At a windy rally in Schnecksville, Pennsylvania, earlier this month, Donald Trump began his hour-long address by sending prayers and support to Israel as it withstood Iran’s aerial assault.
“They’re under attack right now,” the former president and presumptive Republican nominee said. “That’s because we show great weakness.”
Trump, who often describes himself as the “best friend that Israel has ever had”, blamed Tehran’s bombardment – and the entire bloody crisis – on Joe Biden, claiming it “would not have happened” if he had been president.
Yet moments later, he appeared to agree with his supporters when they began chanting “Genocide Joe” – a term more commonly invoked by activists protesting against Biden’s abiding support for Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza, which has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians and pushed the territory to the brink of famine.
“They’re not wrong,” the former president said, as he stepped away from the lectern and let them chant. (His campaign did not respond to a request for clarification on the remark.)
More than six months into the ruinous Middle East conflict, amid fears of a wider regional war, Trump has offered plenty of criticism – of Biden, his successor and all-but-certain rival for the White House, and of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister – but few details on what he might have done differently.
Trump’s relative silence leaves major questions about how he would act if he were to inherit the conflict in January.
His campaign did not directly respond to a list of policy questions, among them whether he supports a ceasefire, how he would handle hostage negotiations, whether there are any circumstances under which he would consider conditioning aid to Israel and whether he supports a two-state solution, an idea some of his former advisers categorically reject.
Yet in his muddled commentary, observers see the same motivations that shaped his first-term foreign policy: personal grievance and political opportunism, as discontent with Biden’s management of the conflict threatens to hurt the president’s re-election bid.
Trump v Netanyahu
When Trump was president, he forged a close, mutually beneficial relationship with Netanyahu. But his feelings for the prime minister reportedly soured after Netanyahu congratulated Biden on his 2020 election victory, which Trump baselessly claims to have won.
Days after the deadly Hamas attack on 7 October, Trump criticized Netanyahu and Israeli intelligence for failing to anticipate and stop the invasion. He also referred to Hezbollah, the powerful Iran-backed militant group in Lebanon that Israel has been clashing with on its northern border, as “very smart”.
The former president’s rebuke of Netanyahu, as his country reeled from what the prime minister said was the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust, drew unusually sharp denunciations from fellow Republicans, including many of his challengers for the party’s presidential nomination.
Trump quickly retreated, writing on his social media platform that he stood with Netanyahu and Israel. Hours later, he posted again, declaring in a video: “I kept Israel safe, remember that. I kept Israel safe. Nobody else will, nobody else can.”
Since then, as public perceptions of the war shift amid a soaring Palestinian death toll and a deepening humanitarian crisis, Trump has surprised some of his allies on the right by exhorting Israel to “finish up your war”.
“Israel has to be very careful, because you’re losing a lot of the world, you’re losing a lot of support,” Trump said in a March interview with the conservative Israeli publication Israel Hayom. “You have to finish up, you have to get the job done. And you have to get on to peace.”
Asked in a later interview with the conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt whether his comments had been misconstrued, Trump again implored Israel to “get it over with”, warning that the country was “absolutely losing the PR war”. Biden has similarly expressed concern that Israel’s tactics in Gaza are hurting its international standing.
“Let’s get back to peace and stop killing people,” Trump told Hewitt.
Calling for peace, but little regard for Palestinians
Trump has not outlined how he believes peace might be achieved or what he envisions for the region after the conflict ends. When pressed on his position, Trump mostly repeats his claim that the war wouldn’t have happened if he were in power.
“I just think Trump is delusional on this point,” John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, said in a recent appearance on CNN. “It’s a point that nobody can refute or confirm one way or the other. He doesn’t have any idea what to do in the Middle East in this situation.”
Playing critic, rather than prospective commander-in-chief, has seemingly worked in Trump’s favor: voters gave him far better marks than Biden on his handling of foreign conflicts as president, according to an April New York Times and Siena College survey.
And by mostly remaining on the sidelines, some analysts say, he is better positioned to exploit the deep division in the Democratic coalition over Biden’s handling of the Israel-Gaza war, one of the president’s biggest perceived vulnerabilities before the election.
Aaron David Miller, who served for two decades as a state department analyst, negotiator and adviser on Middle East issues for both Democratic and Republican administrations, said a future Trump administration was unlikely to show much sympathy to the Palestinian cause.
“He could care less, frankly, about how the Israelis are treating the Palestinians,” said Miller, now a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
“Forget any kind of rehabilitation or reconstruction for Gaza,” he added, unless rebuilding the territory was a condition for achieving “some historic something” in the region, such as a normalization of ties between Israeli and Saudi Arabia.
In statements since the war began, Trump has promised, if elected, to cut off all US aid to Palestinians and urged other nations to follow suit if he returns to the Oval Office.
The former president also pledged to bar refugees from Gaza under an expansion of his first-term travel ban on Muslim-majority countries; expel immigrants who sympathize with Hamas; revoke the visas of foreign students deemed “anti-American” or “antisemitic”; and impose “strong ideological screening” to keep out foreign nationals who “want to abolish Israel”.
Trump’s pitch to Jewish voters
In a statement, Trump’s campaign accused Biden and Democrats of supporting Israel’s enemies and said leftwing criticism of Netanyahu’s government was pushing American Jews into the former president’s camp.
“Jewish Americans are realizing that the Democrat party has turned into a full-blown anti-Israel, antisemitic, pro-terrorist cabal, and that’s why more and more Jewish Americans are supporting President Trump,” said a campaign spokesperson, Karoline Leavitt.
But Trump’s outreach to Jewish voters, a wide majority of whom tend to support Democrats, has faced accusations of antisemitism.
Earlier this month, Trump told reporters in Georgia that “any Jewish person that votes for a Democrat or votes for Biden should have their head examined”. In a March interview with his former aide Sebastian Gorka, Trump claimed that any Jewish American who backs the Democrats “hates their religion” and “everything about Israel”.
The comments, which echoed previous statements he has made, were widely condemned for invoking an antisemitic trope that Jewish citizens hold “dual loyalty” to both the US and Israel.
But Trump has also honed a sharp-edged pitch aimed at evangelical Christians, a crucial part of his base whose fierce support of Israel has helped shape Republican foreign policy.
Casting himself as the great protector of the world’s only Jewish state, Trump vowed in an October speech to “defend western civilization from the barbarians and savages and fascists that you see now trying to do harm to our beautiful Israel”.
Lessons from Trump’s presidency
Though Trump has sent mixed signals about his views of the war, his policies as president unambiguously favored Israel.
During his presidency, Trump moved the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and recognized Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, in a reversal of longstanding US policy. He also slashed funding to the UN agency supporting Palestinian refugees and closed the Palestinians’ diplomatic mission in Washington.
In 2018, he withdrew the US from the Iran nuclear deal, a move cheered by Republicans and Netanyahu. The following year, the Trump administration again broke with decades of precedent to declare that the US no longer considered Israeli settlements in the West Bank a violation of international law. The Biden administration reversed this policy in February.
Late in his presidency, Trump unveiled a Middle East “peace” plan that granted most of Israel’s long-held demands, ensuring its swift rejection by Palestinian leaders.
The former president’s biggest accomplishment in the region was the so-called Abraham accords, clinched in 2020, which normalized diplomatic relations among Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. In remarks to Jewish donors and activists, Trump claimed he had been on the verge of bringing Iran into the deal, even though he spent much of his presidency antagonizing Tehran, most notably by ordering the assassination of Qassem Soleimani in 2020.
While Israel and Iran appear to have pulled back from the brink of a spiraling regional war, tensions in the region remain high. Meanwhile, Trump has been isolated in a New York courtroom, where the former president faces 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in the first of his criminal trials.
Israel and a second Trump term
Trump has yet to provide any substantive details on how he views the role of the US in resolving the current conflict, and his campaign did not respond to questions about his postwar plans for Gaza or whether he supported a two-state solution.
But recent comments from Trump’s former ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, both of whom helped set his first-term Middle East policy, reflect Netanyahu’s rightwing, nationalist vision for the region.
Friedman recently unveiled a proposal for Israel to annex the West Bank based on the country’s biblical claims to the occupied land. In an interview last month, Trump did not say whether he supported the plan but said he planned to meet with Friedman to discuss it. (His campaign declined to say whether the meeting had taken place.)
In a February interview with the Middle East Initiative at Harvard University, Kushner, a real estate scion married to Trump’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, said Gaza’s “waterfront property” could be “very valuable”. He also suggested Israel could move civilians out of the southern Gaza city of Rafah, where more than 1.5 million displaced Palestinians are sheltering, to Israel’s Negev desert while Israeli forces “finish the job” there. Asked about fears that Palestinians who flee Gaza may not be allowed to return, he said: “I am not sure there is much left of Gaza at this point.”
At another point, Kushner described proposals to give the Palestinians their own state as a “super bad idea” that “would essentially be rewarding an act of terror”.
Miller recalled a 2017 conversation with Kushner in which Kushner outlined three key pillars of Trump’s Middle East policy that Miller believes would extend to a second term.
They were, according to Miller, to make it “impossible” for an Israeli prime minister to say no to Trump, develop “strategic partnerships” with the Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia; and to create a “whole new paradigm for how to deal with the Palestinian issue”.
If Trump returns to the White House next year, Miller expects little change in his approach: “I think that his foreign policy will continue to be chaotic, transactional and opportunistic.”
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