Far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir endorsed Donald Trump for president in a highly irregular move, as top officials from both nations usually avoid wading into one another’s internal politics and do not wish to be seen as favoring one side over another.
His comments, in an interview published Wednesday, came at a particularly inconvenient time for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is in Washington and was set to meet Thursday with US President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, the likely Democratic nominee in the coming election.
In an interview with Bloomberg, Ben Gvir asserted that a win for Trump in the November vote would be better for Israel, implying that only the Republican nominee would offer support for action against Tehran.
“I believe that with Trump, Israel will receive the backing to act against Iran,” Ben Gvir told Bloomberg. “With Trump it will be clearer that enemies must be defeated.”
“The US has always stood behind Israel in terms of armaments and weapons, yet [during the war in Gaza] the sense was that we were being reckoned with — that we were trying to be prevented from winning,” Ben Gvir said. “That happened on Biden’s watch and fed Hamas with lots of energy.”
The comments were published just hours before Netanyahu was set to address the US Congress. After his meetings with Democratic leaders on Thursday he is set to meet with Trump in Florida on Friday.
The Bloomberg report said that while Ben Gvir did not directly address the policies of Harris — who has secured the support of enough Democratic delegates to become her party’s nominee for the election — he implied they would be a continuation of Biden’s.
Ben Gvir acknowledged that his endorsement of Trump could be viewed unfavorably by his colleagues.
“A cabinet minister is supposed to maintain neutrality, but that’s impossible to do after Biden,” he argued.
Ben Gvir is the second Israeli minister to break decorum and make undiplomatic comments in favor of Trump and against Biden, after Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli said in April that Biden was projecting weakness and that he would vote for Trump if he could.
Bloomberg also described Ben Gvir as “bemoaning” Netanyahu’s response to Iran’s unprecedented drone and missile attack on Israel in April.
“Israel should respond to attacks on it in a determined, pain-inflicting manner,” he said.
Additionally, the far-right minister said he was in favor of full-blown conflict with the Iran-backed Lebanon-based Hezbollah terror group, which has been attacking Israeli communities and military outposts along the northern border on a near-daily basis since October 8.
“The sooner, the better,” he said.
Ben Gvir’s comments on Trump came just days after he reportedly suggested to security cabinet ministers that a hostage-ceasefire deal with Hamas should be delayed because implementing it would be advantageous for the Democrats and detrimental to Trump in the November election.
Channel 13 news reported that the Otzma Yehudit party leader said an agreement now would be “a slap for Trump, which would be a victory for Biden.”
Ben Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who both oppose any deal that ends the fighting before Hamas is eliminated, have threatened to topple the government if a deal is approved that sees an end to the fighting.
Last week, the White House revisited the idea of sanctioning Ben Gvir and Smotrich during a meeting regarding the deteriorating situation in the West Bank, according to two United States officials.
Biden has been supportive of Israel since October 7, vowing to continue arming Israel in its war to topple the Gaza terror group. The US president visited Israel early in the war, has met family members of some of those being held hostage in Gaza, and sent US warships and planes to the region in support of the country.
But as casualties in Gaza have increased, Biden has pressured Jerusalem to reach a ceasefire deal to free the hostages, end the war and boost humanitarian aid into the Strip.
The US president also withheld a delivery of high-payload weapons in early May, as Israel launched its offensive in densely populated Rafah. The US and other allies had long warned against the operation in the Strip’s southernmost city, where over a million Palestinians sought shelter after being displaced from the Strip’s north and center. Israel said the offensive was necessary to dismantle Hamas’s last remaining battalions. In the end, international predictions of massive civilian casualties in a Rafah offensive did not come to pass.
Washington recently released some of the delayed arms shipment, but not the 2,000-lb (900-kg) bombs.
Trump is adored by many in the Israeli right for his policies as president, namely his relocation of the US embassy to Jerusalem, his recognition of the city as Israel’s capital and his recognition of the annexation of the Golan Heights.
But the former US president has also spent time at recent rallies mocking the intelligence failure that led to the devastating October 7 attack, and criticizing Netanyahu.
In the days following the Hamas assault, in which some 1,200 people in Israel were killed and 251 were abducted by thousands of Hamas-led terrorists, Trump found himself in hot water with Israel, Biden and even some Republicans over comments he made at a campaign rally when he called Defense Minister Yoav Gallant a “jerk” and Lebanon’s Hezbollah terror group “very smart.”
At one point he was reported to have privately called for Netanyahu to be “impeached” for failing to anticipate the massive Hamas rampage.
Trump has resented Netanyahu for years for congratulating Biden on his 2020 electoral win while the US president was still falsely claiming the election had been stolen from him. The prime minister’s meeting with the now-2024 candidate on Friday is meant to help mend ties between the two as the Republican continues to lead in many polls ahead of the November presidential vote.