There was a striking moment in Monday’s White House press conference when deputy press secretary Raj Shah was asked about the Israeli military’s killing of dozens of Palestinian protesters in Gaza.
Trump, Gaza, and the “blank check” approach to Israel
Trump is transforming America’s Israel policy into something new: completely unconditional support.
Zack Beauchamp is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he covers ideology and challenges to democracy, both at home and abroad. His book on democracy, The Reactionary Spirit, was published 0n July 16. You can purchase it here.
Shah said that Hamas, the Islamist militant group that runs Gaza, was responsible for the Palestinian deaths. That’s true in part, in the sense that Hamas organized the protest, and because at least 10 of the dead were Hamas operatives, but it’s incomplete given that Israeli soldiers appear to have also shot civilians who did not pose an immediate threat.
Reporters kept pressing Shah on whether Israel bore any responsibility for its soldiers killing protesters, most of whom were unarmed, and Shah kept denying it.
The conversation culminated in an incredibly blunt admission. The Trump administration is essentially fine with Israel responding in whatever way it wants to:
REPORTER: So there’s no burden on Israel to do something to sort of rein it in?
SHAH: No. We think that we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that Hamas is the one that, frankly, bears responsibility for the dire situation right now in Gaza.
This “blank check” approach is not normal.
Past presidents, Democrat and Republican alike, responded to outbreaks of Israeli-Palestinian violence by urging restraint and calm — typically putting more blame on the Palestinians, to be sure, but also working to try to limit the Israeli response.
President Trump is different. His administration’s response to the Gaza violence, and his decision to move the US Embassy to Jerusalem, which added fuel to an already combustible situation, suggests a major break with the traditional US approach.
Trump is pioneering a new, hardline pro-Israel stance — one that fits comfortably in today’s Republican Party and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.
“Even Reagan criticized Israel. Trump seems to be in lockstep with Bibi,” says Guy Ziv, a professor of international relations at American University, using a common nickname for Netanyahu.
Trump is a radical break with the past
President Obama’s issues with the Israeli government, and Netanyahu in particular, were well known. But even presidents with a reputation for being strongly pro-Israel, such as George W. Bush, took a more tempered approach than Trump has.
In December 2008, outright war between Israel and Hamas erupted after months of Hamas sporadically firing rockets into Israel from Gaza. Bush’s official statement blamed Hamas for the outbreak of violence, but it also said the United States was “leading diplomatic efforts to achieve a meaningful ceasefire.”
Then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice similarly called for an end to the violence “as soon as possible” and led a negotiating effort aimed at stopping both the war and the rocket fire that gave rise to it.
The situation today is different than in 2008: Israeli soldiers aren’t facing an opposing military with tanks and rockets, but rather mostly civilian protesters — some armed with rocks and Molotov cocktails — mixed in with an unknown number of Hamas fighters. If anything, you’d expect the US government to be calling on more restraint from Israel in this situation rather than that one.
But the Trump administration has gone further out on a limb in Israel’s favor than Bush did. It’s not just Shah’s comments; in a speech on Tuesday, Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley declared that “no country” in a similar situation “would act with more restraint than Israel has.” When the Palestinian UN envoy started speaking at the UN session, Haley walked out.
The Trump policy is clear: Israel will face no pressure from America to moderate its aggressive response.
This kind of position, acting as Israel’s advocate rather than its ally, is the emerging norm for Trump. His ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, is a hard-right pro-Israel advocate who once wrote that the two-state solution is “a suicidal ‘peace’ with hateful radical Islamists hell bent on Israel’s destruction.”
The administration has seemingly abandoned early efforts to try to convince Israel to curb illegal settlement activity in the West Bank, and the Trump administration’s mystery peace plan, still supposedly being drafted by son-in-law Jared Kushner, is reportedly tilted toward Israel’s view of the conflict.
Perhaps the most fundamental sign of Trump’s new hardcore policy is the Jerusalem embassy move itself.
Israel’s government is seated in Jerusalem. However, the US put its embassy in Tel Aviv instead to avoid giving the appearance of prejudging the city’s final status in any peace deal, given that both the Israelis and the Palestinians claim it as their capital. In 1995, the US Congress passed a law requiring the US to move its embassy from Tel Aviv to the holy city. However, every US president since then has issued a waiver blocking the move from taking place on national security grounds.
Since Jerusalem is one of the major flashpoints in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the logic went, moving the US Embassy there would be an unnecessary provocation and could damage the United States’ credibility as a fair arbiter in mediating the conflict.
Trump ignored all of these fears and moved the embassy anyway. It was a huge concession to Israel’s current government, one of the most right-wing on Palestinian issues in recent memory.
Yet Trump didn’t seem to get much if anything out of it: As far as we know, Israel hasn’t agreed to give up anything (to either the US or the Palestinians) in exchange for the US recognition of Jerusalem as its capital.
This looks less like a smart negotiating tactic and more like unconditional support for Israel, well beyond what past presidents were willing to give. All four of Trump’s recent predecessors — Obama, Bill Clinton, and the two Bushes — had taken steps to tangibly punish Israeli governments when its actions threatened American foreign policy priorities or the peace process. These ranged from withholding financial assistance to denying requests for advanced military weapons to publicly condemning its actions.
It’s hard to imagine Trump doing the same.
Trump’s policy is a perfect fit for today’s Republican Party
When I spoke with Ziv, the American University professor, about the Trump administration’s hardline position on Gaza, he pointed to Trump’s support base as the key reason for it.
Trump, he suggested, isn’t pioneering a new Israel policy; rather, he’s bringing American policy in line with the position Republican donors and activists have held for quite some time.
There’s been a remarkable surge in pro-Israel sentiment among Republicans over the past several decades. Gallup polling shows that in 1988, 47 percent of Republicans and 42 percent of Democrats took Israel’s side in the conflict with the Palestinians.
Today, that figure is roughly similar for Democrats (49 percent) — but dramatically higher for Republicans (87 percent):
This is a relatively modern development — one directly linked to the rise of evangelical Protestants in the GOP, whose beliefs about biblically granted rights to the Holy Land make them inclined to take a strongly pro-Israel stance.
“Evangelicals were not politically active until about the 1970s,” Elizabeth Oldmixon, a professor at the University of North Texas who studies Israel’s role in American politics, told me back in 2015. “Uncompromising support for Israel is something you start to see as evangelicals become more prominent in the party.”
Evangelical conservatives tend to frame the conflict in religious, rather than national or political, terms: The land is Jewish by divine right. “Evangelicals interpret the Bible literally,” Oldmixon explains, “so God’s [biblical] promise to give Palestine to the Jewish people — that’s an eternally valid promise.”
Because many evangelicals believe God promised the land to Israel, they see Israelis as unerringly in the right in their conflict with the Palestinians, Iran, or other Muslim neighbors. The Israeli occupation of the West Bank and blockade of Gaza are less of an issue for them than they are for many Democrats, liberal Jews, and even many Israelis.
What’s more, the post-9/11 conflict focus on Islamist terrorism among conservative thinkers transformed the stakes of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — from a dispute over land to part of a worldwide struggle against the evil of “radical Islam.” Taking a hardline pro-Israel stance wasn’t just an evangelical project but also a conservative one — one that any Republican who wanted to be in good standing with the base needed to embrace.
The Bush administration reflected this rightward tilt to some degree, but also took the idea of the US as an honest broker in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations at least somewhat seriously. That meant being willing to, at least at times, criticize Israel’s actions and work to end military hostilities between the two sides.
Trump has little respect for the traditional norms of American politics and foreign policy. He came to power in a Republican Party where hardcore support for Israel is a matter of faith, literally and figuratively. Trump is merely bringing US foreign policy in line with Republican partisan rhetoric.
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