Among the supplications frequently repeated by preachers from mosque pulpits is this prayer: “O God, destroy the oppressors by means of the oppressors, and bring us safely out from among them.”
It is a prayer that fosters an extraordinary degree of passivity, encourages an unnatural kind of idleness, and promotes a level of resignation rarely found in any group possessed of genuine will. Those who invoke it seem to be calling upon heaven to fight their battles for them and destroy their oppressive enemies, while they themselves do nothing, initiate nothing, and make no effort to resist the oppressors.
If we were looking for a practical example of this prayer being put into practice today, we would find none better than what many among us have been saying about the relationship that has existed between the United States and Israel since Israel’s founding, and about what they claim no longer exists between two long-standing allies.
We read and hear about what once existed between them, and about what is supposedly absent today compared with what had always been there. Inevitably, our minds are drawn back to that prayer so often repeated by preachers in Friday sermons and elsewhere, while those seated before them respond on every occasion: “Amen.”
We hear and read the meaning of that prayer in the remarks of many among us about the relationship that existed between U.S. President Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, the head of the extremist government in Tel Aviv, before they went on to declare their war against Iran at the end of last February. Then we hear and read the same meaning in our discussion of what no longer seems to exist between the two men themselves during the U.S.–Iran negotiations, culminating in the agreement announced between Washington and Tehran only hours ago and expected to be signed tomorrow.
We hear and read that Israel’s traditional relationship with the United States no longer exists; that the strength and solidity that once characterized it will not endure in the years ahead as it did in the past; and that there is no clearer proof than the fact that the Trump administration excluded Netanyahu from its negotiations with Iran and from the agreement reached with Tehran. The Israeli prime minister himself stated after the agreement was announced that he did not know what it contained.
We hear all this and read about it, yet we can scarcely accept it. Our minds resist it, and our reason does not digest it. More importantly, what we hear and read on this subject automatically takes us back to that very prayer. It leads us to see that the Arabs, who ought to confront Israeli arrogance themselves, are not doing what must be done to meet that challenge. Instead, they find in signs of a deteriorating relationship between Trump and Netanyahu something that compensates for their own failure to do what they themselves ought to be doing.
It is as though the American president, by excluding the Israeli prime minister from the negotiations with Iran and then from the process of reaching an agreement, were fighting our battle, waging war on our front, and championing the cause of Arabs, Muslims, and Palestinians.
Or as though the relationship between the United States and Israel were simply a relationship between Trump and Netanyahu alone, such that once the two men depart the political stage, the relationship between the two countries would remain as cool as it appears today, and the reservoir of goodwill accumulated between Washington and Tel Aviv over the years would simply disappear.
To frame the relationship in this way is neither correct nor accurate. It amounts to little more than wishful thinking. Confronting the realities on the ground is an entirely different matter. The relationship cannot be reduced to the mood of a president in the White House who will eventually leave office when his term ends, nor to the preferences of a prime minister in Tel Aviv whose popularity—built over many years through political maneuvering—has steadily eroded, leaving him exposed before voters whom he repeatedly persuaded to return him to office and whom he repeatedly deceived through every manner of tactic and political trick.
The relationship between Washington and Tel Aviv is governed by something else entirely: the strength or weakness of Jewish lobbying groups both inside and outside the United States. It has little to do with the presence or departure of a president such as Trump. The relationship may experience periods of tension or coolness, as it has during the negotiations with Iran and the announcement of an agreement with it. But that coolness exists between a Trump administration and a government headed by Netanyahu. Once the two men leave their positions—and one day they inevitably will—the relationship will return to the foundations upon which it has rested since its inception.
Trump himself felt betrayed by the Jewish vote in the 2020 race for the White House, when a majority of Jewish voters chose to support his rival, Joe Biden. This happened despite the magnitude of what Trump had done for Israel during his first term. Yet he returned in his second presidency to offer Israel even more than he had in his first—were it not for this passing summer cloud between him and Netanyahu, at least as it appears to observers watching from afar.
This cloud will pass. And if it lingers, it will not outlast the departure of one or both men from office. Then those who have been celebrating the chill in their relationship will be disappointed, as though that chill were the prelude to the oppressors destroying one another, leaving the celebrants to emerge safely from among them.
