“America First” Does Not Mean Unlimited Support for Israel

When I first heard Donald Trump’s plan to help Israel remove the Palestinian population of Gaza—over two million people by most accounts—and turn Gaza into the “riviera of the Middle East,” I thought it was a joke. Since the terrorist group Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, murdering nearly 1,200 Israelis and kidnapping almost 250, the Israeli army has pummeled Gaza, razing much of it to the ground. 

The United States, both under the Biden and now under the Trump administrations, has supplied Israel with the armaments to do this. According to several organizations, deaths of civilians have been in the tens of thousands—many women and children—amid tales of starvation. The stated goal of the Israeli attack on Gaza, the destruction of Hamas, has not materialized, nor has Hamas released the remaining hostages.

Trump’s plan amounts to helping the Israelis ethnically cleanse Gaza of Palestinians. That term does not mean the violent removal of one people by another; most agree that the threat of violence to drive people out of a territory counts as ethnic cleansing. (An example of this happened in 2023 when the Muslim nation of Azerbaijan expelled the Armenian Christian population from the city of Artsakh.) Trump likes to bluster, but the fact that a United States president publicly proposed such an idea is shocking. 

The United States has spent the entirety of the post-WWII era lecturing the rest of the world with slogans like “Never Again” (referring to the Holocaust). But Trump’s plan sounds more like “ethnic cleansing for me but not for thee.” Not only is the plan morally reprehensible but such hypocrisy damages the reputation of the United States abroad.

I have voted for Donald Trump three times for president, mostly for domestic reasons but also because he promised to keep us out of foreign conflicts. Trump and his supporters have touted an “America First” agenda, but this goes out the window when it comes to Israel. Many on the Right, and certainly the Republican Party, see support for Israel as identical with support for the United States. 

Trump has declared himself Israel’s greatest friend in the past. Rep. Andy Barr, a Kentucky congressman, said in an interview during the Republican National Convention that “being pro-Israel is America First. Plain and Simple.” And Vice President J.D. Vance gave a speech in which he declared that the October 7 attack was “an attack on Americans.” Suffice it to say, this is not my idea of “America First” foreign policy.

It seems obvious to me that the United States and Israel have vastly different strategic interests, and this vociferous, virtually unlimited support for Israel makes no sense. Nor do the arguments for such unlimited support. Some on the Right think of Israel as a sort of defender of “Western Civilization” against Islamic barbarism. This notion is preposterous for a number of reasons. Israel is not “Western” in any meaningful sense. It is (for the moment) a secular Jewish ethnostate and neither culturally Christian nor politically democratic as most Westerners understand the term. Arabs and other non-Jews are second-class citizens there, and it is rightly called an apartheid state.

And while it is true that Christianity and Islam are rival religions, the idea that there is an existential struggle going on between them as civilizations is absurd. Islamic terrorism in the Middle East is the result of modern concerns more than ancient hatreds. The creation of Israel drove hundreds of thousands of Palestinians out of their homes, and this is the ultimate cause of Islamic terrorism against Israel. Likewise, such terror attacks as the United States has suffered are due mostly to its support for Israel. Osama bin Laden pointed to two major grievances as his reasons for his attack on 9/11: American support for Israel, and the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia. 

Nor are the moral arguments for supporting Israel convincing. Islamic countries are the major supporters of terrorism in the Middle East, and organizations like Hamas routinely murder Israeli civilians, including women and children. Left-wing activists who idolize Hamas are deranged, but Israel is hardly a moral exemplar. It routinely engages in activity that kills civilians, even though it does not directly target them—again, including women and children. 

Thousands of women and children have died in the Israeli siege of Gaza, which appears to have intentionally starved its civilian population in order to drive the Palestinians out. The attitudes of Israeli soldiers corroborate this. TikTok videos released last year show some destroying Palestinian homes and committing what look like war crimes. Such behavior does not scream “just war” to me or to any disinterested observer.

It is incomprehensible that a client state possesses as much sway over American foreign policy as Israel does. One need not subscribe to paranoid conspiracies about Jewish domination to recognize how effective the Israel lobby is at getting its way. John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s book on the subject, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, makes clear how Israeli concerns drive much of our Middle Eastern policy. 

Mostly, the United States should want to keep the region stable, prevent any power from becoming dominant there, and keep the oil flowing. But our foreign policy has consistently destabilized the Middle East by attacking countries like Iraq and Syria that posed no threat to the United States but did to Israel. Though hardly the only factor, Mearsheimer and Walt’s book makes clear that the Israel lobby and Israeli officials played a role in convincing the Bush administration to invade Iraq in 2003. And the Israelis have been attempting to drag the United States into a conflict with Iran for some time now.

The United States has enough power and leverage over the State of Israel that it could have forced them to accept a two-state solution to the conflict long ago but instead has encouraged it to act recklessly, counting on unqualified U.S. support. I have written before in these pages about the dangers of getting involved in other nations’ ethnic conflicts, and this is pretty much what the Israel-Palestine conflict is, not an apocalyptic fight between good and evil. And like other conflicts in the Middle East, it is an intractable one; although America is the most powerful nation on earth, it cannot end it easily or without great cost to itself.  The United States has enough power and leverage over the State of Israel that it could have forced them to accept a two-state solution to the conflict long ago but instead has encouraged it to act recklessly, counting on unqualified support.Tweet This

And unqualified support for the Palestinian cause is just as big a mistake as it is for Israel. People (especially on the Left), when they realize Israel has done terrible things, often simply latch on to the Palestinians as sacred victims. Americans have a bad tendency to separate foreign policy conflicts into easily identifiable “good guys” and “bad guys,” which is utterly unrealistic; and unflinching support for Israel only makes this worse.

One problem Americans have is they project American politics onto Israeli politics, as if they map on to each other perfectly. I used to welcome news reports that religious Israelis were gaining demographically on secular Israelis, seeing it through the lens of my main concern here, the rise of secularism. But this was a grave error on my part. Unlike in America, the religious Right in Israel really is dangerous. Key members of Benjamin Netanyahu’s political coalition are Messianic Zionists, religious Jews who believe the state of Israel is part of a messianic fulfillment of God’s plan. 

Messianic Zionism is a fundamentalist creed suffused with apocalyptic overtones which has gained a foothold over Israel’s policies, as Netanyahu’s political coalition depends upon their support. The Israeli finance minister refers to the Palestinians as the “Arabs of Judea and Samaria” rather than Israel and Palestine, for example. In 2024, Messianic Zionists held a conference in Jerusalem in which they invoked passages from Numbers to call for the removal of Palestinians from occupied territory. 

Their influence has exacerbated tensions in Israel; a former Defense Minister resigned from the Knesset in January in protest over a bill that grants an exemption for military service to Ultra-Orthodox Jews, even as secular Israelis die in wars promoted by Netanyahu’s government. Commentators on Israel even speak of two different states struggling against each other—the State of Israel, and the State of Judea.

The complexities of the conflict go far beyond this. Trump is trying to get Jordan to take in Palestinians as part of his plan, seemingly unaware that Israel’s expulsion of Palestinians into that country after the Six-Day War of 1967 destabilized Jordan and led to government massacres of thousands of Palestinians. 

The expulsion of Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization after that war led the PLO to flee to Lebanon, and its presence along with thousands of Palestinian refugees triggered that country’s brutal fifteen-year civil war (1975-1990) and has left Lebanon a failed state. The PLO’s continued activities led to Israel invading and occupying southern Lebanon for over twenty years (1978-2000). This led to guerrilla campaigns against the Israelis, which led to the rise of Hezbollah, the Iran-supported paramilitary group with which Israel recently clashed this past year. 

In short, much of the mayhem in the Middle East (not all, certainly) over the past half century and more has been the result of Israel’s ambitions toward its neighbors and the United States’ virtually unlimited support for them. Trump has talked about forcing the Palestinians out of Gaza, which one assumes would involve American troops. Such an action could easily drag the country into a wider Middle Eastern war. If President Trump were to go through with this reckless plan, it could very well blow up in his face and derail his entire presidency. 

There is no need for Americans to take sides in the Israel-Palestine conflict, and it is sheer madness for Americans to “identify” with either, as if our fates were somehow intertwined. One can sympathize with innocent Israeli civilians murdered by terrorist attacks and innocent Palestinians killed by Israeli bombardments. My sympathies are mostly with Middle Eastern Christians like those in Syria, who are now under the rule of former Islamists notorious for the murder of Christians and other non-Muslims. 

In principle, I have no problem with Israel as an ally in the region, and I do think the United States should defend it from destruction. I also believe Palestine should have their own state. These two positions are not mutually exclusive. But if either should conflict with American interests, I would rather see Israel wiped off the map and the Palestinians disappear as a people than have it endanger the interests of the American people. Either would be tragic, but even a nation as powerful as the United States cannot right every wrong but must look to national interests first.

Aside from the strategic concerns listed above, the only other goal the United States should have in the Middle East is to keep both conflicts and the deaths of innocents to a minimum. Both our Vice President and our Secretary of State are practicing Catholics, and Vance especially has been open about his faith. Vance is also someone who has shown a willingness to respond to interlocutors on social media. Catholic Trump supporters ought to ask him if he believes that “pro-Israel is America First” and, if that is in fact what he believes, explain why. We should hold the Vice President and Secretary of State to the fire and demand that the president fulfill his promise to the American people: to put them first before any other nation, including that of Israel.

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