Conspiracy buffs will subscribe to the theory that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was the one who crafted US President Donald Trump’s Sept. 25 speech to the UN general Assembly. Trump announced that he would not permit a regime that threatens Israel’s annihilation to obtain nuclear weapons; he promised tighter sanctions on Iran and demanded that Iran be kicked out of Syria. He also patted himself on the back for recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and didn’t even mention Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories and the settlements it built there.
Indeed, the speech was surely a source of great pride and satisfaction for Netanyahu, who is also Israel’s foreign minister. Netanyahu played a leading role in Trump’s decision earlier this year to withdraw from the world powers’ nuclear agreement with Iran. In his May speech announcing the unilateral move, the president said he had formed his decision after seeing the material Israel had stolen from Iran’s nuclear archives. Trump’s decision to move the US Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, which had been gathering dust in Congress file folders for years, was carried out on Netanyahu’s watch, too. The two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has evaporated and the settlers are once again cheering Netanyahu for this disappearing trick.
