Former President Donald Trump said that Israel should “finish” the war in Gaza against Hamas “quickly” so that the world could return to “peace.”
Trump’s remarks came in an interview with Howard Kurtz of Fox News.
Left-leaning Axios spun Trump’s remarks as encouraging Israel to give up the war.
But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been saying since February that he, too, wants to end the war, in “weeks … not months” by attacking the last Hamas stronghold in the city of Rafah.
The Biden Administration has been opposed to an Israeli attack on Hamas in Rafah, ostensibly because of concern for Palestinian civilians — though arguably civilian suffering would be less if Hamas were defeated quickly.
More cynically, critics believe that the Biden Administration is using Hamas’s survival as a way to gain leverage over Israel and force Netanyahu to accept a Palestinian state, run by the Palestinian Authority government.
Meanwhile, the drawn-out debate over Rafah — including a demand by Biden for talks with Israel in Washington — has arguably made the suffering of Palestinian civilians worse than it would have been if Israel had been allowed to defeat Hamas quickly.
Earlier this month, Trump told Fox News that Israel should “finish the problem” and defeat Hamas. He added that the war would never have taken place if he were president.
Hamas was relatively quiet during the four years of Trump’s administration, after several wars during the Obama administration.
Trump also told Kurtz that Biden had told Netanyahu to “walk.” Trump and Netanyahu have had a frosty relationship ever since Netanyahu congratulated Biden on his victory in the 2020 presidential election.
Trump has said, incorrectly, that Netanyahu was the “first” to congratulate Biden. In fact, he held out as long as politically possible, against mounting domestic political pressure in Israel to acknowledge Biden as the winner, after American media networks had called the race.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent book, “The Zionist Conspiracy (and how to join it),” now available on Audible. He is also the author of the e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
