Did Netanyahu’s Visit Help Trump?

So, Bennie Netanyahu gives a rock ’em, sock ’em speech to what was billed as a joint session of Congress but was more like a GOP campaign event and now he goes down to Florida to see his good buddy, Donald Trump.

To their credit, most of the Democrat(ic) members of the Senate and the House passed on the event, with several making the kinds of comments about Netanyahu which aren’t usually made publicly about foreign heads of state.

Jerry Nadler, who represents Manhattan’s West Side, a neighborhood which is probably 50 percent Jewish, said that Netanyahu was “probably the worst leader in Jewish history,” and Jewish history goes back three or four thousand years.

The fact that Netanyahu was obviously invited to make this appearance by the GOP is, in and of itself, an interesting state of affairs, because it demonstrates how much political alignments have changed both in the United States and in Israel over the past fifty years.

From the time the State of Israel appeared in 1948 until the mid-1970’s, the government was solidly in the hands of a liberal coalition led by the Labor Party, whose roots went back to the Socialist-based Zionist movement which first appeared in Western Europe in the early nineteenth century and was a reaction of secular Jews to the extreme religious orthodoxy of powerful rabbinical…