During his presidency, Donald Trump was an unmitigated disaster for Palestine. If he takes office again, all signs point to him being even worse the second time around. This is why the Biden administration and the Harris-Walz campaign would do well to immediately implement an arms embargo on Israel and move to attack his record in order to lock down support from anti-war voters in swing states.
Trump unilaterally broke the Iran nuclear deal and sold the normalization of the Israeli occupation of Palestine to the Gulf monarchies. He shattered decades of diplomatic progress by recognizing the Israeli annexation of the occupied Syrian Golan Heights and by moving the U.S. Embassy just a few blocks west of the Green Line in Jerusalem.
Illegal settlements in the West Bank and Jerusalem proliferated under Trump. According to the United Nations Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process (UNSCO), during the Trump administration, construction on 6,000 new illegal structures broke ground in the West Bank. Tor Wennesland, who serves as the Special Coordinator, said that such settlements “undermine the prospect of achieving a two-state solution by systematically eroding the possibility of establishing a contiguous, independent, and viable sovereign Palestinian State.”
The most egregious of recent settlement expansion was advanced in the last days of Trump’s rule—the seizure of more than 650 acres of land east of Jerusalem (in an area called E1) functionally cutting off continuity between the north and south parts of the West Bank.
This seemed of little concern to Trump, whose State Department led by Mike Pompeo made it official policy in 2019 to consider the settlements as not in conflict with existing international law.
In early January 2020, Trump sent a three-page letter to Netanyahu that was leaked to the Jerusalem Post two years later. In it, he promised that Israel could annex portions of the West Bank outright in his second term, in strict violation of UN Resolution 2334 concerning Israeli settlements in the West Bank and affirming that the 1967 borders are internationally recognized.
Trump’s former ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, proposes in his new book that once in office again, Trump should move $1 billion in aid from the Palestinian Authority over to Israel’s coffers to facilitate settlement growth as well as officially annex settlements in the West Bank. His son-in-law, real estate developer Jared Kushner, proposed that Israel should ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip while Israel develops what he calls Gaza’s valuable waterfront property.
Trump now regularly calls his enemies “Palestinian,” as if the word itself is a slur. To call Joe Biden, or even Chuck Schumer, “Palestinian” because they are, in Trump’s eyes, too hard on Israel, boggles the mind.
Reviewing the official GOP platform for 2024, with the MAGA promise to “DEPORT PRO-HAMAS RADICALS AND MAKE OUR COLLEGE CAMPUSES SAFE AND PATRIOTIC AGAIN [sic]” it makes sense why Netanyahu would prefer another Trump term to a Harris-Walz administration. While Harris remains mostly quiet on the war—condemning the scale of Palestinian suffering, backing a ceasefire, but saying she won’t stop arming Israel—Trump is adamant that Israel should “finish what they started” and “get it over with fast.”
Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have a lot in common— corruption scandals, criminal indictments, rampant nepotism, judicial maneuvering to secure their political aims—the most glaring similarity between them is their political ambition to take power by any means necessary.
Netanyahu is on the run from a felony conviction that he can successfully avoid so long as he holds office, and this necessitates continuing the genocide in occupied Palestine. Meanwhile, this year’s election in the U.S. is make-or-break for Trump, who faces potential jail time in New York on business fraud charges and a renewed federal indictment for attempting to steal the 2020 election. He is clearly willing to try anything to get back in the White House.
Netanyahu’s refusal to stop the genocide benefits Trump, since the longer it goes on, the more it alienates voters in key swing states that Harris-Walz need to win. While Democratic Party leaders are challenging ballot access for third parties and ringing the alarm about right-wing voter suppression, they refuse to address the majority of their voters who want both an immediate ceasefire in Palestine and an arms embargo on Israel.
A recent YouGov/IMEU Policy Project poll found that a majority of voters who identify as undecided say that their minds would be made up and they would vote for Harris-Walz in November if the campaign pushed for a ceasefire. A lesser amount, though still a comfortable majority, would also be more likely to vote for the ticket if they committed to an arms embargo on Israel. This number grows when considering people who voted for Biden in 2020 but are now undecided.
Trump’s campaign likely understands that the Democratic ticket may be hurting its chances in November by clinging to the same horrific foreign policies pursued by the Biden administration. The campaign’s hard-nosed support for continuing to arm the Israeli military is such a political liability in swing states that a GOP super PAC is beginning to run ads in markets that are heavily Muslim or Arab saying Harris put ceasefire activists “in their place.” They’re aimed at depressing support for Harris among voters who would otherwise be reliably Democratic.
It wouldn’t be difficult for the Harris-Walz campaign to attack Trump’s record on Palestine, but doing so would raise questions about the Biden administration’s own policies, even before the October 7th attacks. The Pompeo doctrine that sought to rehabilitate illegal Israeli settlements was not overturned by the Biden administration until late February 2024, five months after the genocidal war on Gaza began. And it was under the Biden administration that the legal seizure of land that separates the north and south of the West Bank took place. Biden’s State Department has not moved the U.S. embassy back to Tel Aviv.
Yet despite all of this, as well as the tens of billions worth of weapons sent to Israel to commit genocide, Netanyahu is no doubt convinced that another Trump administration and a GOP congress would be the best outcome for his government. While around half of the Democrats in Congress boycotted Netanyahu’s speech this summer, the invitation itself came from the Republican Party. Of the 94 congressional representatives who have signed on to the ceasefire bill thus far, not one of them is a Republican.
By contrast, groups like the Progressive Democrats of America, who have 27 congresspeople and senators in their ranks, are explicitly calling for an arms embargo on Israel. Sen. Bernie Sanders, Ind.-Vt., is currently pursuing a resolution to halt all the weapons shipments. There are signs, as well, that Kamala Harris’s foreign policy advisor, Philip Gordon, may represent a new policy approach on aid to Israel and the genocide in Gaza. Time will tell.
So, why isn’t the Harris-Walz campaign raising alarm as to how devastating another Trump presidency would be for Palestine? To secure a resounding victory, they must win over voters in swing states who, in the age of social media, cannot ignore the tens of thousands of dead in the West Bank and Gaza.
Readers of this publication know the stakes in November. Trump promises to not only be a disaster for Palestinians, but for the American public as well. Organized labor understands this, which is precisely why unions like APWU, AFA-CWA, NNU, IUPAT, NEA, the National Writers Union, UAW, and UE—collectively representing 6 million workers who vote and nearly half of all union workers—are calling for an arms embargo while also endorsing the Harris-Walz ticket.
For all the talk of what a danger Trump is for democracy, the Biden administration and the Harris campaign need to protect their policy gains—such as the strengthening of the National Labor Relations Board, the Inflation Reduction Act, the American Rescue Plan, and the bipartisan infrastructure deal—by making bold moves on foreign policy that are also in the best interests of the working majority, not the privileged few.
While Harris is still ahead in the polls, waking up with the same hangover we had when Trump won in 2016 is not an option. The stakes are just too high.
As with all op-eds published by People’s World, this article represents the views of its author.
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