single state sought by Israel's annexationists—"a Jewish supremacy system where Palestinian people are subordinated."

And here's the best part. All too tellingly, when Trump was questioned by and Israeli reporter at the press conference about the concerns of Jewish constituents about racists and anti-Semites in his administration, Trump first responded (of course) by bragging in unseemly manner about "the victory that we had... 306 Electoral College votes, we were not supposed to crack 220, you know that, right?" Et cetera.

When he finally got around to, um, answering the question, it was in completley equivocal terms—starting out with kneejerk tough-on-crime boast and only actually mentioning racism as an item on a list of ill-defined "bad things"—and not mentioning anti-Semitism at all: "I will say that we are going to have peace in this country. We are going to stop crime in this country. We are going to do everything within our power to stop long simmering racism and every other thing that's going on. There's a lot of bad things that have been taking place over a long period of time." (See transcript.)

Basically, a condescending, lukewarm and evasive psuedo-answer.

So we must ask again: How much overt Nazism will conservative Jews and Zionists be able to stomach in exchange for an aggressively pro-Israel position?