Where Does Donald Trump Stand on Israel?

Reporters keep saying Trump's views on the Gaza conflict are complicated or unclear. They are not.

Photo by براء حبوش on Unsplash

For much of 2024, Donald Trump’s position on Israel has been characterized as “increasingly ambiguous” or “uncertain” or that “his criticisms are growing sharper” Just yesterday, the Washington Post reported that, “Trump has waffled publicly about whether Israel should continue its war in Gaza.” The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World finds this is framing of Trump’s statements to be both utterly baffling and completely understandable.

Let’s start with the bafflement. As president, Donald Trump was extremely hawkish in his support of Israel, bragging that he “fought for Israel like no president ever before.” It is true that Trump has been somewhat more critical of Israel’s conduct of the Gaza conflict as of late. Those criticisms, however, are primarily about the public relations of the campaign looking bad for Israel.  Trump’s comments, such as urging Israel to “get it over with,” suggest that he would prefer Israel be more ruthless and rapid in its military operations. He told the Israeli press that, “Israel has to get better with the promotional and with the public relations because right now they’re in ruin,” concluding, “they’re being hurt very badly, I think, in a public relations sense.” This is not someone with substantive objections to Israel’s actions in Gaza. Furthermore, in a spring 2024 interview with Time, Trump doubted that a two-state solution was viable.

Yesterday, reporting by the Washington Post’s Josh Dawsey, Karen DeYoung, and Marianne LeVine should put to bed any notion that Trump will not back Israel to the hilt in its Gaza war:

The private New York meeting offers new insight into his current thinking. Speaking to wealthy donors behind closed doors, Trump said that he supports Israel’s right to continue “its war on terror” and boasted of his White House policies toward Israel….

Trump’s campaign did not respond to detailed questions about The Washington Post’s reporting. “When President Trump is back in the Oval Office, Israel will once again be protected, Iran will go back to being broke, terrorists will be hunted down, and the bloodshed will end,” Karoline Leavitt, the campaign’s national press secretary, wrote in an email….

Trump took a different tone in the meeting with donors. Instead of saying it was time to wrap up the war, he said he supported Israel’s right to continue its attack on Gaza.

“But I’m one of the only people that says that now. And a lot of people don’t even know what October 7th is,” Trump said.

Trump repeatedly listed for the donors everything he believed he had done for Israel in the White House. He moved the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, bucking decades of U.S. policy. He recognized the Golan Heights, which Israel seized from Syria in 1967, as an integral part of Israel after what he said was a five-minute conversation with David Friedman, his ambassador there….

“So I did Golan Heights. You know that’s worth $2 trillion, they said, that piece, if you put it in real estate terms. But it’s worth more than that. It is,” Trump said, according to donors present.

So this seems pretty clear: Trump will back Israel’s play in Gaza. He would prefer that it look better from a PR perspective, but other than that there is neither waffling nor uncertainty.

So why has it been framed that way? There are two entirely understandable reasons. The first, as the WaPo story makes clear, is that Trump supports Israel but has less positive feelings towards Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: “[Trump] has frequently complained about Netanyahu in public — particularly after the Israeli prime minister acknowledged Biden’s victory in the 2020 election even as Trump was still fiercely challenging the results.” This means that even if Trump supports Israel substantively, he will not be effusive towards Netanyahu.

The second reason is that the political press is invested in a story in which young Americans and Arab Americans, alienated by the Biden administration’s support of Israel, decide to vote for Trump. Slate’s Aymann Ismail wrote a fantastic piece on this topic a month ago, focusing on Arab-Americans in Dearborn: “I heard many who fully believe that Donald Trump will fight for them more than Joe Biden—and plan to take that belief to the ballot box in November.”

For that to happen on a macro-level, however, these voters need to rationalize their way into voting for Trump. Any effort by the Trump campaign to suggest that there is ambiguity or uncertainty in their candidate’s approach towards Israel can make that rationalization a bit easier. But as the WaPo story notes, “Trump’s rhetoric on the subject has limited his ability to capitalize on his opponent’s problems.”

As long as Arab-Americans express their alienation with the Biden administration, the national political press will be tempted to argue that this demographic is “in play,” which incentivizes Trump to muddy the policy waters as much as possible.

Make no mistake, however: a second Donald Trump term would be likely to worsen the situation for the residents of Gaza. And anyone who tells you differently is selling you something.