Trump’s unfinished business for ‘Greater Israel’
The exterior of an UNRWA health centre in Gaza damaged during the war in Gaza, an image taken from video released in February 2024
Jonathan Adler writes in +972 on 13 November 2024:
On November 5, former president Donald Trump secured a resounding victory over Vice President Kamala Harris in the U.S. presidential elections, winning all seven battleground states in the electoral college, as well as the popular vote — the first for a Republican candidate in two decades. It’s clear that discontent with the Biden-Harris Gaza policy wasn’t the deciding factor in Harris’s loss that many had predicted, given the margins of Trump’s win. But it did play a significant role, and Democrats will need to make a meaningful investment to win back Muslim and Arab American voters, in particular, in future election cycles. Trump’s victory, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to be evidence of a popular shift to the right on U.S. policy toward Israel, even though that may well be the result of his return to office.
To unpack the election results and understand the implications of a second Trump term for U.S. policy on Israel-Palestine, +972 Magazine spoke with Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace (FMEP) and a longtime expert on American and Israeli politics (full disclosure: FMEP is a funder of +972 Magazine). For Friedman, last week revealed the consequences of Democrats’ failure to take the concerns of its base seriously — simply assuming that they would turn out to support Harris — and of trying to outflank Republicans on their pro-Israel bona fides as part of their appeal to the so-called centrist voter. This was a lesson, as Friedman points out, that Democrats could have learned from their Israeli counterparts in the Labor Party, which has rendered itself obsolete by failing to offer a real alternative to the Israeli right.
After a year of devastating war in Gaza, aided and abetted by a Democratic administration unwilling to impose any red lines on the Israeli government, Trump made a cynical yet effective last-minute appeal to disaffected voters, pitching himself as the “anti-war” candidate who could secure a quick and lasting peace.