President-elect Donald J. Trump’s emerging team in the Middle East appears poised to push U.S. foreign policy into even tighter accord with Israel’s far-right government, challenging the marriage of convenience Mr. Trump struck with Muslim voters and potentially straining relations between Israeli and American Jews to a breaking point.
The choice of Senator Marco Rubio of Florida as secretary of state, Representative Elise Stefanik of New York as ambassador to the United Nations, former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas as ambassador to Israel and Steven C. Witkoff, a real estate developer and golfing buddy of Mr. Trump’s, as special envoy to the Middle East has delighted the president-elect’s most hawkishly pro-Israel backers.
Matt Brooks, the longtime chief executive of the Republican Jewish Coalition, called the nominees “a true dream team for those who care about a strong, vibrant, unshakable U.S.-Israel relationship.”
But Mr. Trump’s foreign policy picks have dismayed liberal Jews and Arab Americans alike, including Arab and Muslim voters who sided with Mr. Trump as a rebuke to the Biden administration’s support of Israel in its war in Gaza. Some Muslim supporters, such as Rabiul Chowdhury, a founder of Muslims for Trump, said they had been led to believe that the man leading the outreach to them, Richard Grenell, Mr. Trump’s former ambassador to Germany and onetime acting intelligence chief, would be made secretary of state.
Samraa Luqman, an environmental justice activist in Dearborn, Mich., and a co-chair of the Abandon Harris campaign among Arab American voters, said she still believed “anything is better” than the Biden administration officials who “led us into a downward spiral in the last year or so.” But she conceded, “I’m not thrilled about the appointments of war hawks and neo-cons, and have been very vocal about my support for Ambassador Richard Grenell to become the next secretary of state.”
Mr. Grenell did not respond to a request for comment.
Layla Elabed, a founder of Uncommitted, a Palestinian-rights group that initially broke with Democrats and then just weeks before Election Day declared that another Trump presidency would be worse than a Kamala Harris one, said she was not surprised by what she likened to a bait-and-switch.
“Trump’s team lied to a community in anger and despair?” she asked ironically. “Isn’t that his whole thing?”
There can be little doubt how Mr. Trump’s nominees would steer American policy in the region.
Mr. Rubio, the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, is staunchly pro-Israel and aligned squarely behind Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
In May, as President Biden was publicly pressuring Israel not to send its troops into the southern Gaza city of Rafah, Mr. Rubio compared that choice to Allied forces stopping short of Berlin during World War II.
“We know Adolf Hitler’s in a bunker. We know that he has a gun in his mouth. We know that, but don’t go in after Hitler, don’t go destroy Berlin, don’t go in,” he said on Fox News radio, mocking the administration’s calls for restraint. “That’s what they’re basically asking Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israelis to do.”
Ms. Stefanik has led Republican attacks on university presidents over antisemitism on campuses where pro-Palestinian protests flourished after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel started the continuing wars in Gaza and Lebanon.
Mr. Huckabee, an evangelical Christian who has frequently visited Israel, has said that its government has every right to annex the occupied West Bank, though the Palestinians have demanded that land for a future state and much of the world treats Israeli settlements there as illegal under international law.
“There is no such thing as the West Bank — it’s Judea and Samaria,” Mr. Huckabee has said, using the biblical names for the territory. “There is no such thing as settlements — they’re communities, they’re neighborhoods, they’re cities. There is no such thing as an occupation.”
In 2008, Mr. Huckabee even rejected the idea that Palestinian was a distinct Arab identity, instead arguing that the term was a “political tool to try to force land away from Israel.”
Mr. Witkoff, who served as a liaison for Mr. Trump to the Jewish business community during the campaign, has praised Mr. Netanyahu and castigated Democrats who have given the prime minister a cold shoulder. He expressed disgust for the dozens of Democrats who skipped Mr. Netanyahu’s address to Congress in July.
For good measure, John Ratcliffe, Mr. Trump’s pick to direct the Central Intelligence Agency, recently went on Fox News to praise Israel for putting its foot on the throat of Iran and its proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah. “We should be assisting Israel in doing so,” he said.
The new team can expect support among Jewish Republicans and the most stalwart defenders of Israel. Mr. Brooks noted that the Biden administration had, at times, tried to pressure Israel to curtail its attacks in Gaza by threatening to withhold arms and aid, and by “creating daylight between the U.S. and Israel.”
“Under the Trump team,” he said, “there will be no daylight, and Israel will be fully supported to do what it needs to do to eliminate Hamas and Hezbollah and curtail Iran’s nuclear ambitions and support of terror proxies.”
Jonathan Greenblatt, the chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish-led human rights group and an outspoken critic of “anti-Zionism,” congratulated Mr. Huckabee on his selection, advising, “It’s critical that the president’s envoy ensure stalwart U.S.-Israel relations.”
But a majority of American Jews voted once again against Mr. Trump, and liberal Jews reacted with dismay to his choices. Exit polls found that between 66 percent and 78 percent of Jewish voters cast their ballots for Ms. Harris, in line with or considerably higher than the last three presidential elections.
Mr. Trump and his campaign tried hard to use his ardent support for Israel and his accusations of antisemitism within the Democratic Party to peel off Jewish support — though he may well have hurt his cause when he said that Jews would be to blame if he lost.
But as in past years, Jewish voters largely proved more concerned with other issues, including the threat that another Trump term could pose to democratic pluralism and to the position of Jews within an intolerant state, said Amy Spitalnick, the chief executive of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs.
American Jews were repelled, Ms. Spitalnick said, by the idea of “a broader white Christian nationalism backing Trump that would undermine separation of church and state and roll back policies that have made Jews safe.”
Most American Jews also still support a long-term peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians, for which Palestinian sovereignty has long been seen by many as a prerequisite. For those Jews, the Trump team and its consequences could herald a reckoning, as they weigh their love for the world’s only Jewish state with an aversion to policies that could destroy any remaining hope of a two-state solution.
Bezalel Smotrich, a far-right minister in the Netanyahu cabinet, said on Monday that Mr. Trump’s election meant 2025 would be the year for Israel to begin annexing the West Bank.
“I intend, with God’s help, to lead a government decision that says that the government of Israel will work with the new administration of President Trump and the international community to apply Israeli sovereignty over Judea and Samaria,” he said.
If, with Mr. Trump’s assent, the Israeli right makes good on threats to annex large parts of the West Bank, to return settlers to Gaza and to begin to evict Palestinians, American and Israeli Jews could be driven apart irrevocably, said Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of the liberal Zionist group J Street.
“There’s a big, big philosophical question brewing here, a generational question about the concept of Jewish unity,” Mr. Ben-Ami said. The coming years, he added, could herald “a fundamental break between the threads of international Judaism.”
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