Former president Donald Trump sharpened his criticism of Israel over the country\u2019s handling of the war in Gaza on Thursday, expressing concerns about bad optics and questioning Israel\u2019s approach to the conflict.<\/p>\n
When asked by conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt on Thursday whether he was \u201c100 percent with Israel,\u201d the former president did not give a direct answer but emphasized the optics of the ongoing conflict, saying the country is \u201closing the PR war.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019re releasing the most heinous, most horrible tapes of buildings falling down,\u201d Trump said. \u201cAnd people are imagining there\u2019s a lot of people in those buildings \u2026 and they don\u2019t like it. And I don\u2019t know why they released, you know, wartime shots like that. \u2026 To me, it doesn\u2019t make them look tough.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump said his advice to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would be to \u201cget it over with,\u201d and \u201cget back to normalcy.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m not sure that I\u2019m loving the way they\u2019re doing it. \u2026 You have to have a victory, and it\u2019s taking a long time,\u201d he continued.<\/p>\n
Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has in recent weeks found himself increasingly at odds with the Republican Party\u2019s de facto position of steadfast loyalty to Israel.<\/p>\n
In an interview last month with the Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom, Trump similarly urged Israel to \u201cfinish up your war\u201d and said that \u201cIsrael has to be very careful, because \u2026 you\u2019re losing a lot of support.\u201d<\/p>\n
At the same time, Trump has also criticized Biden\u2019s handling of the conflict. During his interview with Hewitt, Trump hit Biden for his handling of Israel\u2019s war, saying, \u201cThe whole world is blowing up with this idiot president we have.\u201d The former president also repeated his assertion that \u201cOctober 7th would have never happened\u201d if he was president, but he didn\u2019t clearly outline what he would do differently about the war if reelected.<\/p>\n
Republicans in Congress, meanwhile, have been rallying around Netanyahu and the Jewish state, particularly since Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N. Y.), who is the highest-ranking Jewish official in the United States and a staunch ally of Israel, took to the Senate floor last month to call on Israel to hold a new election to replace Netanyahu.<\/p>\n
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who has been critical of Schumer\u2019s remarks, said last month that \u201cbipartisan support for Israel seems to be cracking on the political left in this country.\u201d House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has said that he wants Netanyahu to address Congress and called Schumer\u2019s comments \u201chighly inappropriate.\u201d He also said it\u2019s \u201cplain wrong for an American leader to play such a divisive role.\u201d<\/p>\n
After Schumer\u2019s call for new elections in Israel, Netanyahu updated Senate Republicans on the status of the war and criticized Schumer, as multiple GOP lawmakers reassured him that they strongly disagreed with the majority leader\u2019s critiques.<\/p>\n
Trump made support for Israel a cornerstone of his presidency and brokered the 2020 Abraham Accords, a set of treaties negotiated during his administration that normalized relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco.<\/p>\n
But since leaving office, he\u2019s been harshly critical of Netanyahu \u2014 once one of his greatest allies.<\/p>\n
According to interviews in 2021 about his Middle East peace efforts, Trump was incensed with Netanyahu for congratulating President Biden on his 2020 election victory as Trump disputed the results. Trump said the call was a betrayal of their relationship and all the work he\u2019d done to help Israel during his presidency.<\/p>\n
Trump has also criticized Israel\u2019s approach to the war since it began nearly six months ago. Just days after the deadly Hamas attack on Oct. 7, Trump said at a rally that Netanyahu \u201cwas not prepared and Israel was not prepared.\u201d He also called Hezbollah terrorist attackers \u201cvery smart\u201d and said Netanyahu \u201clet us down\u201d in the lead-up to a U.S. drone strike that killed Iranian general Qasem Soleimani in 2020.<\/p>\n
Republican presidential candidates still in the primary race at the time \u2014 including his former vice president Mike Pence and his former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley \u2014 condemned Trump\u2019s comments.<\/p>\n
Biden, meanwhile, continues to face pressure from members of his party who are concerned about the growing humanitarian crisis and are calling for the administration to cut off U.S. military aid to Israel. The tension has amplified since seven humanitarian aid workers were killed this week in an Israeli airstrike.<\/p>\n
On Thursday, in his first call with Netanyahu since the strike, Biden pushed for \u201can immediate cease-fire\u201d and \u201cmade clear the need for Israel to announce and implement a series of specific, concrete, and measurable steps to address civilian harm, humanitarian suffering, and the safety of aid workers,\u201d according to a White House summary of the call.<\/p>\n
U.S. policy with respect to Gaza, the White House said in the summary, \u201cwill be determined by our assessment of Israel\u2019s immediate action on these steps.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Former president Donald Trump sharpened his criticism of Israel over the country\u2019s handling of the war in Gaza on Thursday, expressing concerns about bad optics and questioning Israel\u2019s approach to the conflict. When asked by conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt on Thursday whether he was \u201c100 percent with Israel,\u201d the former president did not give […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":2759,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2758","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2758","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2758"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2758\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2759"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2758"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2758"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2758"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}