Further comfort comes from the fact that three days ago, General McMaster fired Ezra Cohen-Watnick, an enigmatic thirtyish intelligence aide who was vehemently opposed to the Iran deal, leading to calls to get rid of McMaster. Like Tillerson, McMaster is plainly a realist. And he is thought to have job security because his predecessor, General Mike Flynn, lasted barely three weeks and went out with a splash. The Atlantic says McMaster is cleaning house at the NSC; two weeks ago he got rid of an ideologue who spread anti-Muslim conspiracies.

Supporters of Israel are upset by the personnel changes. The Israeli-American hothead Caroline Glick writes at her Facebook page that McMaster is "deeply hostile" to Israel as an occupying power.

The Israel angle on McMaster's purge of Trump loyalists from the National Security Council is that all of these people are pro-Israel and oppose the Iran nuclear deal, positions that Trump holds.

McMaster in contrast is deeply hostile to Israel and to Trump. According to senior officials aware of his behavior, he constantly refers to Israel as the occupying power and insists falsely and constantly that a country named Palestine existed where Israel is located until 1948 when it was destroyed by the Jews.

McMaster "has chosen to eliminate the pro-Israel voices at the National Security Council," according to Jordan Schachtel at the Conservative Review, who cited interviews with White House officials who are trying to undermine the general:

McMaster not only shuns Israel, he is also historically challenged on Arab-Israeli affairs, according to the sources.

"McMaster constantly refers to the existence of a Palestinian state before 1947," a senior West Wing official tells CR (there was never an independent Palestinian state), adding that McMaster describes Israel as an "illegitimate," "occupying power."

The NSC chief expressed great reluctance to work with Israel on counterterror efforts, as he shut down a joint U.S.-Israel project to counter the terrorist group Hezbollah's efforts to expand Iran's worldwide influence.

One of the main indictments of McMaster by neoconservatives (right-wing Israel supporters who favor regime change) is that he restrained the president on his tour of occupied territories in May (as Allison Deger reported at the time). In this White House briefing, McMaster refused to say that the western wall in occupied East Jerusalem is part of Israel.

Caroline Glick goes further about McMaster's orchestrations, in her screed calling on Trump to fire McMaster:

Many of you will remember that a few days before Trump's visit to Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his advisers were blindsided when the Americans suddenly told them that no Israeli official was allowed to accompany Trump to the Western Wall.

What hasn't been reported is that it was McMaster who pressured Trump to agree not to let Netanyahu accompany him to the Western Wall. At the time, I and other reporters were led to believe that this was the decision of rogue anti-Israel officers at the US consulate in Jerusalem. But it wasn't. It was McMaster...

McMaster disagrees and actively undermines Trump's agenda on just about every salient issue on his agenda. He fires all of Trump's loyalists and replaces them with Trump's opponents, like Kris Bauman, an Israel hater and Hamas supporter who McMaster hired to work on the Israel-Palestinian desk. He allows anti-Israel, pro-Muslim Brotherhood, pro-Iran Obama people like Robert Malley to walk around the NSC and tell people what to do and think.

Glick says that McMaster has left in place analysts loyal to Obamaites Ben Rhodes and Valerie Jarrett. She worries that Trump has gone wobbly on Israel.

If McMaster isn't fired after all that he has done and all that he will do, we're all going to have to reconsider Trump's foreign policy. Because if after everything he has done, and everything that he will certainly do to undermine Trump's stated foreign policy agenda, it will no longer be possible to believe that exiting the nuclear deal or supporting the US alliance with Israel and standing with US allies against US foes - not to mention draining Washington's cesspool - are Trump's policies. How can they be when Trump stands with a man who opposes all of them and proves his opposition by among other things, firing Trump's advisers who share Trump's agenda?

Rosie Gray reported in June that Cohen-Watnick was the man McMaster could not fire. So it turns out that is not the case. And what a good sign that people with this sort of thinking are being purged from policy-making positions: Cohen-Watnick "is viewed as an Iran hawk and has been characterized, for instance, as a main proponent of expanding U.S. efforts against Iran-backed militias in Syria." He was a pro-Iraq-war hawk as an undergraduate, with ties to the Islamophobe David Horowitz.

Cohen-Watnick was involved in an on-campus Terrorism Awareness Week connected to the controversial conservative writer David Horowitz's "Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week" events.

"We need people to be passionate about the problem of terrorism," he's quoted as saying in a Daily Pennsylvanian article about the event, advocating more courses devoted to the subject.

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According to the Washington Post, Trump's advisers "were deeply divided on whether" Trump "should risk jetting to Alabama to prop up" Strange. But GOP establishment forces reportedly waged "an intense behind-the-scenes campaign to convince Trump that he could carry Strange across the finish line with an appearance in Alabama."

Though White House Chief of Staff John Kelly was reportedly hesitant about sending Trump to Alabama to potentially waste his political capital, establishment Senate Republicans were "unwilling to let the president turn his attention elsewhere" because they worried that a Strange defeat "could prompt some GOP senators to retire to avoid facing the wrath of anti-establishment voters and the likes of Bannon's Breitbart News," according to the Post's Bob Costa.

He points out that Strange's establishment consultant Jeff Roe "fed regular updates to Jared Kushner" while establishment consultant Ward Baker, who advises a pro-McConnell super PAC that has reportedly "poured more than $8 million into Alabama to support Strange," updated Trump and Pence. Pence loyalist Kellyanne Conway reportedly "impressed upon Trump how much power his visit could have in Alabama and reminded him that all five of the candidates he backed in special elections this year won." And establishment Republican Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN), who just recently openly questioned Trump's fitness to be president that in turn got him plenty of plaudits from the legacy press and vicious Never Trumpers, also begged Trump to campaign for Strange.