Sunday Reads: Is Israel’s bipartisan support at risk?, Le Pen against yarmulkes, the Republican challenge

US

William Kristol writes about the Republican challenge in the age of Trump:

This imposes on the Republican party a peculiar obligation: to guide him when possible, to check him when advisable, to rebuke and oppose him when necessary. And, of course, to support him when he does the right thing, as in the nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. But support of a president of one’s own party is, as it were, natural. It’s opposition that will be difficult.

David Makovsky takes a look at the issues that will be discussed at the Trump-Netanyahu meeting:

To be sure, neither leader is likely to put forward any concrete agreements on such issues during this initial meeting. Rather, their wide-ranging discussion of key topics will probably be foundational, setting the basis for which decisions will need to be made in the months ahead.

Israel

Ben Dror Yemini believes Israel is risking its bipartisan support by aligning with the Trump administration:

I was at the protests against him last week. I spoke to countless pro-Israel Jewish activists. There is one conclusion: Israel is playing with fire. In the past, Israel received bipartisan support. The Democrats have not turned into Israel haters. But only a blind person can’t feel the change. This isn’t predetermined destiny. It can be stopped. But I’m not certain that the current government is capable of doing what is best for Israel. It is enthusiastic over the illusion of an alliance with the new administration. This is dangerous.

David Horowitz gives his perspective on the same issue:

If Netanyahu places Israel fawningly and uncritically in Trump’s corner, he will risk alienating Israel from subsequent American leaderships. He will have deeply undermined US bipartisan support for Israel on a scale that dwarfs the impact of his Obama-challenging, anti-Iran deal speech to Congress in March 2015. He will also, not incidentally, deepen the alienation from Israel of a sizable chunk of America’s Jewish community.

And when the American political pendulum swings again, as swing it surely will, the consequences for American-Israeli ties will be devastating. To use the simple word that Netanyahu most shrinks from, the one he rightly fears the most, Israel will be weakened.

Middle East

Michael Weiss doesn’t think Trump will be able to split between Russia and Iran:

The central contradiction in Donald Trump’s foreign policy, so far as a policy can be divined, has been reconciling his love and hatred for two American enemies. The love, of course, is for Vladimir Putin; a “killer,” sure, but then again, who isn’t? His hatred is for the Islamic Republic of Iran, which was quite rightly described by Defense Secretary James Mattis the other day as the “the single biggest state sponsor of terrorism in the world,” albeit one still enjoying close Russian air and tactical support and intelligence-sharing in Syria, as well as a healthy and growing arms trade with Moscow.

Karim Sadjadpour imagines how Trump’s impatience could make the US stumble upon a war with Iran:

Yet given Trump’s ambitious inaugural promise to “eradicate radical Islamic terrorism completely from the face of the Earth,” a policy whose success is measured in years if not decades will appear weak and inadequate. This lack of strategic patience is precisely why the prospects for conflict with Iran are greater than they’ve ever been.

Jewish World

Yair Rosenberg explains Marine Le Pen’s demand to ban yarmulkes and dual French-Israeli citizenship:

Beyond anti-Jewish prejudice, there is another force at work here: Islamophobia. The desire to marginalize Muslims is implicit in all of the above Le Pen policies: bans on dual citizenship are meant to impact Muslim immigrants, while bans on religious attire are meant to suppress the expression of Islam. But in order to deflect charges of bigotry, the National Front needed to implicate at least one other religious group so they could argue that they were not simply targeting Muslims for discrimination. Thus, Jews became collateral damage in the far-right’s anti-Muslim dragnet.

Heather Gilligan writes about the curious story of Jewish refugee professors who found their homes at black Universities in the 40s:

When Jewish refugee Ernst Borinski fled Nazi Germany, he found a new home in very strange place: Jackson, Mississippi. The South was openly a racial hierarchy when he arrived in the 1940s, and Jews were not considered white. Yet Borinski was just one of about 50 Jewish intellectuals who fled the Holocaust and settled in the deep South to teach at historically black universities.