YouTube
Jeffrey Yass, in a recent corporate video
In the past few days, we’ve learned that Donald Trump’s reversal on whether TikTok should be barred from the U.S. is mainly a payback to Trump mega-donor Jeff Yass, who owns 15 percent of TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance. But it gets so much worse.
Now it turns out that Yass’s money helped Trump reap a multibillion-dollar windfall when his social media company went public. Yass’s company has been the biggest institutional shareholder of the shell company that has merged with Trump’s Truth Social.
What else do we need in this corrupt dance? How about the destruction of what’s left of Israel’s democracy.
Yass is also a major donor to an Israeli think tank and strategy group, called the Kohelet Forum, that has been a prime architect of Netanyahu’s attempt at one-man rule, the weakening of Israel’s democracy, and the elimination of what remains of the rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel.
Kohelet’s founder helped draft Israel’s Basic Law on the Nation-State, which took effect in 2018. This law established Jewish people as having the sole right to self-determination, and downgraded Arabic as one of Israel’s official languages. Kohelet also drafted the law that gives the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, the power to override Supreme Court decisions, and grants the government total control over judicial appointments. This is a core part of Netanyahu’s strategy for clinging to power by evading prosecution.
One of Kohelet’s close allies is the Shiloh Policy Forum, which promotes illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank and far-right Israeli politicians who support that policy.
In the U.S., Eugene Kontorovich, head of Kohelet’s international law department and director of the Center for the Middle East and International Law at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, has been instrumental in the movement to brand all criticisms of Israeli policy as antisemitic.
If we connect these dots, they display Trump’s effort to cash in by reversing his stance on China and U.S. national security, and the blowback between billionaire efforts to destroy democracy in Israel and similar moves to destroy it in the U.S. There is a dance between would-be dictators of similar mind (Trump and Netanyahu) and the oligarch who connects them.
You might think that someone who professes to care about antisemitism would think twice about providing so much ammunition. But Yass’s cynicism knows no bounds, matched only by that of Trump and Netanyahu.
The fates of democracy in the U.S. and in Israel are indeed linked. But not in the way the propagandists for AIPAC and Netanyahu would have us believe.
