Trump says little about Gaza, and nothing about what he would do differently
In the nearly five months since Hamas terrorists invaded Israel on October 7, triggering the most divisive foreign policy crisis of the Biden presidency, Donald J. Trump has said remarkably little on the subject.
He criticized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel before quickly retreating to more standard expressions of support for the country. And he has blatantly claimed that the invasion would never have happened if he had been president. But his overall approach was laissez-faire.
“So there’s a war going on, and you’re probably going to have to let it play out. You’re probably going to have to let it happen because a lot of people are dying,” Trump said in a speech interview with Univision a month after the attack. His main advice to Mr. Netanyahu and the Israelis, he said at the time, was to do a better job at “public relations,” because the Palestinians “beat them at public relations.”
Trump’s hands-off approach to the bloody conflict in the Middle East reflects the profound anti-interventionist shift he has brought about in the Republican Party over the past eight years and is colored by his feelings about Mr Netanyahu, who he may never forgive for congratulating President Biden on his 2020 victory.
Mr. Trump has not made any substantive criticism of Mr. Biden’s response to the Hamas invasion and Israel’s retaliation in Gaza. Instead, he has placed the blame for the entire crisis on Mr. Biden’s “weakness,” as he often does when there is violence or tragedy.
“You would never have had the problem you just had, the terrible problem where Israel was so terribly attacked on October 7,” the former president told a crowd in Rock Hill, S.C., on Feb. 23 before switching. to more practiced lines of attack against Mr. Biden.
It is unimaginable that in a pre-Trump Republican Party, the standard-bearer would have had so little say in a major terrorist attack on Israel and a widening regional conflict in the middle of a presidential campaign.
“This is one of America’s closest allies under attack. And it’s mind-boggling that you’ve heard so little from Trump in such circumstances,” said John R. Bolton, a former national security adviser to Mr. Trump who became a sharp critic of his and who has long been aggressive in his support of Israel.
Yet people close to Mr. Trump, who is leading Mr. Biden in the polls, feel little or no urgency for him to put forward more detailed foreign policy plans — on Israel or any other issue.
In 2016, Mr. Trump gave one major speech and a number of foreign policy interviews. But it is unclear whether he will do the same in this campaign. He has a track record that he can now point to. And when it comes to supporting Israel, his advisers see that record as unquestionable.
“President Trump has done more for Israel than any American president in history, taking historic action in the Middle East that led to unprecedented peace,” said Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for his campaign. She added: “When President Trump is back in the Oval Office, Israel will be protected again, Iran will be bankrupt again, terrorists will be hunted and the bloodshed will end.”
Moreover, Mr. Trump has faced no disagreements within his party over his position on Israel and Gaza.
In contrast, the Democratic Party is tearing itself apart over the conflict between Israel and Hamas. Biden faced a protest vote during the Michigan primaries on Tuesday aimed at pressuring him to change his approach to the conflict. And a December New York Times/Siena College poll showed widespread disapproval among voters of his handling of the conflict. Among voters between the ages of 18 and 29 — a demographic crucial to Democrats’ electoral success in recent years — nearly three-quarters of voters disliked Biden’s handling of the war in Gaza.
Mr. Trump has enthusiastically consumed news about young progressives turning against Mr. Biden over Israel. And his campaign and his allies plan to exploit those divisions to their advantage.
One idea being discussed among Trump allies as a way to drive the Palestinian wedge deeper into the Democratic Party is running ads in heavily Muslim areas of Michigan thanking Mr. Biden for “supporting Israel,” according to two people briefed on the plans who were not authorized to discuss them publicly.
Trump allies have done so cheerfully deployed similar underhanded tactics to suppress the Democratic vote in his two previous campaigns. But the latest idea is especially bold given that Trump’s Middle East policy as president unapologetically and lopsidedly favored Israel over the Palestinians. He gave Mr. Netanyahu almost everything he wanted, including moving the American embassy to Jerusalem and recognizing Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, reversing decades of American foreign policy and antagonizing the United Nations, while he lashed the Palestinians with aid cuts and diplomatic punishment. mediation agreements between Israel and four Arab states.
Given Trump’s pro-Israel record, the Oct. 7 attack would have seemed like an opportunity to lean on his credentials in describing how he would handle the crisis as president.
Other candidates have taken advantage of such moments. Richard Fontaine, foreign policy adviser to Senator John McCain, the 2008 Republican presidential candidate, recalled how McCain responded that summer when Russian troops entered Georgia — an international land invasion unlike anything Europe had seen in decades.
Mr. McCain presented a list of aggressive actions the United States should take to punish the Russians, telling a crowd in Pennsylvania that he had assured Georgia’s leader “that I know I speak for every American when I told him said: today we are all Georgians.”
Today’s Republican Party has come a long way from the “we’re all Georgians” era. But there is still a strong attraction to Israel, especially among evangelicals.
Michael Allen, a former national security aide to former President George W. Bush, said a pre-Trump Republican candidate might have been able to highlight what he would have done differently than the sitting president to support and supply Israel, and continued by saying: saying that the dominant, malign influence in the region is Iran, and we cannot move forward without tackling them effectively.”
Instead, Mr. Trump’s initial instinct in the days immediately following the greatest loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust in a single day was to use Israel’s national trauma to settle a personal score with Mr. Netanyahu.
On October 11, Mr. Trump publicly attributed Hamas’s invasion to Mr. Netanyahu’s lack of preparation, praised the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah as “very smart,” and launched an even more unnecessary attack: claiming that Mr. Netanyahu had “let us down” during Trump’s presidency by refusing to participate in the January 2020 strike that killed Iranian General Qassim Suleimani.
What happened behind the scenes next appears to have left a lasting impression on Trump. Close Trump advisers and allies described his public castigation of Mr. Netanyahu as an unintentional act of political self-harm — even as many privately shared some frustrations with the Israeli leader — and privately urged him to issue a statement expressing his made clear support for Mr Netanyahu. Netanyahu and for Israel’s right to defend itself, according to two people with direct knowledge of the scope, who insisted on anonymity to describe it.
One of those people was David Friedman, Trump’s former ambassador to Israel, according to the people with knowledge of the scope. Mr. Friedman did not respond to a message seeking comment.
Mr. Trump followed their recommendations. In the fallout from his comments, Mr. Trump walked back his criticism: post on social media that he stood with Netanyahu and Israel. And he proposed expanding his government’s travel ban on predominantly Muslim countries to include Palestinian refugees from Gaza.
In something of a makeup effort, Mr. Trump vowed unyielding support for Israel against Hamas in an Oct. 28 speech to the Republican Jewish Coalition, pledging to defend the country against what he called “the barbarians, savages and fascists that you see.” . are now trying to harm our beautiful Israel.”
More recently, he has pledged to simply “stand proudly with our friend and ally, the State of Israel,” as he told a meeting of the National Religious Broadcasters in Nashville last week.
Yet the initial criticism of Mr. Netanyahu exacerbated concerns among a broad network of Jewish groups and others on the pro-Israel right that Mr. Trump’s personal grievances and transactional politics would make him a less reliable partner for Israel in a second term could make than he. was in his first.
The concern is that he will let his hostility toward Netanyahu color his approach to the relationship, and that he will continue to curry favor with anti-Semites like rapper Kanye West or white supremacist Nick Fuentes, whom he hosted on Mar-a – Lago end of 2022.
Those Trump allies are working quietly to ensure that Mr. Trump feels he has incentives to support Israel if he is elected.
Mr Bolton counts himself among the ranks of those involved.
“Anyone who thinks he will be as pro-Israel as he was in his first term could be in for a surprise,” Mr. Bolton said. “Like everything else for Donald Trump, he saw support for Israel as a political asset for him. And if he ever saw it as not a political asset, the support would disappear.”