What a Second Trump Presidency Could Mean for the Pro-Palestine Movement
While it may have seemed that a second Trump Administration couldn’t possibly enact policies toward Israel and Palestine that are worse than those of former President Joe Biden, early signs indicate that Trump intends to even more forcefully aid and abet Israel’s actions in the region. But the extreme rightwing nature of President Donald Trump’s foreign policy agenda may open the door to finally changing U.S. policy towards the conflict—or at least force establishment Democrats to reckon with the potential consequences of failing to oppose him on this issue.
Under Biden, the United States was an international outlier in its support for Israel’s devastating war on the civilian population of Gaza. Biden refused to apply his considerable leverage on the Israeli government to end the slaughter of civilians in Gaza, or to condition military aid to Israel on the state ending its illegal occupation of the West Bank and allowing for the emergence of a Palestinian state. The former President repeatedly blocked efforts by the United Nations to impose a ceasefire and vetoed an otherwise unanimous U.N. Security Council resolution recognizing Palestine, while dismissing the United Nations’s support for a two-state solution, insisting that a Palestinian state could only emerge on terms to which Israel would voluntarily agree. Biden upheld four of Trump’s controversial initiatives during his first term: recognizing Israel’s illegal annexation of Syria’s Golan Heights (which the U.N. Security Council unanimously declared “null and void”), maintaining the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem (making the U.S. the only major country to do so), refusing to reopen the U.S. Consulate in occupied East Jerusalem, and refusing to allow the Palestinian diplomatic office in Washington to reopen. He even spoke out against nonviolent civil society movements against the occupation, denouncing calls for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions.
In the final year of his term, Biden took a few modest actions to limit Israeli violence against Palestinian civilians. In May of last year, he delayed a shipment of 3,500 bombs, including 2,000-pound unguided bunker busters that the Israeli military was using to blow up entire apartment blocks in Gaza. In November, he imposed sanctions such as freezing assets against nine far-right settler militia leaders and their organizations which have terrorized Palestinians in the West Bank with shootings, arson, and other attacks. Al Jazeera reported at that time that the Biden Administration had sanctioned 33 individuals and entities in total over the preceding ten months.
But Biden’s actions did little to curb settler violence overall: More than 1,400 settler attacks took place in the eleven months after he first imposed the sanctions, and he refused to condition military aid to the Israeli armed forces, which openly collaborated with the settler militias, on stopping the terrorism. In this way, his approach toward Israel and Palestine resembled former President Ronald Regan’s approach to the Salvadoran Civil War, during which administration officials condemned far-right death squads and denied visas to some of their leaders while also enabling further killings by insisting on continuing U.S. support for the death squad’s Salvadoran military backers.
There is no question that Trump’s policies for Israel and Palestine will be even more devastating for Palestinians. He recently proposed a plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza, suggesting that Palestinians should leave the Gaza Strip to “clean out” the region in order to make room for Israeli development in a territory he has described as a “phenomenal location, on the sea” with “the best weather.”
His appointments of former Arkansas Governor Mike Hukabee as U.S. Ambassador to Israel and U.S. Representative Elise Stefanik as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations are similarly disturbing. During her confirmation hearings, Stefanik insisted that Israel has a Biblically endowed right to occupy the entire West Bank, while Huckabee has previously claimed that there is “no such thing as a West Bank” and “no such thing as a Palestinian.”
Trump has made clear that his support for Israeli expansionism and repression of Palestinians is not simply the work of powerful Zionist lobbying groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), but part of a broader racist and imperialist agenda that aligns him with far-right Israeli officials who have called for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
But his presidency may allow for the fuller emergence of a popular movement to more effectively challenge U.S. policy related to Israel-Palestine. Just as scores of Democratic Congresspeople who were unwilling to speak out against the Vietnam War when Lyndon Johnson was president became outspoken opponents of the war after Richard Nixon took office in 1969, we may hope to see a similar Democratic shift toward adamentally opposing Israel’s actions.
Peace and human rights activists can now label Democrats who support the U.S.’s continued military support of Israel’s far-right government as “pro-Trump,” as they have chosen to back the president’s policies against the wishes of what polls show are the 77 percent of registered Democrats who oppose military aid to Israel. The same goes for those who support Trump’s attacks against the United Nations, the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, and other bodies which have attempted to support a universal application of international humanitarian law.
Under the new Trump Administration, the U.S.’s status as an extreme outlier in the international community may bring renewed attention to many ways in which Trump continually breaks international legal norms and politically isolates the U.S.. Just like opposition movements against the Vietnam War, South African apartheid, U.S. intervention in Central America, and the invasion of Iraq all eventually became mainstream liberal causes, so too could opposition to the Israeli occupation, apartheid, and genocidal violence in Palestine gain more mainstream public support under the Trump Administration. Trump’s presidency, devastating as it may be, provides us an opening to force a choice upon Democrats: Are you with the majority of Americans and the international community, or are you with Donald Trump?