Can Israel Handle a President Trump?

Ed note–If Trump were ‘their boy’, there wouldn’t be Op Eds with titles such as this.

Shmuel Rosner, NYT

Tel Aviv — All Benjamin Netanyahu wanted in 2016 was a president who would be friendly toward his government.

For the last eight years, President Obama and Mr. Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, have disagreed over Iran, Israeli settlements and just about every other issue. The Democratic Party has meanwhile drifted further from Israel. Its candidates in this year’s election are Bernie Sanders, who boycotted Mr. Netanyahu’s speech to Congress last year, and the more likely nominee, Hillary Clinton, whose history of thorny relations with Israel’s prime minister began in the mid-1990s, when her husband clashed with the first Netanyahu government, and continued through her tenure as Mr. Obama’s secretary of state.

So Mr. Netanyahu and his colleagues in one of Israel’s most hawkish coalitions ever have been biding their time, waiting for Mr. Obama to vacate the White House in the hopes that he’d be replaced by a Republican with whom they could finally see eye to eye. That shouldn’t come as a surprise: Polls regularly show that Republicans are much more supportive of Israel than Democrats, and Republican candidates tend to hold positions — on issues from Iran to the Palestinians — that parallel those of a majority of Israeli voters.

And then along came Donald J. Trump.

Israel depends on an America that asserts itself abroad. Israel needs bipartisan support. It needs stable, predictable American foreign policy. It desires candidates who sing Israel’s praises as often and as loudly as they can. Mr. Trump, who looks poised to capture the Republican Party’s nomination, offers Israel none of those. Mr. Netanyahu has every reason to be concerned and disappointed by what the American political system has produced this election cycle.

On foreign policy, Mr. Trump certainly uses muscular language. He says he would “bomb the hell” out of the Islamic State. That’s a welcome change from Mr. Obama, whose equivocations about the use of force have made America look weaker in the eyes of Israel’s enemies. And Mr. Trump has also been in line with the Netanyahu government in condemning the nuclear deal with Iran. But many of Mr. Trump’s statements on foreign policy suggest he has an isolationist streak. Last September, for example, he said: “Russia wants to get rid of ISIS. We want to get rid of ISIS. Maybe let Russia do it. Let them get rid of ISIS. What the hell do we care?” That poses a problem for Israel: The last thing Israel wants is an America that refuses to lead.

That is, except when it comes to Israeli-Palestinian relations, because if there’s anywhere the Netanyahu government might want to see a hands-off America, it would be on that issue. But here, Mr. Trump suddenly wants to take the lead. He promises he would broker a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians and assures that he would do it as a “neutral guy.” For Israel “neutral” is a code word with one meaning: unsupportive. In fact, “neutral” is how Israelis tend to describe Mr. Obama’s policies by way of expressing displeasure. There are other ways Mr. Trump echoes the Obama administration: He has hinted that the lack of progress on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has to do with Israel’s lack of enthusiasm rather than, as Mr. Netanyahu and most Republicans believe, because the Palestinians aren’t a serious partner for peace.

And then, of course, there is Mr. Trump’s unpredictability. While previous presidential candidates did not always support policies that were to Israel’s liking, most of them had a fairly comprehensible agenda: Mr. Obama wanted to get a deal with Iran, to pull out of Iraq and to promote peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Whatever the Netanyahu government thought about his policies — and it disliked most of them — Mr. Obama almost always tried to do exactly what he promised. Mr. Trump, on the other hand, is vague about his plans, if he has any. Sometimes he promises to destroy the Islamic State, other times he wants to leave the task to Russia. He criticizes the Iran deal, but unlike some other Republican candidates, doesn’t say he will “rip it up” if he is elected.

In recent weeks, Mr. Trump has repeatedly called himself Israel’s “biggest” and “best” friend. When it comes to Israel-United States relations, friendship is a word with many definitions. Early in his presidency, Mr. Obama said that his role as “a friend to Israel is partly to hold up a mirror and tell the truth” when he disagreed with its policies. It’s no wonder that these days, the American president and his Israeli counterpart often look more like adversaries than friends.

Israel’s government hoped a new president would restore a more traditional definition of friendship — one based on mutual trust and support. But if the choice comes down to Mrs. Clinton or Mr. Trump, that’s unlikely. From a President Clinton, Israel’s hawkish government would come under more of the same pressure it received from the Obama administration. From a President Trump … anything is possible.

The rocky relations of the Obama era have damaged the American-Israeli alliance and eroded Israel’s standing in Washington and around the world. Four — or eight — more years of bickering could cause even more lasting damage to the one foreign relationship that is truly critical to Israel’s future.