There seems little doubt that the war in Gaza is reconfiguring the politics of Israel in the United States. But how exactly? The conventional wisdom is that it is deepening pre-existing tendencies, with support for Israel increasingly becoming a partisan issue. In turn, that growing partisanship is driven much more by changes on the left than on the right - Democrats are becoming increasingly critical of Israel, while Republicans are maintaining their iron wall of support.
I don’t think that this conventional wisdom is wrong, exactly. But I do think that it has an expiration date.
To an extent which I think is under-appreciated, this American political alignment is a product of the particular set of personalities and issues which have emerged in Israel and the broader Middle East over the past two decades. And when those personalities and issues change, the alignment could change as well.
Most obviously, Benjamin Netanyahu’s domination of Israeli politics has been the main determinant of American political attitudes. Netanyahu has himself waded into American domestic politics, most famously in his speech to Congress in 2015 in which he savaged the Obama administration’s attempts to negotiate a nuclear deal with Iran. But just as consequential has been the set of policies that he became associated with - aggressive containment of Iran; a swaggering, nationalistic populism at home; and an attempt to sideline the Palestinian issue and instead seek Israel’s security through normalization with Arab regional powers. These were policies that were generally viewed more skeptically by Democrats, but enthusiastically embraced by Republicans.
Among the Republicans who seemed to feel a thrill going up their leg at the thought of Netanyahu was, until recently, Donald Trump. Bernard Avishai has described the synergy between the two men like this:
[B]oth see “strength” as their go-to asset, or at least the con that the political base seems most likely to buy. Each claims to be his nation’s singular guardian against catastrophe. Each turns shamelessness into charisma. Each grew up coddled but plays up resentments for elites. Each cultivates, in effect, dictators like Vladimir Putin and Victor Orban and scoffs at Western Europe. Each will tolerate only loyalists, and has a string of former appointees, especially high-ranking security professionals, who look back on their service in disgust. Each brags promiscuously, condemns “fake news” and has a sycophantic, tweeting son.
It has always seemed to me that Trump liked Netanyahu primarily for the stylistic and political similarities he saw in him rather than because of any well thought out stance towards diplomatic and security affairs in the Middle East. To Trump, Netanyahu seemed more like an autocrat than the leader of a Western European liberal democracy - someone he could do business with while feeling validated at the same time. And it also didn’t hurt that Trump and his family’s very literal business interests frequently overlapped with exactly the Arab countries with which Netanyahu sought to improve relations.
But precisely because Trump’s affinity with Netanyahu was based on this sort of personal consideration, it has always been subject to change. Trump was apparently furious when Netanyahu congratulated Joe Biden for winning the in 2020. In Trump’s mind, his fellow strongman should have been joining in the conspiracy to overturn the result of the election instead. It didn’t matter that anyone with an elementary understanding of Israeli politics or Israeli-American relations could tell you that an Israeli leader could never afford to spurn an incoming American president in that way; what mattered to Trump was the perceived personal affront.
Winning and being perceived as a winner also matters a great deal to Trump, which explains his initial reaction to the October 7 atrocities. It seems clear that, in Trump’s mind, the events of October 7 led Netanyahu to finally be demoted from the elite club of strongmen whose back the former president will always have. At a time when the rest of the world was still united in voicing support for Israel, Trump castigated Netanyahu for being “not prepared” in the run-up to the Hamas attack and said that Hezbollah, which was right at that moment attempting to kill Israelis, was “very smart”. He later followed up with a tweet saying “#IStandWithBibi” (the complex capitalization being a clear sign that he didn’t write it himself), but as is always the case with Trump, the unscripted comments are the truest.
Although it seems to have surprised the Israeli journalists involved, it shouldn’t have come as a shock to hear Trump continue in this vein in remarks late last month:
Two Israeli journalists traveled to Palm Beach, Fla., a little over a week ago, hoping to elicit from Donald J. Trump a powerful expression of support for their country’s war in Gaza.
Instead, one of them wrote that what they heard from Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago “shocked us deeply.”
[…]
He told the interviewers that Israel was losing public support for its Gaza assault, that the images of devastation were bad for Israel’s global image and that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should end his war soon — statements that sounded far more like something President Biden might say than the kind of cheerleading Mr. Netanyahu has come to expect from Washington Republicans.
“You have to finish up your war,” Mr. Trump said. “You have to get it done. We have to get to peace. We can’t have this going on.”
One way to interpret this would be to say that Trump is just bending to public opinion - Israel’s war is becoming so unpopular in America and elsewhere that he feels the need to make some gesture towards ending it. But in reality, Trump is unconcerned with public opinion, particularly when a fellow strongman is on the receiving end of it. He has never, to my knowledge, said that Vladimir Putin must “finish up your war” or that “we can’t have this going on” in Ukraine. The main issue is not what anyone else thinks of the war - after all, the rest of the Republican Party is still in lockstep behind it - but the fact that he no longer sees Netanyahu as serving his own personal interests, or as being the sort of man he wants to support.
This dynamic is, I think, under-appreciated because Trump is not currently the president, and is commenting on Middle Eastern issues only sparingly. But he is now out of step with much of his own party, and he has a history of allowing his personal beefs and bromances to have a greater influence over policy than either politicians in his own party or career national security officials. That could greatly affect U.S. policy if he wins in November.
This issue is also bigger than Trump and Netanyahu. Netanyahu has been the dominant figure in Israeli politics for so long that it’s easy to forget that his era will one day end. And Israel’s next leader could shake up America’s political divisions in a fairly radical way, regardless of whether Trump or Biden is president a year from now.
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