During the Gaza War, President Joe Biden took a consistently pro-Israel line. He traveled to Israel after the October 7 attack, supplied the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) with huge amounts of ammunition, refused to publicly call for an indefinite ceasefire, and vetoed UN resolutions they rejected. This all reflects the president's strong personal belief in the need to support the Jewish state and the idea that public support for Israel gives America greater influence behind the scenes.
For those who wish Washington would put more pressure on Jerusalem to stop the killing, this raises a fundamental question: Would President Donald Trump have done anything differently?
The answer is almost certainly yes. Biden has applied only uneven pressure on Israel; Trump wouldn't have set any.
Everything we know about the former president, from his extensive political record in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to his top advisers' statements on the war, suggests that he would have no qualms about siding entirely with the Israeli far-right to provide government. While Biden has pushed Israel behind the scenes on issues such as food and medical aid for civilians – with some limited success – it is hard to imagine Trump lifting a finger in defense of Gaza civilians, whom he has barred from entering the United States states want to ban.
The Israeli right understands this and longs for Trump. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal in early February, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir made his views clear.
“Instead of giving us his full support, Biden is busy providing humanitarian aid and fuel [to Gaza], which goes to Hamas,” Ben-Gvir said. “If Trump were in power, US behavior would be completely different.”
Expert observers see it similarly. In a recent New Republic essay sharply criticizing Biden's Gaza policy, two former senior officials – American David Rothkopf and Israeli Alon Pinkas – argue that the difference between him and Trump is still vast.
“However we criticize the Biden administration’s Israel-Gaza policy to date, the only hope of reversing recent mistakes and achieving positive results lies in maintaining America’s current leadership,” they argue. “Donald Trump would, as we have both written elsewhere, be far worse and far more accommodating to the extremist elements in Netanyahu’s government.”
This is not intended as a hasty defense of Biden. The current president should not be judged by the standards of his predecessor; There is much more he could have done and still could do to divert the Israeli government from its deadly and self-destructive path.
But since one of these two men will almost certainly be sworn in next January, it's worth being clear about their actual policy differences. And the truth is this: Biden is a traditional pro-Israel American centrist, while Trump has openly and publicly aligned himself with the Israeli right. These are two very different worldviews that would lead to very different policies.
In fact, they already have.
“The most pro-Israel president ever”
Donald Trump loves deals – and an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement would be “the deal of the century,” as he likes to say. Early in his term, it looked as if this might lead him to deviate from the hardline pro-Israel positions he outlined during the campaign. After all, you can't reach an agreement if you only talk to one side.
But bringing the Palestinians to the table would have required a more balanced policy than that pursued by Trump – who describes himself as the most pro-Israel president ever. There's a reason Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu all but openly campaigned for Trump against Biden in 2020. American policy in the Trump administration has been a long list of gifts to the Israeli right:
These are not “normal” positions that one would expect from any president given the bipartisan pro-Israel consensus in American politics. Many of them were in direct contradiction to the long-standing bipartisan consensus in US policy, which sought to balance support for Israel with an attempt to maintain the US position as a potential mediator in credible peace talks. The Biden team has largely tried to return to that traditional position where it could, although before October 7 it worked to prioritize Middle East diplomacy.
This track record suggests that Trump is not approaching Israel like he does other issues. Neither his bravado as a dealmaker nor his transactional approach to other alliances such as NATO could dampen his hardline support for Netanyahu and the Israeli right during his time in office. To claim that he would have handled the Gaza war differently, one would have to show some reason to believe that Trump would break his established mold.
And there is none.
Why Trump's Gaza policy would be (even) more restrictive than Biden's
Trump's Israel-Palestine policy was largely the product of delegation, according to reports like this one from The Washington Post's Isaac Stanley-Becker. Uninterested in the details, he outsourced policy formulation to aides. While Trump has said relatively little about the Gaza war since October 7, these influential advisers have been quite vocal. And they attacked Biden from the right.
The most important of these deputies was son-in-law Jared Kushner. At a public appearance at Harvard in February, he expressed strong opposition to Biden's current push for a Palestinian state as part of a postwar settlement.
“Giving them a Palestinian state is basically an endorsement of, 'We will reward you for bad deeds,'” Kushner said. “We have to show the terrorists that they will not be tolerated and that we will take decisive action.”
Trump's ambassador to Israel, noted hardliner David Friedman, went even further, accusing the Biden team of “hindering the war effort” by pressuring Israel to limit the number of civilian casualties from its bombings. “Never [while I was ambassador] “Has the United States put any handcuffs or limits on Israel’s ability to respond?” he added in an interview with Israel’s Channel 12.
And Jason Greenblatt, Trump's special envoy for Middle East policy, called the Biden administration's decision to impose sanctions on violent settlers in the West Bank “wrong and misleading.” He also claimed he was “shocked that the State Department is exploring the possibility of declaring an independent Palestinian state,” a decision he called “terribly damaging and dangerous.”
Key policymakers in the last Trump administration rejected the few Biden decisions that peace advocates can actually approve of: his quiet pressure on Israel to limit harm to civilians, his diplomacy aimed at improving the postwar future, and his willingness to do something about sanctions against Israeli settlers.
By contrast, Trump's advisers have praised the elements of Biden's policies that his left-wing critics most reject: the president's public and unqualified support for the Israeli war effort.
US President Joe Biden and Israeli President Isaac Herzog pose for a photo with children waving American and Israeli flags upon his arrival at the presidential residence in Jerusalem on July 14, 2022. Maya Alleruzzo/Pool/AFP/Getty Images
“While I have been and remain deeply critical of the Biden administration, the moral, tactical, diplomatic and military support it has provided to Israel in recent days has been extraordinary.” Friedman wrote on October 12th. “As someone who lives in Jerusalem and has children who are Israeli citizens, I am deeply grateful. I pray that American support continues in the difficult days ahead.”
There are no signs that Trump plans to choose a different type of adviser or abandon his previous positions. When Trump made an isolated negative comment about Netanyahu in October that appeared to arise from criticism of the Israeli prime minister's recognition of Biden's victory in 2020, the former president walked back his criticism the next day.
Again: Biden's position in the course of this war is certainly cause for criticism. The Palestinians feel betrayed by him, as do many Arab and Muslim American voters, and one can hardly blame them.
Biden, for example, has built up a huge reservoir of goodwill among Israelis, so much so that he is actually more popular there than Trump and Netanyahu. But several experts have told me that he is bafflingly unwilling to cash in on that support, tell Israelis the truth about their government's terrible mismanagement of the war, and apply pressure for a just and quick solution.
But it is one thing to say that Biden is underperforming and quite another to say that he is not much different from Trump. All the evidence we have suggests that this would be the case – and that this difference could be very important for the future of the American approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
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