Making Israel Great Again?

The apparent abandonment of Ukraine and Adam Boehler’s negotiations with Hamas have raised serious doubts about Donald Trump’s commitment to Israel.

President Trump Holds a Press Conference with Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel. Streamed live on 5 February 2025 on the The White House YouTube channel.

This essay first appeared at Quillette. Read more by Benny Morris here → https://quillette.com/author/benny-morris/

Washington’s grand strategy on the Palestinian issue remains unclear, as does its understanding of the players involved, especially Hamas, which has ruled the Gaza Strip since 2007. This is causing considerable anxiety in Jerusalem.

These questions have gained pertinence and urgency following a series of interviews that Donald Trump’s new “hostage envoy,” Adam Boehler, gave to American and Israeli media platforms. Over recent weeks, Boehler has directly negotiated a possible new hostage–prisoner exchange deal with Hamas—at Trump’s behest, but apparently behind Israel’s back. “We are not an agent of Israel. We have specific [American] interests at play,” he stated, apparently in reference to the American/Israeli dual citizens who were among those taken hostage by Hamas in its 7 October 2023 assault on southern Israel and who remain in captivity—whether dead or alive—in tunnels in the Gaza Strip. Officials in Israel are troubled by the thought that Washington may be seeking the separate release of American hostages alone, rather than negotiating a deal that encompasses all those held in Hamas captivity.

But Israel’s irritation about the interviews was more general than this. Boehler has opined of Hamas that, “They don’t have horns growing out of their head. They’re actually guys like us. They’re pretty nice guys.” After this unsurprisingly ruffled feathers in Jerusalem, Washington immediately issued a correction: “They are definitely bad guys.” But Boehler then predicted that Hamas will soon disarm and “fade away” from the Gaza Strip—an idea that is completely divorced from reality. On the contrary, over the past months, Hamas appears to have recovered militarily and is clearly in control of Gaza’s civilian population. In his interviews, Boehler even got the hostage/prisoner terminology backwards: repeatedly calling the Palestinians held in Israel’s prisons—most of whom are convicted terrorists, including mass murderers—“hostages,” while designating the Israelis languishing in Gaza’s tunnels, most of whom are civilians, “prisoners.”

The US government, along with the European community, has long defined Hamas as a terrorist organisation and Trump has repeatedly said that it needs to be eradicated. Is this still Washington’s position? Or is Hamas now an acceptable negotiating partner and a legitimate partner in the future governance of Gaza? And if so, could Hamas also be seen as a legitimate party that might eventually govern the West Bank, a region that, in the past, Trump has hinted should come under Israeli rule? Washington’s policy on the Palestinian issue may be in real flux, and Israel’s right-wing leaders are deeply concerned.

Boehler’s missteps did not result in his immediate dismissal; he remains on the White House staff. Yet Hamas is still dedicated to Israel’s destruction—it is a deeply antisemitic organisation and its spokesmen have promised to repeat the kind of assault we saw on 7 October 2023 many times in the future. Many observers have cast doubt on the strength of Trump’s opposition to antisemitism over the years. In recent days, the Administration partially defunded Columbia University, which, since 7 October 2023, has been the scene of major, antisemitism-inflected riots and building takeovers, and the government has also charged or detained some of the more prominent foreign-born progressives who have backed Hamas and called for Israel’s destruction, “from the River to the Sea.” But most thinking Israelis remain doubtful about Trump’s real convictions—if, indeed, he has any—about Jews, and by extension about Israel.

Publicly, Benjamin Netanyahu and his supporters continue to paint Trump as a staunch, irreproachable supporter of Israel. They point to the fact that, during his first term as president, he transferred the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, as Israel had long demanded, and remind people that he helped facilitate the Abraham Accords of the early 2020s, which normalised the Jewish State’s relations with Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, and even Sudan. And in recent weeks, he revoked his predecessor Joe Biden’s suspension of certain weapons shipments to Israel, including 2,000-pound (907 kg) aerial bombs and 155 mm artillery shells.

But serious doubts remain as to Trump’s commitment to the “special relationship” between Washington and Jerusalem, especially in view of his apparent abandonment of Ukraine and his very public efforts to distance the United States from its traditional commitments to European security.

The American–Israeli special relationship predates even the establishment of Israel itself in May 1948. Six months earlier, defying his own State and Defence departments and the CIA, President Harry Truman ordered America to support the establishment of a Jewish State at the UN General Assembly, as part of a push for a two-state solution to the Zionist–Arab conflict. And in May 1948, Truman recognised Israel within minutes of its declaration of statehood. But Truman was not all in. During the 1948 War, he embargoed all arms shipments to Israel, while the country was fighting for its life against Arab aggressors, leaving it reliant on Stalin-endorsed Czech arms shipments to win the war. The following American Administration, under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, not only effectively embargoed arms sales to Israel but supported the Soviet demand that Israel withdraw from Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip following the Sinai–Suez war of 1956.

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