the USA, Israel, and national interest

Throwing up the Mordy signal on this one, but anyone else can answer:

How can Trump be "good for Israel" in a realpolitik way while also realigning with Russia? Russia is aligned with supposed enemies of Israel -- Iran and Syria. Is this insignificant?

I don't think Putin sees it as a contradiction to be a patron to Syria/Iran and also on strong terms with Israel. Remember during the Cold War the US fostered alliances/client relationships with Israel in addition to other countries that were antagonistic to Israel - like Egypt before 1978, the gulf states like Saudi Arabia until today, etc. I think Israel prefers having the Syria war continue so that Iran and Hezbollah continue to bleed (and it has already basically ceded any Syrian claims to the Golan practically), so in that sense Putin's interests - ending the war and returning sovereignty to Assad - is not perfectly aligned with Israel. But otoh Putin has given Israel the go-ahead to bomb shipments to Hezbollah passing through Syria and so I don't know that Putin actually cares about Iran's proxy war against Israel and would probably prefer all the countries get along.

Trump is "good" for Israel in a very limited sense - he'll presumably have no interest in pushing a 2SS, or going along with UN resolutions. He already gave the go-ahead for Israeli to annex the settlements if they want, and even if he wasn't gung ho about the settlements it's hard to imagine him taking any active interest in the whole thing. So if you're pro annexing the WB, I guess you would see Trump as good for Israel. Presumably it'll lower some of the BDS heat especially in the US, but also likely it'll take the attention off Israel since POTUS Trump is such a more troubling figure. If you think annexation is a bad idea (maybe because of demographic concerns, or whatever reason you might think the 2SS is still the best solution), Trump will not be great for Israel.

Essentially you've got to think that neither Putin nor Trump really gaf about the Palestinian issue. How you feel about it yourself probably determines how good or bad you think that is for Israel.

I also wouldn't be surprised if Steve Bannon wants to long-term reduce the influence of the Israel lobby in the US.

Does that make sense? Like the bottom line is that even if Putin is snuggling up to Iran, and the US is now going to have a more favorable relationship with Russia, that doesn't mean that either Russia or the US suddenly care about the same things that Iran cares about. From a realpolitik perspective Israel doesn't want the war in Syria to end since that'll give Iran and Hezbollah enough breathing room to start fucking w/ Israel again, but even there they might stand to gain more from having tighter connection to Russia (and therefore some potential leverage on Iran/etc). Even before Trump's election Bibi has been sidling up to Putin - so you could reframe the question as "How can Israel gain from a closer relationship to Russia despite Russia's ties to Iran/Syria" but that question kinda answers itself I think?

I don't get the impression that the Israel lobby is on the Trump administration's radar at all. Isn't Bannon buddies w/ like Horowitz and Geller and Caroline Glick, etc? He seems like the kind of white supremacist that is pro-Israel (maybe bc he sees it as a model of an ethnosupremecist State he'd like to establish in the US). Here's a comment I wrote on fb this week explaining this particular peculiar phenomenon to a friend:

Maybe. There's a strain of white supremacism that chides liberal Western Judaism (generally metonymically represented by the Frankfurt School) for trying to dominate gentiles by diluting the white gene pool through massive migration. This strain 'calls out' Zionism as hypocrisy because Jews support an ethnosupremecist State when it is Jewish but not when it is white. It is not entirely incompatible for them to say (and this is a rarer ideology but one I have definitely seen expressed) that Jews should live in Israel and whites should live in the US and that's the best for each. (iirc this was not an entirely unknown ideological current in pre-Final Solution Nazism.) In that case they might even respect Bibi for so strongly supporting the needs of his ethnic community while disdaining American Jews for undermining their own.

Yes, that does make sense. xp