‘Best friend’ or ‘worst nightmare’?

In winning the White House in 2024, Donald Trump made serious inroads among Orthodox voters, which the GOP hopes to capitalize on this November and in the 2028 presidential contest.

Until June 17, those hopes had a good chance of being realized. Now, however, it must be dawning on Trump’s Orthodox voters that he is not the “best friend” Israel could ever have in the Oval Office. In fact, he may turn out to be Israel’s worst nightmare.

Historically, Republican presidents have tended to deal harshly with Israel at times.

In early 1957, for example, President Dwight D. Eisenhower went on national television to threaten Israel with economic sanctions if it refused to withdraw completely from territories it had seized during the October 1956 Suez Crisis.

In 1981, President Ronald Reagan was furious with Israel for destroying Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor. He put the delivery of F-16 fighter jets to Israel on hold and supported a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israel.

In 1991, George H.W. Bush refused Israel’s request for $10 billion in loan guarantees. It needed the money to help settle the huge wave of Jewish immigrants arriving from the Soviet Union. Bush said there would be no such guarantee as long as Israel continued to build Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza.

Such events, though, pale in comparison to what this president and his forked tongue are doing.

Beginning on February 24, when he delivered his State of the Union address, the nation’s commander-in-chief has been quite blunt about totally eliminating Iran’s missile program.

“Our objectives are clear,” he explained on February 28, after launching his air war against Iran. “First, we’re destroying Iran’s missile capabilities … and their capacity to produce brand-new ones.”

The goal, he said, was to “obliterate Iran’s ballistic missile arsenal and production capability.”

He did not mean a word of it. On June 17, he announced a deal in which Iran gets to keep its missiles because it “would be unfair” to deny it the weaponry its neighbors have. For “neighbor,” read “Israel,” because Iran makes no secret about whom its missiles are intended for.

Besides, said the president, Iran’s missiles are no big deal. “Missiles aren’t the problem. Missiles, they hurt a little location, but they don’t blow up the planet,” Trump said.

In the wake of the Iran deal announcement, this “great friend” of Israel has described Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as being “[expletive] crazy,” “ungrateful,” and having “no judgment.” Bibi must be “kept sane” and needs to be “more responsible with respect to Lebanon.”

That last remark was a veiled warning to Netanyahu and his extremist ministers. Either stop attacking Lebanon or the United States is prepared to charge Israel with committing war crimes. Said Trump:

“You don’t have to knock down an apartment house every time you’re looking for somebody, because there are a lot of people in those apartment houses and they’re not all Hezbollah….”

Earlier in the week at the G7 summit, Israel’s “great friend” suggested that he might ask Syria to intervene because, “If Israel can’t do the job without killing everyone else…, Syria will do the job.”

Not all of the president’s “disguised” warnings were hard to find. In an interview last week with the online Axios news service, he said, “if it weren’t for the United States of America…Israel would not exist right now. Israel would have been blown off the face of the earth, 100 percent.”

In fact, he said, Israel would have been “eviscerated” by now if not for him.

He added this: “I said, ‘Bibi, you better be careful, or you will be on your own very soon.’”

That is why, he said, he expects Netanyahu and his government to “do what I tell them.”

U.S. intelligence estimates are not so certain about that. Netanyahu, they note, is under extreme pressure to continue pressing his war with Hezbollah.

Following the Iran deal announcement, for example, Israel’s far-right national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who is also the leader of the Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) party, said that “for every tear of an Israeli mother, a thousand Lebanese mothers must weep. All of Lebanon must burn!”

In the past, Netanyahu, who is anxious to hold on to power at all costs, often has caved to Ben-Gvir’s wishes because the minister has the power to bring down the government.

At one point, for example, Ben-Gvir forced Netanyahu to impose a ban on the entry of all goods and supplies into Gaza. It was a disastrous decision both humanely and politically, and it pushed support for Israel down to its lowest point ever, but it kept Ben-Gvir happy. As he posted on X: “The only thing that needs to enter Gaza are hundreds of tons of explosives from the Air Force, not an ounce of humanitarian aid.”

The intelligence estimates also note that Netanyahu is facing pressure from the Israeli public, as well. The majority supports the war against Hezbollah and wants it to continue. With an election slated for no later than October 20, and his fortunes fading fast, the estimates note, the last thing Netanyahu wants to be seen doing is kowtowing to a U.S. president. He, therefore, is just as likely to intensify the Lebanon campaign.

That may be why the president also unleashed his attack dog, Vice President JD Vance, to push the not-very-well-veiled threat up a notch or two. Vance did so during a briefing at the White House on June 18, in which his remarks were deliberately intemperate and insulting.

“If I was in the cabinet of the Israeli government, I might not be attacking the only powerful ally that I have anywhere left in the entire world,” Vance said.

He added that “anybody in Israel who thinks their biggest problem is the president of the United States needs to wake up and smell the reality of the situation that country is in.” After all, not only is the president “the only head of state in the entire world who is sympathetic to the nation of Israel at this moment in time,” but “Israel could not have defended itself to the extent it did over the last three months without massive American military support.”

In other words, either Israeli leaders of every stripe stop criticizing Trump, or they had better learn to duck because Israel will no longer receive the weapons it needs to blow Iranian missiles out of the sky.

(Given the icy reception the president received at the G-7 summit — nearly all the other leaders who attended avoided him like the plague — I would suggest to both him and his vice president that they need to wake up and smell the reality of the situation they are in, because Israel may be the only country willing to engage with them on any level.)

To repeat: Trump will say or do one thing today and say or do the exact opposite tomorrow. He does not care about the Jewish state. He only cares about Jewish votes and the votes of the evangelical right. After the November midterms, he probably won’t even care about anyone’s votes.

Trump is not only a liar, but he is also a hypocrite.

For over a decade, he has been extraordinarily vicious in attacking President Barack Obama’s 2015 Iran nuclear agreement, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (the JCPOA). The Obama plan was “one of the worst deals ever made by our country.” He later changed that to “the worst deal ever” and said — only recently, in fact — that no one “ever saw a deal so stupid.” In 2018, he said that the JCPOA was “a horrible one-sided deal that should have never, ever been made.”

Obama’s deal traded sanctions relief for specific nuclear restrictions. Trump’s deal trades sanctions relief, an end to hostilities, and a pot-sweetening $300 billion aid package for a promise to negotiate any restrictions down the road.

Whether the president’s Jewish fans here have figured out how dangerous he really is, his fans in Israel quickly realized that they had been duped. At the end of May, the president enjoyed a 58 percent approval rating among Israelis — higher than that of most of Israel’s leading politicians, including Netanyahu. That support suffered a nearly 40 percent seismic shift almost overnight after the Iran deal was announced.

To be honest, I have never understood the president’s stateside fans. He considers all Jews to be disloyal Americans. When speaking to Jewish groups, he has referred to Netanyahu as “your prime minister” and to Israel as “your country.”

If it was not obvious to the president’s fans (or any of us) before, it should be now. Depending on what a final deal with Iran looks like, the greatest existential threat to Israel could well turn out to be Donald J. Trump, with JD Vance right behind him.

In November, we need to disable the president’s enabling congressional majority. But we must do so carefully, because there are not many on the Democratic left who are much better. We must choose, but it must be done wisely and with great care. I will have more to say about choices in the coming months.

Shammai Engelmayer is a rabbi-emeritus of Congregation Beth Israel of the Palisades and an adult education teacher in Bergen County. He is the author of eight books and the winner of 10 awards for his commentaries. His website is www.shammai.org.

Opinion