Trump is not America First. Like Biden, he’s Israel First by Omar Suleiman

A billboard shows a slogan in support of US President Donald Trump in Tel Aviv, Israel, on 5 November 2024 (Reuters)

Some Democrats will read this piece in hopes of finding an apology, or maybe simply an acknowledgement of a strategic miscalculation on the part of many Muslim leaders who advocated for third-party voting in the recent US presidential election.

They will find no such concession here, and I urge them to self-reflect instead on the state of their party – one that oversaw and continues to oversee the Israeli genocide of thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians in Gaza, a process that has continued for more than 13 months.

Their party didn’t sit silently as this happened, nor did it turn a blind eye; rather the Biden administration actively supported the genocide financially, militarily, and in every way imaginable.

As for the incoming president, Donald Trump, his America First policy agenda – peddled since his last term in office not as a departure from US global dominance, but as a shift to balancing global powers and making “foreign policy decisions based on outcomes, not on ideology” – has been touted as a reprioritisation of American citizens and their concerns.

But Trump’s first tenure revealed this promise to be smoke and mirrors – and his second-term cabinet nominations paint an even bleaker picture.

To many Americans, the idea of putting national interests first is intuitive, agreeable and bipartisan. But what if your elected politicians are not truly “America First”? What if Israel’s national security interests trump your own domestic necessities, such as affordable healthcare and housing?

For decades, millions of Americans have sounded the alarm over the Israel lobby’s outsized influence on US policymaking. Bipartisan support for Israel – manifested by sending billions of US taxpayer dollars overseas – is only reinforced when challenged.

“The United States’ commitment to Israel is ironclad,” President Joe Biden posted on X (formerly Twitter), as Israeli President Isaac Herzog visited the White House a few days ago.

Funding occupation
And ironclad it is. In the year since 7 October 2023, the US has gifted Israel more than $22bn in military aid. On its own, this is a difficult figure to comprehend.

To put it in context, this past September, after Hurricane Helene killed more than 230 people in the southeastern US and affected hundreds of thousands of households, the Biden administration approved a measly $1bn in assistance “for individuals and families to help pay for housing repairs, personal property replacement, and other recovery efforts”.

The American victims of Hurricane Helene thus got less than five percent of what Israel received in the past year alone. More funding for Israel may be approved before the end of 2024.

How do Americans keep funding an occupation, apartheid and ongoing genocide? As political scientist John Mearsheimer put it in a recent interview with Al Jazeera, the US relationship with Israel today is neither rational nor strategic.

Efforts by anti-Zionists to weaken the grip of groups like Aipac on US policymakers are strategically categorised as antisemitism, designed to censure and stifle criticism of the ideology of Zionism by conflating it with hatred of the Jewish people.

There are no strategic benefits to continuing to serve as Israel’s lifeline in a region where it has only burned bridges for decades

The counterarguments from policymakers and pro-Israel groups are mind-numbing: “Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East”, or “Israel is a strategic ally”, or even “we share Judeo-Christian values”. Arguably the most egregious is the claim that Israel’s army is “the most moral in the world”, another easily debunked fallacy.

Israel is not “the only democracy in the Middle East”. It’s an apartheid state where Palestinians endure segregation and discrimination. As author Ta-Nehisi Coates put it, visiting the occupied West Bank is like stepping into the Jim Crow South. Palestinians are treated as subhuman.

In addition, Israel’s occupying military is not the “most moral army in the world”. This is a myth, tactically employed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his cronies, and large swaths of Israeli society to deceive a western leadership that seeks an altruistic ally to ward off “barbarians”.

But there’s no hiding the monstrous picture painted by data and evidence: more than 43,000 slaughtered Palestinian men, women and children over the past year alone; reports of sexual assault and rape of Palestinian prisoners; mass executions of Palestinian men with their hands tied; mass graves; children shot in the head by Israeli snipers – indeed, the evidence has become overwhelming.

The Gaza genocide will feature as a bloody stain on the Biden-Harris administration. The new president-elect’s tenure could be even worse.

Encouraging genocide
The US ambassador to Israel during the first Trump administration, David Friedman, was instrumental in brokering the Abraham Accords, Israel’s failed attempt to achieve an artificial peace with a handful of anomalous Arab regimes. What was termed the “deal of the century” is now a laughing stock. More than a year of genocide has had a profound impact on the region; anti-Israel sentiment is now ironclad.

So what will Trump’s second term look like? We know the Republican Party will encourage the genocide of Gaza, while accelerating land theft in the occupied West Bank. Trump’s cabinet nominations – all staunchly pro-Israel – point to an escalation in blind support for Israel’s war crimes, and the criminalisation of anti-occupation efforts.

Lee Zeldin, Trump’s nominee to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, in 2022 introduced the Israel Anti-Boycott Act to combat the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement. Trump’s nominee for secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has vehemently opposed the notion of a ceasefire in the onslaught against Gaza, and throughout his empty career has expressed blind support for “resupplying” Israel’s arsenal.

Kristi Noem, the South Dakota governor and Trump’s nominee for Homeland Security secretary, describes Israel as having every right to defend its “God-given homeland”, calling the Biden administration “weak” on foreign policy. Apparently, sponsoring a genocide in Gaza isn’t enough.

Trump’s pick for ambassador to Israel is former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, an evangelical Zionist who believes in a Greater Israel and dreams of building a holiday home in the West Bank. “There’s no such thing as a settlement. They’re communities … There’s no such thing as an occupation. The only occupiers were the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Turks, the Brits, the Romans. They were occupiers. The Jews are the occupants,” Huckabee said.

Stop supporting Israel, the occupier, the genocidal entity, the apartheid regime, and you win the entire region

To hell with your holiday home on occupied land, Mike.

There are no strategic benefits to continuing to serve as Israel’s lifeline in a region where it has only burned bridges for decades. There is no rationality to this relationship. Stop supporting Israel, the occupier, the genocidal entity, the apartheid regime, and you win the entire region. Stop supporting Israel, and you organically win over the peoples of the Arab and Muslim world.

Recommit to funding Israel’s crimes, and one Abraham Accord after another will fail. A Trump presidency is likely to make things worse before they get better, but a real America First agenda – uninfluenced by flawed ideology – would finally stop supporting Israel and its war crimes.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

Imam Dr. Omar Suleiman is a world renowned scholar and theologically driven activist for human rights. He is the Founder and President of the Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research, and an adjunct professor of Islamic Studies in the Graduate Liberal Studies program at Southern Methodist University as well as member of the Ethics Center Advisory Board. He’s also the resident scholar of the Valley Ranch Islamic Center and Co-Chair Emeritus of Faith Forward Dallas at Thanks-Giving Square