From Israel: Donald Trump, loved no more

TEL AVIV, ISRAEL - There was a time, not so long ago, that people here really, truly loved him. 

One year and one month ago, for example, hostage families gathered in an auditorium near the centre of this city to plead for the release of their loved ones. They were so, so sad, their suffering visible to all of us who had come to listen to what they had to say. They all spoke in English, not Hebrew.

One after another, the family members held up photos of their sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, spouses - the dozens then still being held in tunnels by Hamas in Gaza - and begged for them to be set free. “We won’t feel free until they all return,” one said. “I want my son back,” said another.

They weren’t addressing their own Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who many of them privately said they despised. They were pleading with U.S. President Donald Trump, on that day marking 100 days of his second term.  To the hostage families, Trump was the only leader who could save their loved ones.

Trump often boasts about it. "I'm right now at 99% in Israel,” he’d say, and he wasn’t far off. “I could run for Prime Minister! Maybe after I do this, I'll go to Israel, run for Prime Minister.”

Well, that was then, and this is now, as they say. Just over one year later, all of the hostages are home. And Donald Trump is in no way venerated as he once was.

David Horovitz is the award-winning founding editor of the Times of Israel, and formerly wrote for the Jerusalem Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Independent and more. He is a centrist and arguably one of the best journalists in the world.

This week, Horovitz said out loud what many Israelis now think. The reported terms of Trump’s Iran deal “would confirm the war as an epochal failure,” read the headline on his column, which excoriated the U.S. president. “Its reported terms, quite apart from being humiliating for him, are nothing short of catastrophic,” said Horovitz. 

The despotic Iranian regime remains in power, and is to be compensated for its losses; the murderous Islamic Revolutionary Guard can continue as they were, killing and repressing their countrymen without restraint; the Strait of Hormuz stays in Iranian control; and the 1,000 pounds of weapons-grade uranium remains in Iran. It all represents a calamity for Israel and the world, says Horovitz.

“Israel’s leadership and citizenry, almost all the way across the spectrum, rightly regard the Islamic Republic as a direct, existential threat — a regime that has to be removed for the sake of the Iranian people, the region, and the free world, but first and foremost, for the survivability of Israel,” he says. 

“We know all too well the devastation that Iran’s weaker border proxy, Hamas, was able to wreak on October 7, 2023. We are currently rediscovering the revived deadly capabilities of Hezbollah, across the northern border. And we have every reason to fear that if Iran attains its sought-after nuclear weapons capability, it will seek to use it against the world’s only Jewish state.”

For most Americans, the conflict with Iran, now entering its fourth month, is a far-away annoyance, one that has caused the cost of gas and fertilizer and food to soar. But for Israelis, the prospect of a revitalized Iranian regime - still committed to developing and possessing nuclear weapons - is existential. It is “a clear and present danger to Israel,” Horovitz says.

And it is Trump himself who has ruined his reputation with Israelis. His favoured approach to dealing with adversaries, per his Art of the Deal, is to belittle and mock them on social media and in his pronouncements, to secure concessions and pledges of fealty. It worked for a long time with Canada and the Europeans. But it has never worked with the Iranians, who now regularly mock Trump on his preferred platform of social media.

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