Rob Taub, and American TV commentator, bestselling author, and writer for Huffington Post, airs his views on the subject.
Host John Harrison suggests that President Trump's actions in deciding to move the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem might relate to the possibility that the President fears he might lose his evangelical base. Rob says that it is quite difficult to analyze with accuracy some of President Trump's actions. "There are a lot of reasons why he does what he does. It could be an appeasement of the religious right, there are big donors who are Jewish, but I would like to bring up another fact that a lot of people have not been considering, which is that Donald Trump is always saying that John Kerry was a terrible negotiator and that this is a way to say that their [the Obama team's] methodology failed. I am going to agree with him a little bit. I don't think that they had the most effective foreign policy. I disagree with a lot of what Obama wanted to do. Perhaps Trump also thought that Jerusalem has been the de facto capital of Israel for years and years and years, let's finally acknowledge it."
To the question of what the reaction of the Jewish community, which is well educated is, Rob says: "in regards to politics and Israel, I am a bit of a Zionist. I agree that whilst Jerusalem may have been the de facto capital for years, officially naming it so is going to cause a lot of tension, violence, and repercussions. However, I was going to preface this whole thing by saying that Hamas has run Gaza for about a decade, and that whole time they haven't been building schools, hospitals and things to help the people, they have been building terror tunnels and bombs. So I think that there is a real split there in the fact that I don't see the Palestinians ever striving for democracy. And Americans as a whole consistently make the same mistake when they naturally assume that other people want the same peace and democracy that we do."
Rob is uncertain as to whether or not there will be major repercussions in terms of violence as a result of this, "I see us banging a lot of drums in our country right now about everything Trump does but nothing has been as disastrous as everyone claims it will be….Yes, he is kowtowing to the religious right but he is also kowtowing to wealthy Jewish dollars and he is also trying to do something differently from how the Obama administration did things. It wasn't one particular situation of circumstance that caused Trump to act."
To the question of how much is US foreign policy being guided by wealthy lobbying groups, Rob answers: "There are certain areas of foreign policy which are not in my area of expertise, but I certainly have an opinion about them. His reaction to the Trans-Pacific Partnership has been wrong, and his America First and isolationist behavior is very extreme, so I don't see how he is kowtowing to any lobbyists there. But we have always had multinational oil corporations in the committees and we have been serving their interests for years. But Donald Trump continues to break rules and forms… So it's a different kind of politics because you don't know what he is going to say or do next."
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