The Stakes: On Israel and the Gaza war, how would Trump and Biden handle the Palestine conflict if reelected?

This is part three in an ongoing series. Read part one: Abortion. Read part two: The Border.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has long been one of the world’s thorniest problems — a bloody, intractable dispute over land and statehood that has riven the region and vexed American presidents ever since the Jewish state was established in 1948.

But Hamas’s brutal Oct. 7 attacks — and Israel’s brutal response in Gaza — have taken things to a whole new level. On May 26, global outrage erupted after an Israeli strike that killed at least 45 displaced Palestinians at a tent camp near Rafah. Soon after, President Biden outlined a plan for “this war to end [and] for the day after to begin.” In November, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is likely to weigh on the U.S. ballot like never before.

So how could the differences between Biden and former President Donald Trump reshape U.S. policy going forward?

The 2024 election will be the first since 1892 to feature two presidents — one former, one current — competing as the major-party nominees. As a result, this year’s candidates already have extensive White House records to compare and contrast.

Here’s what Biden and Trump have done so far about the Israel-Palestinian conflict — and what they plan to do next.

Where they’re coming from

Trump: As a first-time presidential candidate, Trump’s initial forays into the Israeli-Palestinian thicket were … vague, to say the least.

He mentioned his daughter Ivanka’s conversion to Judaism. In 2016, he boasted about his ceremonial role — 12 years earlier — as grand marshal of New York’s Salute to Israel Parade. And when Trump finally did try to flesh out his views, he angered Republican hawks by pitching himself as “sort of a neutral guy” and predicting that future peace talks would hinge on Israel being “willing to sacrifice certain things.”

But soon enough, Trump started towing the party line. During an uncharacteristically sober and scripted speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in March 2016, he accused then-President Barack Obama of “treating Israel like a second-class citizen” — and pledged to “send a clear signal that there is no daylight between America and our most reliable ally, the state of Israel.”

“The Palestinians must come to the table knowing that the bond between the United States and Israel is absolutely, totally unbreakable,” Trump said.

Yet one thing remained consistent throughout. Trump kept describing himself as a master negotiator — and portraying a possible Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement as “the ultimate deal.”

Biden: A self-described “Zionist in my heart,” Biden has a long, deep history with Israel — and with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

It’s a bond he traces back to his dad, who “had a preoccupation with the Holocaust,” as Biden recalled in 1999.

Biden took his first trip to Israel after becoming a senator in 1973, shortly before the Yom Kippur War. In the years since, Biden has often recounted how Prime Minister Golda Meir leaned over to him during a photo op and whispered that Israel had a “secret weapon.”

“We have no place else to go,” Meir said, according to Biden.

Over the next five decades, Biden met with all of Meir’s successors. In the Senate, he raised a record amount from pro-Israel groups: $4.2 million, according to Open Secrets.

Biden always publicly emphasized his “unshakeable” support for Israel’s security. But he also backed steps toward Palestinian statehood. As early as 1973, he told Meir that Israel should begin relinquishing Palestinian territory that had been seized during the Six Day War in 1967. In 1982, he reportedly pressed Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to halt the building of Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

It was all part of a strategic pattern, according to staffers.

For Biden, “it was very important in public venues … for the United States to stand shoulder to shoulder with Israel,” Frank Jannuzi, who worked for Biden when he was chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told the Associated Press. The idea was that “if Israel felt insecure in the world or isolated because America had somehow distanced itself, then Israel would be less likely to listen to our advice,” Jannuzi added.

What they’ve done as president

Trump: Today, Trump frequently describes himself as the most pro-Israel president ever. That’s debatable — but what’s clear is that once in the White House, he ditched his earlier emphasis on neutrality and consistently ignored Palestinian interests in pursuit of something he could sell as a “peace deal.”

According to a former aide who spoke to the Washington Post, Trump was primarily “interested in the idea of winning the Nobel Peace Prize because President Barack Obama had won it” — and he “thought the Israeli-Palestinian conflict afforded him a chance.”

Entrusting the Middle East portfolio to his son-in-law, the Orthodox Jewish real estate developer Jared Kushner, Trump sided with the Israeli right again and again.

In December 2017, he announced that the United States would move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, breaking with decades of U.S. policy to recognize the city as Israel’s capital — a move seen as provocative to Palestinians, who also claim it as their capital.

In September 2018, Trump stopped funding the United Nations’ agency for Palestinian refugees.

In March 2019, he recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, disputed territory with Syria that was seized during the Six-Day War.

And in November 2019, Trump abandoned the decades-old U.S. position that West Bank settlements are a key barrier to peace.

The Trump administration framed each decision as one that would ease the path to a peace deal. And indeed, in January 2020 Trump released his Peace to Prosperity plan, followed a few months later by the Abraham Accords, an effort to normalize relations between Israel and various Arab states.

The problem is that both measures were completely unacceptable to Palestinians, who had been boxed out of negotiations.

This plan, which was put together by Kushner in consultation with Netanyahu’s government, would have eliminated a path to a viable Palestinian state by dividing up Palestinian territories, surrounding them by Israel and giving Israel total control over Palestinian security. It was immediately rejected by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

The Abraham Accords, in contrast, did go into effect. Previously, the U.S. had insisted that any steps toward normalizing relations between Israel and Arab states would have to be accompanied by progress toward a sovereign Palestine. Trump nixed that precondition and announced a series of bilateral agreements between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco.

Palestinians felt betrayed. “This agreement is very damaging to the cause of peace,” Husam Zomlot, the head of the Palestinian mission to the United Kingdom, told the New York Times, “because it takes away one of the key incentives for Israel to end its occupation — normalization with the Arab world.”

Biden: Biden and Netanyahu have known each other since Biden was a young senator and Netanyahu was a senior official at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C. The president has described their dynamic as a close personal friendship, boasting that his Israeli counterpart still displays a 1980s photo of the two of them inscribed by Biden: “Bibi, I love you. I don’t agree with a damn thing you say.”

As Biden’s words imply, the two leaders often don’t see eye to eye — and the disagreements have only grown in recent years.

Netanyahu and Obama had a famously icy relationship; as vice president, Biden often served as mediator. “Whenever things were getting out of hand with Israel, Biden was the bridge," Dennis Ross, Obama’s Middle East adviser, told Reuters. "His commitment to Israel was that strong.” Even so, Netanyahu all but campaigned for Trump In 2020.

Once in the Oval Office, Biden reaffirmed his commitment to Israel and continued Trump’s normalization policy, with Saudi Arabia next on the list. But Biden also restored funding for the U.N.’s Palestinian refugee agency and tried to steer Netanyahu’s far-right government away from weakening Israel’s Supreme Court.

Then came Oct. 7, when Hamas militants invaded southern Israel, killing more than 1,100, wounding more than 3,500 and taking more than 250 hostage — the vast majority of them civilians.

After the attacks, Biden’s old instincts — full-throated public support for Israel coupled with a behind-the-scenes push for moderation — kicked in. He traveled to Israel, provided the Israel Defense Forces with huge quantities of munitions, refused to publicly call for an indefinite ceasefire and vetoed U.N. resolutions that Jerusalem opposed.

Yet the Biden administration also pressed Netanyahu to limit civilian casualties as the IDF embarked on a counteroffensive; urged post-war planning and diplomacy; imposed sanctions on violent Israeli settlers; and built a pier to deliver aid to Gazans. Eventually, Biden came around to calling for an immediate ceasefire.

In response to the president’s balancing act, Israel has done little to check its military campaign.

With more than 35,000 civilians dead in Gaza and an invasion looming in Rafah — the southern Gaza city where more than a million Palestinians have taken refuge since the start of the war — Biden finally threatened to cut off some U.S. support, pausing the delivery of thousands of bombs and artillery shells in an effort to stop Netanyah from launching an all-out invasion.

“Civilians have been killed in Gaza as a consequence of those bombs,” Biden told CNN. “It’s just wrong. We’re not going to supply the weapons and artillery shells.”

What they want to do next

Trump: Heading into the 2024 election, Trump’s plan for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is unclear — just as it was in 2016.

This may reflect political opportunism, ??as discontent with Biden’s approach — on both the right and the left — threatens to hinder the president’s reelection bid.

After Oct. 7, Trump’s first move was to criticize Netanyahu, who reportedly angered the former president by recognizing Biden’s 2020 victory. Trump also referred to the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah as “very smart” while its fighters fired across Israel’s border in the wake of the Hamas attacks.

As public opinion turned against Israel, Trump warned the Jewish state to “finish up” and “get the job done” because it was “absolutely losing the PR war.”

At the same time, Trump has made sure, as usual, to blame the entire crisis on Biden, saying Israel was attacked because “we show great weakness” and that it “would not have happened” if he had been president. He has also weaponized his immigration policy to signal pro-Israel sentiment, pledging to bar refugees from Gaza, expel immigrants who sympathize with Hamas and impose “strong ideological screening” to keep out foreign nationals who “want to abolish Israel.”

But when outlets such as the Guardian have asked the Trump campaign to clarify the candidate’s views on the war itself — “whether he supports a ceasefire, how he would handle hostage negotiations, whether there are any circumstances under which he would consider conditioning aid to Israel and whether he supports a two-state solution” — they have gotten a “no comment” in return.

Perhaps the best guide to what Trump might do in a second term, then, is to look at what his closest Middle East advisers have said. David Friedman, Trump’s former ambassador to Israel, recently unveiled a plan for Israel to annex the West Bank; Kushner has described a Palestinian state as a “super bad idea.”

Biden: Domestically, Biden is mired in a lose-lose situation over Gaza.

As pro-Palestinian protests consume college campuses and stoke cable news chatter, approval of Biden’s handling of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has fallen to a new low (26%) while disapproval has risen to a new high (60%), according to the latest Yahoo News/YouGov poll.

No other issue — not inflation, not immigration — tests as poorly for the president at this point.

This wasn’t always the case. Right after Oct. 7, Americans were evenly divided over Biden’s handling of the conflict (36% approved, 40% disapproved). But now that the president has shifted from unequivocally supporting Israel’s military campaign to trying to nudge the U.S. ally toward a ceasefire, more Republicans than ever reject his approach as “not pro-Israel enough” (54%) — while a significant portion of Democrats continue to see it as “too pro-Israel” (35%).

Biden’s long-term priorities are clear. “As we look to the future, the only real solution is a two-state solution,” he said in March.

Yet getting there has never seemed more difficult. Last week, Biden said the time had come for a permanent ceasefire — and he endorsed a new, three-phase plan from Israel’s war Cabinet that would begin with a six-week pause in the fighting, continue with hostage-prisoner exchanges and end with an Israeli withdrawal followed by the long-term reconstruction of Gaza.

The next day, Netanyahu reiterated that Israel would not agree to a permanent ceasefire as long as Hamas still retains governing and military power.