Trump says little on Gaza, and nothing about what he’d do differently
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Donald Trump has offered no substantive criticisms of Mr Joe Biden’s response to the Hamas invasion and Israel’s retaliation in the Gaza Strip.
PHOTO: NYTIMES
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WASHINGTON - In the nearly five months since Hamas invaded Israel on Oct 7, igniting the most divisive foreign policy crisis of the Biden presidency, Donald Trump has said noticeably little about the subject.
He criticised Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, before quickly retreating to more standard expressions of support for the country.
And he has made blustery claims that the invasion never would have happened had he been president. But his overall approach has been laissez-faire.
“So you have a war that’s going on, and you’re probably going to have to let this play out. You’re probably going to have to let it play out, because a lot of people are dying,” Trump said in an interview with Univision a month after the attack.
His main advice to Mr Netanyahu and the Israelis, he said then, was to do a better job with “public relations,” because the Palestinians were “beating them at the public relations front.”
Trump’s hands-off approach to the bloody Middle East conflict reflects the profound anti-interventionist shift he has brought about in the Republican Party over the past eight years and has been coloured by his feelings about Mr Netanyahu, whom he may never forgive for congratulating President Joe Biden for his 2020 victory.
Trump has offered no substantive criticisms of Mr Biden’s response to the Hamas invasion and Israel’s retaliation in the Gaza Strip.
Instead, he has pinned the blame for the entire crisis on Mr Biden’s “weakness,” in the same way he often does when violence or tragedy occurs.
“You would have never had the problem that you just had, the horrible problem where Israel – Oct 7, where Israel was so horribly attacked,” the former president told a crowd in Rock Hill, South Carolina, on Feb 23, before switching to more practised attack lines against Mr Biden.
It is unimaginable that in a pre-Trump Republican Party, the standard-bearer would have had so little to say about a major terrorist attack against Israel and a broadening regional conflict in the middle of a presidential campaign.
“This is one of America’s closest allies under attack. And it’s stunning that in such circumstances, you have heard so little from Trump,” said Mr John Bolton, a former national security adviser to Trump who became a sharp critic of him and who has long been hawkish in support of Israel.
Yet people close to Trump, who leads Mr Biden in polls, feel little if any urgency for him to put out more detailed foreign policy plans – about Israel or any other matter.
In 2016, Trump gave one major speech and a number of interviews about foreign policy. But it is unclear whether he will do the same in this campaign.
He has a record in office to point to now. And when it comes to supporting Israel, his advisers see that record as unimpeachable.
“President Trump did more for Israel than any American president in history, and he took historic action in the Middle East that created unprecedented peace,” said Ms Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for his campaign.
She added, “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.”
Moreover, Trump has faced no dissent within his party over his stance on Israel and Gaza.
Trump has enthusiastically consumed news about young progressives turning against Mr Biden over Israel. And his campaign and its allies plan to exploit that division to their advantage.
One idea under discussion among Trump allies as a way to drive the Palestinian wedge deeper into the Democratic Party is to run advertisements in heavily Muslim areas of Michigan that would thank Mr Biden for “standing with Israel,” according to two people briefed on the plans who weren’t authorised to discuss them publicly.
Mr Trump allies have gleefully deployed similarly underhanded tactics to suppress the Democratic vote in his two previous campaigns.
But the latest idea is especially audacious, given that Trump’s Middle East policy as president unapologetically and lopsidedly favoured Israel against the Palestinians.
He gave Mr Netanyahu nearly everything he wanted, including moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem
Given Trump’s pro-Israel record, the Oct 7 attack would have seemed to present the opportunity to lean into his credentials by describing how he would deal with the crisis as president.
Instead, Trump’s initial instinct in the days immediately following the greatest single-day loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust was to use Israel’s national trauma to settle a personal score with Mr Netanyahu.
On Oct 11, Trump publicly attributed the Hamas invasion to Mr Netanyahu’s lack of preparation, praised the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah as “very smart,” and piled on another even more gratuitous attack: claiming Mr Netanyahu had “let us down” during the Trump presidency by declining to participate in the January 2020 strike that killed Iranian General Qassem Soleimani.
What happened next, behind the scenes, seems to have left a lasting impression on Trump.
Close Trump advisers and allies described his public castigation of Mr Netanyahu as an unintended act of political self-harm – even if many privately shared some frustrations with the Israeli leader – and privately urged him to issue a statement making clear his support for Mr Netanyahu and for Israel’s right to defend itself, according to two people with direct knowledge of the outreach who insisted on anonymity to describe it.
One of those people was Mr David Friedman, Trump’s former ambassador to Israel, according to the people with knowledge of the outreach. Mr Friedman did not respond to a message seeking comment.
Trump followed their recommendations. In the fallout from his remarks, Trump walked back his criticism, posting on social media that he stood with Mr Netanyahu and Israel.
And he proposed expanding his administration’s travel ban on predominantly Muslim nations to cover Palestinian refugees from Gaza.
As something of a makeup effort, Trump, in an Oct 28 address to the Republican Jewish Coalition, vowed unyielding support for Israel against Hamas, promising to defend the country from what he called “the barbarians and savages and fascists that you see now trying to do harm to our beautiful Israel.”
More recently, he has promised simply to “stand proudly with our friend and ally, the state of Israel,” as he told a gathering of the National Religious Broadcasters in Nashville, Tennessee, last week.
Still, the initial criticism of Mr Netanyahu aggravated concerns among a broad network of Jewish groups and others on the pro-Israel right that Trump’s personal grievances and transactional politics could make him a less reliable partner for Israel in a second term than he was in his first. NYTIMES
