Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke in a solemn voice as he lauded the efforts of the peacemaker who sat before him.
“He’s forging peace, as we speak, in one country, in one region after the other,” Netanyahu said. “So I want to present to you, Mr President, the letter I sent to the Nobel Prize Committee. It’s nominating you for the Peace Prize, which is well deserved, and you should get it,” he added, rising to hand him said letter.
President Donald Trump, who had just weeks earlier launched airstrikes against Iran, was touched.
“Wow,” he said. “Coming from you in particular, this is very meaningful.”
Soon after, Trump took a moment to reflect on his quest for peace.
“The biggest bombs that we’ve ever dropped on anybody, when you think non-nuclear,” the president said of the diplomacy that earned him the nomination for the prize previously awarded to Mother Teresa and Nelson Mandela.
“I don’t want to say what it reminded me of, but if you go back a long time ago, it reminded people of a certain other event, and Harry Truman’s picture is now in the lobby,” Trump continued, comparing his efforts to the dropping of the two atomic bombs on Japan during the Second World War, an event that killed more than 120,000 civilians.
The ironies abound.
President Trump received a nomination for the Peace Prize weeks after launching military strikes against a country that his intelligence agencies had said was not building a nuclear weapon. He launched that action after single-handedly destroying a diplomatic deal that his predecessor, Barack Obama, had negotiated, and which was working.
He received it from a man who, had he delivered the nominating letter to the Nobel Committee in Norway by hand, would have been at risk of arrest under its obligation as a signatory to obey a warrant issued by the International Criminal Court.
From a man who is currently presiding over a war that has killed more than 55,000 people, more than half of them women and children, that has made Gaza the place with the highest number of child amputees per capita in the world, and where the blockade of vital aid has pushed much of the population to the brink of famine.
In short, being nominated for a peace prize by Benjamin Netanyahu is akin to being nominated for a ‘not breaking the law’ prize by fictional mob boss Tony Soprano.
But Netanyahu’s nomination has less to do with world peace and more to do with the softening up of Trump ahead of crunch talks this week.
This visit was supposed to be a victory lap for the Israeli prime minister after the realization of a decades-long-held wish to bomb Iran’s nuclear program. He achieved it with Trump’s help and he will likely need it again in the near future to ensure it does not rebuild.
