Annex, Baby, Annex: Why Israelis Will Soon Regret Their Glee Over Trump's Triumph - Israel News - Haaretz.com
A person walking near a congratulatory billboard for U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, in Jerusalem last week.Credit: Ronen Zvulun/Reuters
Israelis don't vote in U.S. elections, but boy, Donald Trump wished they could. There would have been no nail-biting polls, no preparations for calling electoral fraud.
A survey from the Israel Democracy Institute released just two days before the election found that 65 percent of Israelis thought Trump would be better for Israel's interests – no less than a stunning 72 percent of Jewish Israelis.
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Although Joe Biden gave and gave and gave throughout this war, while Israel took and took, Israelis were astonishingly unmoved. Only 13 percent thought his successor, Kamala Harris, would have been better for Israel's interests. This trend would be inexplicable, but Benjamin Netanyahu has spent years meticulously dismantling Israel's bipartisan trust in the United States – the mirror image of a breakdown of the once-paradigmatic "bipartisan consensus" in U.S. policy toward Israel. For Israelis, it's Democrats bad, Republicans good – for the Jews, that is.
Despite the glee at a Trump victory in Israel, looking at his emerging cabinet, the majority of Israelis might one day think twice about what they wished for.
Mike Huckabee visiting a new housing complex in the West Bank settlement of Efrat in 2018.Credit: Oded Balilty/AP
Trump's designated U.S. ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, is a Southern Baptist minister with a messianic appetite for Jewish supremacy in the West Bank. He gushes over Israeli land grabs, and breezily denies the existence of the Palestinian people with a divinely infused arrogance that reminds me of Bezalel Smotrich. They certainly agree about full Israeli conquest of the West Bank.
If Huckabee is Smotrich's metaphorical (and metaphysical) twin, Israelis can't be too happy about him: Smotrich is so unpopular that he only sometimes scrapes past the electoral threshold in polls – many times dipping below.
Meanwhile, Trump's choice of secretary of defense is the army veteran and Fox News commentator Pete Hegseth. One of his claims to fame is defending U.S. servicemen accused of committing war crimes in Iraq. That gives him some overlap with the Israeli public, when a majority of Israelis (Jews) broadly supported Elor Azaria, the soldier who executed an incapacitated Palestinian attacker in 2016.
But even some right wingers in Israel (and most others) were disgusted by the allegations against reservists in Sde Teiman who tortured and raped a prisoner. We don't have hard data, but many were horrified at the riots of far-right extremists, who banged on the doors of Israel Defense Forces bases, infiltrated and roamed around seeking to free the suspects. Hegseth would have been on their side.
Then-President Donald Trump with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem seven years ago.Credit: Sebastian Scheiner/AP
Trump has also tapped his golfing and real estate crony and loyalist Steve Witkoff as Middle East envoy. The Israeli version of golf and real estate is champagne and cigars – it's as if Netanyahu appointed Arnon Milchan and Shaul Elovitch, or Sheldon himself, to rule over big policy issues.
It's no surprise that this emerging team looks like a Palestinian nightmare. Huckabee has doubled down on his support for Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank ("Well, of course," he told Haaretz) like a response to Smotrich's birdcall just days before Trump picked him, calling on the administration to annex, baby, annex.
Most Israelis do not love this idea. A new survey by the Jewish People's Policy Institute Index found that two-thirds of Jewish Israelis – and a consensus of Arabs – opposed annexation and settlements in any part of Gaza, for one thing.
Gaza is still a far-reaching aim (for now). But JPPI Index also asked Israelis about the West Bank, twice, many months apart. The researchers found that each time, just over one-third of Jews agreed that "Israel should strengthen its control over Palestinians, expand the settlements, consider dismantling the PA, and maybe annexing Judea and Samaria." Obviously, fewer Arabs agreed. In total, just 29 percent of Israelis supported the proposition in the current survey.
A Jewish settler writing "We will be back and return to our borders," in the Gaza settlement of Netzarim in 2005.Credit: Getty Images
Perhaps most surprisingly, the same survey noted that 35 percent of the total Israeli public supports "separation from the Palestinians, including dismantling settlements outside the big blocs, while allowing the IDF to move around the territory and foil terror infrastructure" – not exactly freedom for Palestinians, but far from messianic annexation. Moreover, 28 percent preferred that Israel try to reach a peace agreement with the Palestinians based on a two-state solution (roughly consistent with my own surveys).
If Trump 2.0 is a reprise of the first term, he will be full-force chummy with Netanyahu once again. Israelis aren't there: For most of this year, 70 percent have hoped Netanyahu would resign, and his government couldn't win an election if it was held today, according to all polls.
The majority of Israeli Jews may have been lulled by Netanyahu's constant portrayal of Trump as Israel's best friend. But if Trump's administration advances a theocratic, expansionist, isolated, authoritarian rogue state, they might one day realize that Netanyahu sold them a lemon. (TP-As Trump Maniacs have, and are, doing to Americans, and to this email list!)