Trump’s unfinished business for ‘Greater Israel’
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meets with U.S. president Donald Trump at the White House in Washington DC, March 5, 2018. (Haim Zach/GPO)
Last week revealed the consequences of Democrats’ failure to take the concerns of its base seriously
On Nov. 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. Friedman, however, suggests that we should not look to Trump but to those around him — to figures like former ambassador David Friedman, Jason Greenblatt, and others who pledge to continue the unfinished work of Trump’s first term. These are the people who will be at the center of what Friedman calls a “Greater Israel” period in U.S. policy: supporting Israeli annexation and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, Gaza, and parts of Lebanon; lifting sanctions on settlers; and preventing any bans on weapons transfers. “They have lists of things that they are ready to do,” Friedman says, warning that we should take them at their word.
Friedman is also one of the foremost analysts of Congressional legislative developments relating to Israel-Palestine — an aspect of U.S. policy toward the region that often flies under the radar of mainstream media coverage, but is essential to help understand what we should expect when Trump returns to office in January. On many issues regarding Israel-Palestine, from advancing the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism to sanctioning the International Criminal Court (ICC) for taking action against Israel, there is longstanding and bipartisan pro-Israel consensus in Congress. And there is no reason, Friedman argues, to believe that many Democrats will grow a backbone under Trump.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What are your main takeaways from last week’s election results?
This is obviously a moment of reckoning for Democrats, and Gaza did play a role. If you look at Senator [Bob] Casey’s loss in Pennsylvania, for example, where the amount [of votes] he lost by is smaller than the number of people who voted for the Green Party candidate, who’s a Palestinian American, that seat alone is clearly Gaza-impacted.
And one can argue that it’s impacted even more by the fact that people didn’t show up. If the normal number of voters had shown up, then [anger about Gaza] probably wouldn’t have mattered. The percentage of the [vote for] Green Party [candidates] isn’t greater than in previous years. But this year, it had a definitive impact.
We’re still waiting to see final numbers, but I think turnout is a big piece of it. And to the extent that the Democratic Party assumed that they would have a similar turnout to the last Biden election [in 2020], where you had a really energized base, I think they assumed wrong. Gaza is a piece of the disillusionment of this base: the cynicism, the sense that “this party doesn’t care about me and isn’t reflecting me.” A lot of people either didn’t show up, voted for a third-party candidate, or voted for Trump. And we have clear evidence of this where, down ballot, the Democrats outperformed Harris: [in Michigan], a state where Harris lost but Rashida Tlaib won, or [in Minnesota], where Harris did worse than Ilhan Omar.
There are some very simplistic arguments [about the election outcome being a result of] the fact that [Harris] is a woman or that she’s black. We actually had significant successes for female candidates and women of color in this election, where they did better on the same ticket than she did. Even [Rep. Elissa] Slotkin, a Jewish woman, won a Senate seat in Michigan while Harris lost. So no one can say this is about antisemitism. And Slotkin differentiated herself from Harris: she actually spoke in terms that expressed compassion, empathy, and care for Palestinians. Did it go as far as some of us would have liked? No. Did it go far enough [for constituents] to say, “I believe you, I think you care”? Apparently it did. And that makes a difference.
Democratic Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib. (Stephanie Kenner/Shutterstock)
For years, I’ve been saying to friends in the Democratic Party that if you want a warning for what can happen [here], look at the Labor Party in Israel. If your strategy [to win] is consistently to try to attract people from the right and center right, taking for granted your own base — assuming that “our own base will vote for us no matter what, and that we can win without the people on the far edges of that base” — the Labor Party is a really good example of where that takes you.
Years ago, in the period after the Second Intifada, I was talking to a friend in a Labor Party leadership position. This was when [the party] was saying, “We can’t touch the Palestine issue — it’ll destroy us. We have to keep leaning to the center.” I told them, “You can either wear this issue as a crown and own it and be proud of it and have a clear agenda, and then if you win you’ve got a mandate and if you lose you can criticize the other [party] for not doing what they should have done. Or you can wear it as a heavy chain that will drag you to the bottom of the sea in every election.”
And that’s where we are today: the Labor Party has moved to the right and [as a result] almost out of existence, because the [Israeli] right doesn’t vote for it — they’re not going to vote for “Likud lite,” they’re going to vote for Likud. And we essentially have an Israeli political spectrum that is a battle between parties from the center-right to the far-right and some vestigial left-wing parties. So there’s something for Democrats to learn from the Israeli experience.
So looking at Slotkin’s reelection, or races like Summer Lee’s in Pennsylvania, do you see any new openings for Palestinian rights advocacy — or at least a reflection of the fact that taking a strong, pro-Palestine stance is not an electoral liability?
That’s going to depend fundamentally on the Democratic Party and who it decides to listen to when it learns the lessons of this election. We already saw learned pundits on TV during the election saying Democrats were losing because they weren’t pro-Israel enough. We’re seeing analysis that if they attacked more in the pro-Israel direction, they would have captured whatever part of the Jewish community didn’t vote for them, which is ridiculous — there’s a certain percentage that always votes Republican.
The bottom line is that you’ve had clear messages from the Democratic electorate that there is a broad spectrum of views on Gaza and on Israel, which precedes this election, and that there is a lot of space to be more even-handed.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meets with U.S. President Barack Obama at the White House, on November 9, 2015. (Haim Zach/GPO)
Since the Oslo Accords, the Democratic Party has chosen to continually move further and further to the right [on Israel], and from the Obama era onward, to the [position of] no daylight [between the U.S. and Israel], shoulder-to-shoulder; they are not just with the Republicans, they’re to the right of the Republicans on this. And [that comes] with a clear statement to the base: “We simply don’t care about you, or maybe we consider you a liability and would rather have you mad at us because we think we can gain more from the right than by actually keeping our left. We’re so convinced that you’ll vote for us no matter what, or that we can win without you.”
We saw this a little bit with the Bernie [Sanders presidential] campaign [in 2016]. I remember talking to someone on the Clinton campaign after Bernie dropped out, and they were still showing open contempt for Bernie [supporters]. This person looked at me and said, “We don’t need them. We can win without them.” If you have contempt for your base, at some point your base is going to have contempt for you.
When a significant, decisive portion of your base either casts a protest vote or stays home — effectively saying, “I can’t support you at this point,” or “I’d rather let you lose and learn a lesson than continue to be implicated in policies that are anathema to my values” — does that lesson get learned?
I want to shift from the election results to discussing more about what we expect when Trump takes office in January. To start, could you outline the anticipated policy priorities of a second Trump administration toward Israel-Palestine?
Israel-Palestine has never been central for Trump personally, but it is central for a number of the people who he feels accountable to or cares about — starting with Miriam Adelson, who was one of his top donors.
It’s useful to look at what’s unfinished from [the first Trump administration’s] agenda. The selection of Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israel [who denies that Israel is even occupying the West Bank] proves that Trump intends to advance and claim credit for achieving the “Greater Israel” dreams of messianic Zionist Jews and evangelical Christians. With Gaza, Hagit Ofran from Peace Now was quoted in Haaretz saying she thinks there are going to be settlements before inauguration.