Netanyahu Favors Trump, but He Could Come to Regret It

In the United States, the polls in the run-up to the Nov. 5 presidential election show Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump are neck and neck. But if the voting were limited to Israelis, Trump could begin writing his inaugural address. Israel is Trump country, and Trump’s No. 1 supporter is its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Yet, Trump’s record, his mercurial personality, and his public remarks on Israel during the campaign offer little to justify the enthusiasm.

The war Israel has been fighting for the past year has made it more dependent on the United States than at any time since the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Israel needs the full support of the next U.S. president no matter who they are. Yet Netanyahu seems willing to give a cold shoulder to one candidate and place all his chips on another whose policy instincts mostly run counter to Israel’s interests.

Netanyahu has always felt more at home with Republicans than Democrats. In the 2012 election, he made his preference for Sen. Mitt Romney known, over the incumbent Barack Obama. Romney was given head-of-state treatment in a July visit that year, and Netanyahu appeared (supposedly without his foreknowledge) in an Obama attack ad. Netanyahu held back in the next two elections, but this time around, he has been playing favorites again.

It began with a reconciliation of sorts. Trump took umbrage over the fact that Netanyahu  congratulated President Joe Biden on his election victory in 2020. For the next four years, the two men didn’t speak. In an interview with Time last April, Trump blamed Netanyahu for the failures that enabled Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel. It was a sharp dig for an Israeli leader who has refused to accept any responsibility for the security failure.

Netanyahu broke the ice last July in a visit to Mar-a-Lago. Since then, the two have reportedly spoken by phone several times. Whatever the two men really think of one another, both find it useful politically to be seen as friends and allies.

Israelis stand out among Western democracies in their support of Trump. A recent poll by Channel 12, an Israeli broadcaster, found that 66 percent said he was their preferred candidate, versus just 17 percent for Harris (another 17 percent expressed no opinion). By comparison, a survey conducted by Gallup International of 43 countries (but not Israel) found that 54 percent of respondents preferred Harris, more than double the level of support for Trump. Even in Serbia and Hungary, the two countries most supportive of Trump, he was favored by no more than 49 and 59 percent of those polled, respectively.

The average Israeli probably prefers Trump partly because Harris is an unknown. Little or none of the appreciation they feel for Biden’s enormous help over the course of the war in Gaza has been passed on to his vice president.

But Trump’s popularity is mostly due to his first term in office, when he moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, pulled out of the Iranian nuclear deal and orchestrated the Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and a clutch of Arab countries. The fact that Trump also proposed a peace plan that called for a Palestinian state and that he scotched Netanyahu’s plans to annex part of the West Bank seems to have been forgotten.

Israelis tend to see the positive gestures as a demonstration of Trump’s love for Israel. But the record doesn’t quite bear that out. Trump only made one visit to Israel during his term as president. By contrast, Biden has traveled to Israel twice, including in the early days of the war in Gaza, in a powerful and personal show of support days after the Oct. 7, 2023, attack. Early in his 2016 campaign, Trump got his pro-Israel talking points wrong and told a CNN interviewer that, in regard to the Israel-Palestine conflict, he “would love to be neutral if it’s possible.” He corrected himself quickly after he recognized the gaffe, but it is safe to assume it reflected a strong personal impulse.

In his current campaign, Trump has offered a mixed and often nebulous mélange of stances on Israel in regards to the most pressing issues it faces, namely Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Iran.

In the first few months of the Israel-Hamas war, Trump spoke about the need to “finish up your war”  and “get it done quickly.” In the September debate with Harris, he said, “I will get that settled and fast.” More recently, he has moved a little more in the direction of supporting the war effort, telling Netanyahu in a phone call, “Do what you have to do.” But Trump has never spoken of the “total victory,” which Netanyahu says is Israel’s goal.

Trump advisors have been quoted as saying it is quite possible Trump would follow Biden’s approach by pressuring Israel to agree to a cease-fire and hostage deal. And, since Trump appears keen on crowning his Abraham Accords achievement with a deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia, Netanyahu might find himself under pressure from a Trump administration to meet Saudi demands for progress toward Palestinian statehood.

On Iran, Trump has taken a tough line publicly, but not as tough as Netanyahu would like. Trump has spoken of stepping up his campaign of “maximum pressure” on Tehran but by that he means more onerous economic sanctions, not a war. “Overall, he has a huge aversion to war,” one advisor recently told the Financial Times.

And that speaks to Trump’s larger worldview, which doesn’t align well with Israeli interests. Trump is suspicious of allies, especially those who don’t pay their own way in terms of defense. He most certainly doesn’t like multilateralism. In all these areas, Israel would be vulnerable in a Trump administration.

In the past, Israel might have been regarded as the kind of ally Trump appreciates. Yes, it was the recipient of billions of dollars in U.S. aid and was hardly paying its way, but at least Israel never asked for American troops to defend it. And its powerful and effective military often served U.S. interests.

The war with Hamas and the parallel conflicts with Hezbollah and Iran have changed that dynamic. The United States has spent at least $22.7 billion on direct military aid to Israel and related U.S. operations in the region as of September 30, according to a study by Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. Since then, the price tag has grown, as Washington extended more assistance amid tit-for-tat attacks between Israel and Iran.

Beyond the money, the United States has, at various times, dispatched additional aircraft carriers, fighter jets, and troops to the region. Earlier this month, it sent a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) ballistic missile defense system to Israel and 100 personnel to operate it to close gaps in Israel’s air defenses. The United States has also been supplying massive quantities of arms to Israel that could never be sourced from any other country or produced at home. To the credit of multilateralism, Biden twice organized a coalition of Western and Arab powers to aid Israel when Iran launched missile attacks.

The fighting will eventually come to an end, but Israel’s reliance on the United States is likely to remain elevated for the foreseeable future. Israeli planners are assuming it will have to increase defense spending considerably in the years ahead, costs that it might struggle to cover, especially if economic growth slows.

Trump’s defenders will counter that Israel is a special case. Unlike other allies, it has a homegrown constituency in the United States among evangelical Christians and many Jews. In the Republican Party, support for Israel is a sine qua non. But will that be enough?

Trump will never have to face voters again if he wins next week and can do as he chooses. He and Netanyahu might have made up for now because they need each other politically, but Trump isn’t the forgiving type and doesn’t take defiance lightly. If the two clash on Iran, Palestinian policy, or the terms for Saudi normalization, the friendship could easily fall apart.

Trump’s foreign-policy team is likely to contain a large number of “America first” supporters who might like Israel but are loath to entangle the United States in the Middle East’s forever wars, even when Israel is a party. Those among his advisors who advocate a more activist U.S. foreign policy are focused on China. Like the Biden administration, they see Iran as secondary and don’t want to commit resources to the threat.

Netanyahu is presumably more calculating and pragmatic than the ordinary Israelis whose support for Trump is visceral. The prime minister might be reasoning that he can’t afford to alienate Trump and that if Harris wins she’ll behave like Biden and continue supporting Israel despite any bad blood.

No matter who wins, the next four years of Israel-U.S. relations are likely to be rockier than those of the Biden presidency. Biden was a true friend of Israel and was prepared to go a long way to help it in a crisis at a great political cost. The White House’s next occupant—whether Trump or Harris—is unlikely to do the same.