I’ve mentioned a few times that in addition to everything else Trump’s Iran “deal” is an electoral disaster for Benjamin Netanyahu. What I’ve been wondering is what the deal would do to Israelis attitudes toward Donald Trump. On its face that shouldn’t be complicated. If Israelis are mad at Netanyahu for getting boxed into Trump’s deal and coerced into honoring a treaty Israel wasn’t a party to, presumably they should be far angrier at Trump himself. After all, he made the deal. But Israelis’ attitudes toward Donald Trump don’t allow it to be quite that simple. Pains me as it does to say, Israelis really like Donald Trump. Like really like Donald Trump, in a way that transcends Netanyahu’s to-date iron hold on Israel politics.
Now we get the beginnings of an answer to the question. A new poll from Israel’s Channel 12 finds that 71% of Israelis don’t trust Trump to look out for Israel’s interests in an Iran accord compared to 13% who do. The same pollster asked the same question only a week ago, when the outlines of the deal were coming into view but they weren’t official. That poll found only 61% trusted Trump. So Trump’s standing in Israel is bad and falling fast. To give some context, a February poll by the Jewish People Policy Institute found that 73% of Israelis thought Trump was a better than average president and 49% thought he was one of best in American history. The results were highly polarized. 92% of the Israeli right thought he was a good president. But even 34% of the Israeli left thought so.
Of course these are not the same questions. So you can’t say that Netanyahu went from 73% for him to 71%. But these are both basically trust/approval type questions. So they give some sense of the sea change in opinion about him.
Relatedly, the same poll found that 52% of Israelis believe Netanyahu’s actions harmed Israeli interests in the Iran deal while 24% think it helped.
Does it really matter what Israelis think of Donald Trump? Maybe not that much. It’s not that Israelis liked Donald Trump and then decided to back his policies. It’s that Trump celebrated and enabled Israel’s most aggressive geopolitical aspirations and so they thought he was awesome. Finding out Trump’s full of it and would drop them the moment it became necessary or convenient may not have much impact beyond their opinions about him. But it’s at least a major blow to Netanyahu. He played a central role in convincing Trump to launch this war, which Israelis overwhelmingly believe they lost or ends a stalemate (lost 43%, inconclusive 41%, won 11%). Just as much though, in what we might call the third phase of Netanyahu’s prime ministerial career — the one begins with the JCPOA in 2015 and Trump’s election in 2016 — he’s made his relationship with Trump and ability to get what Israel needs from Trump as a centerpiece of his political brand.
