Trump puts on a show in the Knesset!

On October 13, speaking in the Israeli parliament, U.S. President Trump sounded less like a “Make America Great Again (MAGA)” president and more like someone proclaiming “Make Israel Great Again (MIGA).” The Israelis, for their part, took full advantage of Trump’s weakness for flattery.

Speaker of the Knesset Amir Ohana compared Trump to the Persian King Cyrus the Great — a figure with a sacred place in ancient Jewish historical narratives. According to the mythological account, Cyrus ended the Jewish exile in Babylon and allowed the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem. Ohana said, “Mr. President, you are not standing before the people of Israel as just another American president, but as someone who stands among the giants of Jewish history. To find someone comparable to you, we have to go back 2,500 years — to Cyrus the Great.” In his view, Trump could only be compared to Cyrus.

Speakers also thanked Trump for allowing Israel to expand its illegal settlements in the West Bank in 2020. Yet just a month earlier, Trump had told reporters at the White House that he would not allow Israel to annex the West Bank. Dizzy from the praise he was receiving, Trump seemed to have forgotten his own words.

Sitting in the Knesset that day was Miriam Adelson, wife of late Zionist billionaire Sheldon Adelson, who had donated hundreds of millions of dollars to Trump’s campaigns since 2016. After Sheldon’s death, Miriam carried on as a “super-donor.” Trump made sure she got an ovation, boasting that he had delivered everything the Adelsons wanted for Israel — including moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. He also added that the Adelsons’ demands were endless.

Opposition leader Yair Lapid’s speech summed up the Zionist mood perfectly. Citing the Babylonian Talmud, he said that “saving one person is like saving all of humanity.” He thanked Trump for rescuing Israeli hostages. His words, however, underlined once again how the babies, children, women, and other Palestinians in Gaza — torn apart by American bombs or dying from hunger and lack of medicine — are not seen as “human.”

Trump, who repeatedly spoke about the release of Israeli hostages, didn’t say a word about the killing of 70,000 Palestinians or the hundreds of thousands injured. The only thing that mattered was rescuing Israeli captives.

Trump pushed the shamelessness even further when he said that “Bibi,” as he calls “Genocidal Benjamin Netanyahu,” asked him for American weapons whose names he didn’t even know — and he gave them immediately. He bragged that the Israeli army “used them very well.” His statement was essentially an admission that Gaza had become a testing ground for U.S. weapons Trump himself couldn’t name.

And indeed, the Israeli army used those American weapons “very well” — raining bombs and missiles from the air, turning homes, hospitals, schools, and places of worship into rubble, and massacring unarmed civilians to show the world how “strong” it was.

About 750,000 Jewish Americans live in Israel, and some of them are among the illegal settlers in the occupied West Bank. During his speech, Netanyahu named a Jewish-American soldier wounded in Gaza and showered him with praise. Trump then jumped up from his seat to give the soldier a standing ovation — a chilling moment.

The Israeli army has also killed numerous Palestinian-American citizens in the West Bank and Gaza. Successive U.S. administrations have dragged their feet on these cases. Among the victims was Rachel Corrie, a non-Palestinian American human rights activist who was deliberately crushed to death by an Israeli military bulldozer in Gaza in 2003 while trying to prevent the demolition of a Palestinian home.

The Corrie family says that, 22 years after her death, the U.S. government has still done nothing meaningful to hold anyone accountable. Meanwhile, Trump cheers for a Jewish-American soldier wounded while fighting in the ranks of an army committing atrocities in Gaza.

Do these scenes suggest Trump is a true “peacemaker”?