US Republican candidate Christie says Trump ducked Middle East progress and fuelled bigotry

JERUSALEM - Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie said former US president Donald Trump’s rhetoric of intolerance had fuelled the surge of bigotry confronting Jews and Muslims since Hamas’s Oct 7 attack.

He said Trump’s lopsided adherence to the wishes of Israel’s right-wing government, while widely praised in Republican circles, secured only the “low-hanging fruit” of Middle Eastern diplomacy during his presidency.

Mr Christie is challenging Trump for the 2024 US Republican presidential nomination.

He argued that Trump’s lack of “intellectual curiosity” and foreign policy ambition had led his administration to give up the pursuit of a more elusive peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

Mr Christie delivered a scathing assessment of Trump’s Middle East policy in an interview as he travelled to Israel on Sunday.

He toured a kibbutz, Kfar Azza, near Gaza, where 58 residents were killed by Hamas gunmen in October.

Mr Christie watched raw footage of the attacks at a military base near Tel Aviv, commiserated with survivors and families in a hospital, and conferred with Israeli President Isaac Herzog in Jerusalem.

In the interview, Mr Christie discussed Israel’s crisis – and the repercussions felt around the world – from the perspective of a man who has known Trump well for years, advised him and then turned against him.

Mr Christie’s criticism of the former president’s Middle East record is significant.

During Trump’s tenure, peace agreements were struck by Israel with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco.

The so-called Abraham Accords are widely seen as perhaps Trump’s most important diplomatic accomplishment.

And Republicans have offered high praise for decisions such as moving the US Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv, which also happened during Trump’s time in office.

US President Joe Biden’s own diplomatic efforts to secure a peace agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia, which were under way in earnest before the Israel-Hamas war broke out, were widely viewed as building on Trump’s achievements.

Mr Christie offered higher praise for Mr Biden’s handling of the Israel-Gaza crisis, including his Oct 18 visit to Israel, where he met Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Mr Christie accused Trump of cynicism in his handling of the once broadly bipartisan US-Israel relationship and held him responsible for fractures over Israel within the Democratic Party.

Mr Christie said US President Barack Obama’s policies had been perceived as favouring Israel’s enemies and that Trump had seized the political opening that presented.

Mr Christie said Trump wholeheartedly embraced every policy pressed by Israel’s conservative government, including moving the embassy, recognising Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights, withdrawing from Mr Obama’s deal with Iran to temper its nuclear ambitions, and pursuing regional peace agreements between Israel and the Persian Gulf states that isolated Palestinians and marginalised their demands for political autonomy.

“I don’t think he has any principles on the issues at all,” Mr Christie said. “I think it’s just that he saw a public opportunity that Obama presented and he took it.”

Mr Christie argued that Democratic voters, in turn, had reflexively opposed anything embraced so wholeheartedly by Trump, including by electing Democratic representatives to Congress such as Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, whom they saw as Trump’s fierce opponents.

Those new lawmakers on the Democratic left then opened an anti-Israel wing of the Democratic Party that is straining the US-Israel alliance.

Meanwhile, he said, the cause of Israeli-Palestinian peace, once considered the holy grail of presidential diplomacy, was all but forgotten.

“I don’t think he was equipped to deal in a foreign policy way with a very difficult, if not impossible, issue, right? And I don’t think he has any ambition,” Mr Christie said. “I think he was looking for what would be relatively direct and easy scores because his view always was political.”

“If Chris Christie thinks strengthening the US-Israeli alliance, moving the embassy to Jerusalem, bringing peace to the Middle East with the Abraham Accords and enacting laws to protect Jewish Americans is low-hanging fruit, he is clearly living in a fantasy world not rooted in reality,” said Mr Steven Cheung, a spokesperson for Trump’s presidential campaign.

Mr Christie was quick to say that he did not blame Trump for the violent hostilities in Israel.

The timing of Hamas’ attack reflected larger geopolitical dynamics with Iran, Russia and China, he said.

In the interview before arriving in Israel, Mr Christie traced the surge in public expressions of anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim bias since the war began in part back to Trump’s often inflammatory rhetoric.

“I don’t think Trump’s an antisemite,” even though he has routinely espoused stereotypes of Jews, Mr Christie said. But, he added, Trump’s “intolerance of everybody” is “what’s contributed to” the surging bigotry.

“He says what he says, without regard to the fact that he’s perceived as a leader and that his words matter,” Mr Christie said. The bigots “think you’re giving them permission be a bigot”, he added, “and that’s even worse than them thinking you are one.”

Trump has bristled at accusations that he is antisemitic, pointing to his daughter Ivanka, a Jewish convert, and her Jewish children.

Trump’s well-chronicled habit of trotting out Jewish stereotypes – saying he only wanted “short guys that wear yarmulkes” counting his money, calling Jewish real estate executives “killers” and telling those at a gathering of the Republican Jewish Coalition that they were all tough deal-makers – is of a piece with stereotypes he holds for Italian Americans, Black Americans and Muslim Americans, Christie said dismissively.

“I think he’s a guy of the 1960s from Queens, New York, with certain attitudes that he probably learned from his parents,” Christie said.

But he was less sympathetic about the bigotries that he said Trump had unleashed.

“His rhetoric contributes to it,” he said. “By his rhetoric, I mean, his intolerance of everybody. Everybody hears that dog whistle a different way.” NYTIMES