‘Yesssss!’: Israel reacts to Donald Trump’s return to power in US election

Even before the US presidential election polls had closed on Tuesday night, Israel’s far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir had taken to Twitter, posting “Yesssss” in English, while adding emojis of a flexing bicep and images of the Israeli and American flags.

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was only slightly slower in congratulating former US President Donald Trump on his triumph in the US presidential election, becoming the first world leader to do so and framing Trump’s victory as a “powerful recommitment to the great alliance between Israel and America”.

Dear Donald and Melania Trump,

Congratulations on history’s greatest comeback!

Your historic return to the White House offers a new beginning for America and a powerful recommitment to the great alliance between Israel and America.

This is a huge victory!

In true friendship,… pic.twitter.com/B54NSo2BMA

— Benjamin Netanyahu – בנימין נתניהו (@netanyahu) November 6, 2024

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Two days before this week’s election, which saw Trump stage one of the wildest political comebacks in recent history, leading the Republican Party to a landslide victory, polls in Israeli media showed Trump had already won the hearts and minds of many in Israel.

Asked who they would like to see in the White House, almost 65 percent of respondents said they preferred Trump over his rival, Kamala Harris. Among those who identified themselves as Jewish, the difference was even more marked, with 72 percent of those polled telling the Israel Democracy Institute they felt Israel’s interests would be better served by a Trump presidency.

This is a further lurch towards the Republicans. A similar poll conducted by the same body in 2020 showed that 63 percent of Israelis favoured Trump over the eventual victor, Joe Biden.

For Vice President Kamala Harris, who polls showed took a beating for her administration’s unflinching, if occasionally critical, support of Israel’s war on Gaza and its refusal to halt military aid, celebrations of Trump’s win in Israel likely come as another twist of the knife in her defeat.
Trump Netanyahu
Donald Trump shakes hands with Benjamin Netanyahu as they pose for a photo during their meeting at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, in Palm Beach, Florida on July 26, 2024 [Amos Ben-Gershom (GPO)/Handout/Anadolu via Getty Images]
A ‘watershed moment’

“People are celebrating now,” pollster and former political aide to, among others, Netanyahu, Mitchell Barak told Al Jazeera from Jerusalem. “I mean, you’ve seen the polls, people see this as a win for Israel, and for Netanyahu. He [Netanyahu] gambled on this, reckoning that he just had to hold on till November and a Trump victory, and that gamble turned out to be right.

“Within Israel, people see this as being a watershed moment,” he said.

In the build-up to the 2020 election, Trump had told US voters in a bid to win the Jewish vote that “the Jewish state has never had a better friend in the White House than your president, Donald J Trump”.

In this, unlike many of the former US president’s statements, he appeared factually correct.

In his first term as president, Trump defied international norms and recognised the occupied Golan Heights – Syrian territory, two-thirds of which is occupied by Israel – as Israeli territory, accepted Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, subsequently moving the US embassy and installed its pro-settler ambassador there.

Consolidating Israel’s position within the region, the US president also embarked on what he termed the Abraham Accords, leading to the normalisation of relations between Israel and four Arab states; Bahrain, the UAE, Morocco and Sudan, in return for US concessions and, in many cases, access to Israel’s cutting edge intelligence and weapons technology.

More recently, Trump emphasised his wish to re-establish the warm relationship he enjoyed with Netanyahu during his first presidency in July this year when he welcomed the Israeli prime minister to his Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago.

In contrast, the Biden administration’s relations with Netanyahu, while strong, have cooled through the course of 13 months of war on Gaza.

First, there were the repeated US “concerns” over the Israeli campaign on Gaza that has so far killed 43,391 people – mostly women and children – and with many thousands more lost and presumed dead under the rubble. Then there were Biden’s red lines on Israel’s subsequent invasion of Rafah. And finally, the US government’s recent requests that aid be allowed into northern Gaza, which aid agencies have said sits upon the brink of famine. All this appears to have jarred with the Israeli prime minister who, in March this year, went so far as to say that US President Biden – whose unflinching military and diplomatic support has underpinned Israel’s war on Gaza – was “wrong” in his criticism of Israel.

Given the pressure that Netanyahu faces both at home – from people who want a Gaza ceasefire deal to be done to secure some chance of retrieving the remaining Israeli captives there – and abroad, where many countries are appalled by the levels of violence seen in Gaza – Netanyahu needs an American ally that is uncritical, analysts have said.
protest
Demonstrators in front of the Ministry of Defence building in Tel Aviv, Israel, carry banners and posters criticising the government and demanding a ceasefire in Gaza and a swap deal for the captives held in Gaza on November 2, 2024 [Mostafa Alkharouf/Anadolu via Getty Images]
End of the two-state solution?

As well as being more likely to give Netanyahu free rein over his actions in Gaza and the West Bank – as is feared by Palestinians in the wake of the election – Trump may also be the catalyst to putting paid to any notion of a two-state solution.

“People often accuse the Israeli right of never looking too far forward,” independent Israeli analyst Nimrod Flaschenberg said of Netanyahu and his cabinet. “And they’re often right. However, with Trump, they’ve recognised that his election probably marks an end to the two-state solution and Gaza, as we’ve known it.”

In the US, despite its unflinching support for Israel’s war on Gaza, the two-state solution – at least officially – remains a central tenet of the outgoing Biden administration’s foreign policy in the Middle East, as it has previous ones since the signing of the Oslo Accords in the 1990s.

In mid-May, Biden doubled down on the longstanding American policy, telling a graduation ceremony in Georgia: “I’m working to make sure we finally get a two-state solution.”

However, just weeks earlier, Trump appeared to take the opposite stance, telling Time magazine: “Most people thought it was going to be a two-state solution. I’m not sure a two-state solution any more is gonna work.”

Trump’s sentiment echoed the Middle East peace plan, which he called “the deal of the century” and presented towards the end of his first administration in 2020. To some observers, it read like an Israeli wish list.

In it, among other measures, Trump affirmed his intention to recognise the bulk of Israel’s illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank, acknowledge a unified Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, deny the right of return to Palestine’s refugees and, should statehood be granted to Palestine, ensure it remains demilitarised.

With a newly returned Trump now in charge of both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court, there is no legislative or judicial block preventing the incoming Trump administration from delivering what the outgoing Trump administration had promised.

“Trump just doesn’t care. He’s not interested,” Flaschenberg said of Gaza and Lebanon, where Israel has launched devastating attacks against the political group, Hezbollah, so far killing 3,002 Lebanese civilians in the process in recent weeks. “The only thing that’s new is people claiming to be surprised. They shouldn’t be. We’ve been here before,” he said.
‘Slaughter as usual’

“Netanyahu and Trump share the same genocidal agenda,” independent political scientist Ori Goldberg told Al Jazeera from within Israel, from where Al Jazeera is banned from reporting.

“Both are against what they see as ‘progressive wokeness’ or identity politics. What’s more, each assumes that the other is an idiot that they can easily manipulate.”

However, Goldberg cautioned that at least one of those leaders’ assessment of the other may be wide of the mark. “I think Netanyahu may be a little short-sighted in how he sees Trump.

“Trump takes great pride in his antiwar stance,” Goldberg said, suggesting that, whatever promises had been made by Trump in 2020, practical support was likely to be limited to weapons and dollars.

“It’s really unlikely he’d sanction American boots on the ground, but then, let’s face it, whoever accused Israel or Israeli politicians of playing the long game?” he said. “For Netanyahu especially, it’s all about making it through to the end of that day.”

In the meantime, with the weapons, aid and diplomatic support already provided by the Biden administration difficult to improve upon, Goldberg predicted little tangible change in the short term.

“Netanyahu will continue to do whatever he wants, just as he always has,” Goldberg said, “It’ll be slaughter as usual.”