Will Donald Trump become America's last Zionist
president?
David
Hearst
7 July 2026
Trump was the president who gave Israel all it needed,
and more. But with a wave of Aipac-backed candidates defeated in Democratic
primaries, support for Israel is now toxic
https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/will-donald-trump-be-america-last-zionist-president
Hell hath no fury like an Israel scorned.
In the space of just a few weeks - the blink of an eye
in the timeline of this Middle East conflict - US President Donald Trump has gone from being so popular
in Israel he boasted he could be its next prime minister to a man so
hated he could qualify for Israel’s next
Amalek.
The pro-government commentariat was unsparing in their
verdict.
To give you just a taste of the bile aimed at Trump
personally, Yinon Magal, host of a primetime show on Channel 14, called the US president "a loser" and branded his
son-in law Jared
Kushner and Steve
Witkoff as "little
Jews".
Yaakov Bardugo, an Israeli political
commentator, said that Trump and his vice president, JD Vance, were
becoming the modern Chamberlain, the British prime minister associated with
appeasing Hitler in 1938.
Amit Segal, chief political analyst for Channel 12 and
Israel Hayom - which is owned by billionaire Miriam Adelson - said Trump had completely surrendered by
allowing Iran to enrich uranium.
Shimon Riklin, an anchor on Israel's right-wing Channel 14, posted on X that the US was weaker than ever and that no-one
will want to be its ally.
These commentators are close to the Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Some are considered his mouthpiece. And they
have collectively executed a textbook hand-brake turn.
They are turning on the president, who, in his first
term, gave Israel the US recognition of the annexation of the Occupied Golan Heights and
Jerusalem as the capital of
Israel, something that a
long line of his predecessors in the White House had avoided doing.
This is the president who appointed David Friedman, an advocate for the settlers, as US ambassador to
Israel. Friedman abandoned all pretence of being neutral in this conflict
by opening a
tunnel under
the Palestinian neighbourhood of Silwan in Occupied East Jerusalem with a
sledgehammer.
As a presidential candidate, Trump accepted Adelson as the third-largest donor of his
re-election campaign in 2024.
To communicate with the White House, Netanyahu did not
even have to pick up the phone. He already had Kushner, among many others,
whispering in the president’s ear.
Trump: From loyal to traitor
Trump stood
fully with Israel’s genocide in Gaza and continues to do so to this day.
Kushner was the planner behind "the Board of
Peace" and a surreal
plan to
turn Gaza into one of his many Mediterranean beach resorts.
There is little dispute that Trump’s decision to go to
war with Iran was made after a briefing by
Netanyahu and David
Barnea, then Mossad director, in the White House situation room.
That the leader of a foreign country was even allowed
into the situation room was considered a first.
Never before had a US president been so suggestible
and never before had a prime minister of Israel been so close to the beating
heart of a US administration.
This is the man they now brand a traitor.
The real question is how deep does this rift go? And
how permanent? Trump was the president who gave Israel all it needed, and more,
to fight its forever wars.
Is he destined to be the US’s last Zionist president?
A rift of this nature is not unique in the history of
Zionism. There are many examples of Zionists turning against the superpower of
the day on which they depend.
A historic pattern
When 250,000 Jewish refugees were stranded in displaced persons camps in
Europe after the Second World War and Britain refused to lift the ban on immigration to admit
100,000 Jews to Palestine, the Jewish underground united.
Between 1945 and 1948, over 780 British soldiers, police officers, and civilians
were killed in Palestine, many targeted by the Irgun and
the Stern (Lehi) Gang.
All this despite the fact that Britain, through the Balfour
Declaration,
called for a Jewish Homeland in 1917, breaking its
promise to Arab
leaders to set up an Arab state.
The worst atrocity was the bombing of King David Hotel on 22 July, 1946, the British administrative
headquarters in Jerusalem, killing 28 British subjects out of the 91 total
fatalities.
To this day, Israel refuses to honour their graves,
although it does those who bombed the hotel.
In 2006, the Menachem Begin
Heritage Center,
named after the former leader of the Irgun terrorist gang who approved the
bombing and later became prime minister, held an event to commemorate the
attack.
Brigadier Peter Smith-Dorrien, the most senior
official killed in the bombing, lies in an unmarked
grave.
Nor did outstanding bravery in the Holocaust present
any bar to Jewish terrorists.
The Lehi or Stern Gang also killed a Swedish
diplomat, Count Folke Bernadotte, who had negotiated the release of over 4000 Jews
from Nazi concentration camps during the final months of the war.
After the war, he became the first official mediator
of the United Nations in the conflict between the new Israeli state and the
Palestinians. His original sin, in the eyes of the Stern Gang, was to
have negotiated a truce and laid the ground for early relief efforts.
This pattern repeats itself throughout Israel's
history.
Former US President Barack Obama’s parting gift to
Israel was a military
package worth £38bn ($51bn)
over ten years. It was the largest aid package in US history.
Avi Shlaim, the Israeli historian, wrote in
The Guardian at the
time: "Netanyahu invariably repaid Obama’s generosity with ingratitude and
abuse. He never missed an opportunity to attack Obama; he intervened crudely in
the 2012 presidential elections by backing the Republican candidate; he abused
the privilege of an address to a special session of both houses of Congress to
insult their president; and he conducted the most vociferous public campaign to
sabotage the nuclear agreement with Iran.
"One is hard put to think of a more blatant
example of biting the hand that feeds you. Netanyahu’s conduct marks him out as
the special ally from hell."
Former US President Joe Biden, an instinctive liberal Zionist, got the same
treatment. General Amos Gilead wrote that Netanyahu’s "unprecedented berating" of
Biden was an extreme manifestation of ingratitude and a first-rate strategic
failure.
"The United States is Israel’s only true ally,
and Joe Biden is the friendliest president to Israel in history. There is no
strategic logic to lashing out at him and at Senate Democratic Majority Leader
Chuck Schumer, and one can only suspect that petty domestic politics are coming
in lieu of a strategy that is crucial to Israel’s security and future."
Zionism’s true face
For some commentators, what we are seeing is Zionism
revealing its true supremacist face. And that even includes Moshe Ya’alon, a
former defence minister under Netanyahu between 2013-2016.
In an Ynet interview, Ya'alon said that factions within the religious Zionist
movement, which is closely aligned with Israeli settlers, hold a "Jewish
supremacy ideology".
"What is Jewish supremacy? Eighty years after the
Holocaust, it's Mein Kampf in reverse. The superior race is us," said
Ya'alon
Jewish supremacism is now central to Israel’s
mainstream political dialogue. Just listen to how Naftali Bennet, Netanyahu’s
main challenger, talks about Iran and the Palestinians. Or for that matter just
listen to how Israeli Jews talk about the Palestinians.
What is driving Israel’s feud with Trump could just
boil down to the shock of the new.
The shock consists of a US president telling Israel to stop waging war. It's the shock a
settler colony experiences when it realises it has lost control of its
parent.
A similar shock was experienced by the Pieds
Noirs in
Algeria who helped bring Charles de Gaulle to power in 1958, only to see the
French president pivot to self-determination and Algerian independence.
Or take the rage of Northern Ireland’s Unionist
community when the greatest Unionist of them all, British Prime Minister
Margaret Thatcher, signed the Anglo-Irish Agreement allowing Dublin to have a say in the peace
process.
Toxic tsunami
Whatever is brewing inside Israel, it's having a truly
toxic effect on public opinion on the other side of the Atlantic.
It is no exaggeration to say the genocide in
Gaza, the failed war
on Iran, and
Israel’s refusal to
withdraw from Syria, southern
Lebanon and Gaza
have killed off a generation of support in the US.
In both Republican and Democratic parties, the
majority of adults under the age of 50 rate Israel and Netanyahu
negatively, Pew Research reveals. Today, 57 percent of Republicans
between ages 18 to 49 have an unfavorable opinion of Israel, up from 50 percent
last year.
Overall 60 percent of US adults have an unfavorable
view of Israel, up from 53 percent last year. Fifty nine percent have little or
no confidence in Netanyahu to do the right thing regarding world affairs - up
from 52 percent last year.
The direction of travel is clear.
But there is less consensus about what this shift in
public opinion means in political terms and when this could trigger a
meaningful change of policy.
New York, home to the world’s largest Diaspora Jewish
population, has just seen three
incumbent Democrat congressmen unseated and five local
seats taken
by candidates backed by mayor Zohran
Mamdani.
Soon afterwards, Melat Kiros, a lawyer and PhD student, mounted a stunning
upset for establishment Democrats after she was declared the winner of the
Democratic primary in Colorado's 1st congressional district, which includes the
state capital, Denver.
Kiros ousted Diana DeGetter, a politician who had
spent three decades on Capitol Hill and had received over
$1.6m from the
American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac).
Jewish Voice for Peace - Action said that the race proved Aipac was a "toxic
brand" in the Democratic party, and that Democratic voters were tired of
lawmakers who support or defend genocide.
This certainly was a defeat for Aipac. Three
candidates critical of Israel’s genocidal war defeated opponents backed by
Aipac.
But did the results represent a meaningful pro-
Palestinian shift, or simply a Democrat re-incorporation of liberal Zionists,
without the endorsement of Aipac?
Is the party preparing simply for a post-Netanyahu
era, when support for Israel will become baked into the system once again?
One of the victors was Brad Lander who won the primary
for New York’s 10th Congressional district.
Lander, who ran for mayor before endorsing Mamdani,
previously opposed Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) and
increased New York City’s pension fund investments in Elbit Systems, an Israeli
arms manufacturer, during his time as city comptroller. He describes himself as
a liberal Zionist.
"At a time when those in the Palestine solidarity
movement who disrupted the operations of Elbit Systems face the harshest of
state crackdowns, it's a sucker punch to see elements of the same movement
celebrate Lander, given his own involvement with the arms manufacturer
Elbit," Nazia Kazi, professor at Stockton University, told MEE.
After Kiros’s victory, Democratic Senator Bernie
Sanders congratulated her on X. "The tide is turning," he wrote.
"Americans are tired of status quo politics."
Mamdani himself said it was a victory for the working
class, reinforcing findings from a poll last
year that showed
voters were primarily driven by domestic economic concerns, affordable housing,
and the cost of living.
However in their speeches, the wining candidates
presented domestic issues and demands to end the genocide in Gaza as one
package. Their challenge to the status quo was on both fronts.
A long journey
For experts on relations between Israel and US
like Daniel Levy, president of the US/Middle East
Project (USMEP),
America is only at the start of a long journey on recalibrating its support for
Israel.
"It has yet to be seen whether enough of the
movement on the Democrat side can be focused on accumulating power, even if
they have to hold their noses to achieve a shift in policy and this happens
more slowly than any of us would wish.
"Unprecedented opportunities lie ahead and I
would love to see that change happen but it's not there yet. The countervailing
pressure of an entrenched lobby and the capacity for our own side to make
mistakes, as well as the absence of a Palestinian liberation movement driving
this change, all means that it's not there yet."
And yet there has been a real change in US public
opinion.
One of the most significant changes in the United
States has been the shift which moved Palestine from the political margins into
the mainstream.
Once dismissed as a niche concern of the left - or
reduced to questions of Islamism or terrorism - it has become an issue that
cuts across the political spectrum.
Even sections of the American right have begun to view
Israel as a liability rather than an asset. For some conservatives, Israel’s
conduct - its mass killing of civilians, including children, and its open
disregard for international law - has made it increasingly difficult to
reconcile unconditional support for Israel with America’s self-image.
Distancing themselves from Israel has, for some,
become a way of attempting to redeem the American project.
Yet, the mainstreaming of Palestine has also come with
new boundaries. The terms of debate have expanded, but they remain tightly
managed across both conservative and progressive circles.
It has become increasingly acceptable to discuss the
influence of Aipac because doing so allows Americans to frame the problem as
one of undue influence by a powerful lobby.
However, for now at least, the limits of this
debate are clear: Palestinian resistance, self-determination, or the political
aspirations that underpin the Palestinian struggle are issues that remain
largely outside the boundaries of respectable debate.
America could be on a path which goes in stages: an
increase in sympathy with Palestinian suffering and increasing hostility to an
Israel permanently at war.
This in turn leads to the ending of
Israeli exceptionalism in US politics and finally a recognition of the full
rights of Palestinians. It may take several election cycles to achieve this.
But for Netanyahu, or whoever comes after him, making
Israel relevant to the right in America once again will not be a simple task.
Stymied over Iran, but allowed to keep its territorial gains in Lebanon and
Syria, Netanyahu’s reaction will be to restart the war to take over all of
Gaza.
He has to - if he wants to keep the extreme right in
his cabinet and alongside his election campaign. But renewed slaughter in Gaza
will increase the sense of revulsion in the US on both sides of the political
spectrum.
Framing the war as Israel’s "9/11" is a card
that has been played. Even Republicans like Tucker Carlson are reviewing the
War on Terror as a wrongheaded attempt to frame the whole of Islam as an
existential enemy.
For the moment there is no way out. The lobby is not
about to roll over and will stage a ferocious rearguard action in US
politics.
But the more supporting Israel becomes an act of
force, and the less it is an article of faith, the bigger the trouble Zionism
is in.
