Israel’s Favorite American President
Donald Trump is constantly delivering the goods for the Jewish state.
On February 11, 2026, the Jewish People Policy Institute released polling data that stunned political observers. According to the JPPI Israeli Society Index, 73% of Israelis rate Donald Trump as a “better than average” U.S. president for Israel’s interests. The breakdown was even more striking. Nearly half of all Israelis, 49%, called Trump “one of the best” U.S. presidents ever for Israel, with an additional 24% rating him “above average.”
Among Jewish Israelis specifically, the numbers climbed higher still. 54% percent described Trump as one of the best presidents for Israel, with an additional 25% saying above average, totaling 79% favorable.
Israeli journalist Barak Ravid amplified the findings on social media, highlighting the extraordinary contrast with Trump’s domestic standing. While nearly three quarters of Israelis celebrated Trump’s presidency, American voters remained deeply divided. Multiple U.S. polls conducted at virtually the same time showed Trump with approval ratings hovering between 37% and 44%, with majorities disapproving. Pew Research recorded 37%. Marist PBS found 39%. Morning Consult showed 44%. .
The Libertarian Institute noted that “Trump’s approval rating is higher in Israel than in the US,” capturing a fundamental dynamic in U.S.-Israel relations. Trump’s most politically consequential foreign policy actions are popular in Israel but divisive or unpopular at home. The roughly 30-point gap between Israeli and American assessments reflects the fact that Trump has taken positions that directly serve Israeli security priorities while facing domestic backlash over economic concerns and broader issues of governance.
This is not accidental. Trump is the Judeo-Accelerationist president after all. He has consistently delivered on commitments to Israel that no previous American president, regardless of party or ideology, was willing to execute. From moving the embassy to Jerusalem to bombing Iranian nuclear facilities, from recognizing Israeli sovereignty over occupied territories to abandoning the framework of a two-state solution, Trump has emerged as one of the most pro-Zionist politicians in recent memory.
Understanding why Israelis view Trump so favorably requires examining what he has actually done.
In 2018, Trump officially moved the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. This was not merely symbolic. It represented the violation of a long-held international consensus. Although Congress had passed the Jerusalem Embassy Act in 1995, every president since then had deferred the move out of concern it would undermine peace negotiations. Bill Clinton used the waiver to avoid the move. George W. Bush did the same. Barack Obama continued the moratorium.
Trump not only executed the move but timed the embassy’s opening for May 14, 2018, the 70th anniversary of Israel’s founding. As Palestinians protested at the Gaza border, Israeli forces killed dozens of demonstrators. The message was clear. American recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital would proceed regardless of Palestinian objections or international condemnation.
In March 2019, Trump went further by recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. This region has been occupied by Israel since 1967 and unilaterally annexed in 1981. No other country had ever formally accepted this annexation. The timing of Trump’s announcement, just two weeks before Israeli parliamentary elections, suggested it was a deliberate attempt to help Benjamin Netanyahu secure victory.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo justified the move by stating it acknowledged “the reality on the ground,” effectively endorsing Israeli territorial conquest through military force. This represented a radical break from American policy. Previous administrations, regardless of their support for Israel, had at least maintained the fiction that territory seized by force could not be legitimized. Trump dispensed with that pretense.
Where earlier administrations gave lip service to a two-state solution, Trump and his advisors openly abandoned the framework. Jared Kushner, Trump’s senior advisor and son in law, declared in May 2019, “If you say ‘two-state,’ it means one thing to the Israelis, it means one thing to the Palestinians. We said, you know, let’s just not say it.”
The Trump administration’s peace plan would have confined Palestinians to disconnected territories resembling bantustans while allowing Israel to annex roughly 30% of the West Bank. This represented the most pro Israeli “peace” proposal ever advanced by an American administration, one that would have formalized permanent Israeli control over Palestinian territory.
Further entrenching Israel’s power, Trump’s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared in November 2019 that Israeli settlements in the West Bank were “not inherently illegal,” overturning decades of U.S. policy that had treated settlements as violations of international law.
Trump’s Abraham Accords, heralded by many as a diplomatic success, in fact undermined the long-standing Arab Peace Initiative. By pressuring Bahrain, the UAE, Morocco, and Sudan to normalize relations with Israel without securing any concessions for Palestinians, Trump stripped away one of the last forms of regional leverage against Israeli intransigence.
For groups like Hamas, this shift represented a death knell for Palestinian statehood aspirations. The October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel was in part a response to the erosion of regional support for the Palestinian cause, a gambit designed to reignite global attention and leverage international outrage over Israel’s retaliation.
Trump’s sustained hostility toward Iran, Israel’s foremost regional adversary, further illustrates his commitment to Israeli priorities. His opposition predates his 2016 campaign, going back at least to his 2011 book “Time to Get Tough”, in which he declared, “America’s primary goal with Iran must be to destroy its nuclear ambitions. Let me put them as plainly as I know how Iran’s nuclear program must be stopped by any and all means necessary. Period. We cannot allow this radical regime to acquire a nuclear weapon that they will either use or hand off to terrorists.” He repeatedly condemned the Iran nuclear deal, calling it “the worst deal ever.”
After pulling the United States out of the JCPOA in May 2018, he launched the “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign, an aggressive move that clashed with his public image as an anti-war candidate. He dismissed the deal as enriching “the Iranian regime and enabled its malign behavior, while at best delaying its ability to pursue nuclear weapons.”
Sanctions were swiftly reinstated, hitting Iran’s energy, petrochemical, and financial sectors. Trump warned of “severe consequences” for any country that continued doing business with Iran. These measures ranked among the most severe sanctions in modern history, with the explicit aim to “bring Iran’s oil exports to zero, denying the regime its principal source of revenue.” Trump’s administration steadily widened the scope of the sanctions, targeting Iran’s central bank, space agency, and even the inner circle of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
In October 2019, Trump sanctioned Iran’s construction industry, linking it to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which he had previously designated as a foreign terrorist organization in April of that year. This marked the first time the United States had ever applied that label to another country’s military. Trump bragged, “If you are doing business with the IRGC, you will be bankrolling terrorism. This designation will be the first time that the United States has ever named a part of another government as an FTO.”
The most dramatic episode came in January 2020, when Trump authorized the drone strike that killed Iranian General Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad. Over the course of a storied military career spanning decades, Soleimani established himself as one of the 21st century’s most formidable strategic minds and proved to be among the most effective commanders in the fight against ISIS in Syria and Iraq. But for the United States—a polity run by and for the sole benefit or organized Jewry—these realities never entered the equation.
Trump claimed Soleimani had been “plotting imminent and sinister attacks on American diplomats and military personnel,” a move that brought the United States and Iran to the edge of open conflict. Iran retaliated with missile strikes on U.S. bases as the world braced for war.
Even after this volatile episode, Trump continued to escalate. Toward the end of his first term, he reportedly explored military options for targeting Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley and other senior officials pushed back firmly. Milley warned, “If you do this, you’re gonna have a f***ing war,” and began holding daily briefings to prevent an unchecked spiral toward military conflict.
As tensions intensified during Trump’s second term, he privately gave the green light for preparations to strike Iranian targets. U.S. military assets, including carrier strike groups, bombers, and fighter jets, were moved into strategic positions. According to The Wall Street Journal, Trump informed aides that he “approved of attack plans for Iran, but was holding off on giving the final order to see if Tehran will abandon its nuclear program.”
In June 2025, Trump ordered direct strikes on three Iranian nuclear sites: Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan, using B-2 stealth bombers and bunker buster bombs. Trump declared that Iran’s nuclear capabilities were “completely and totally obliterated.”
This escalation went far beyond anything contemplated by previous neoconservative administrations. Even the Bush administration, which invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, had never authorized such a strike on Iranian soil. Trump’s willingness to risk regional war to directly advance Israeli security interests represents a qualitatively different level of commitment to Zionist objectives.
The JPPI poll dropped just days before Trump’s seventh meeting with Netanyahu since returning to office, held on February 12, 2026, focused heavily on Iran nuclear negotiations. This frequency of engagement—unprecedented between an American president and a foreign leader in such a short span—combined with Trump’s demonstrated willingness to deploy American military force on Israel’s behalf, has cemented his standing with the Israeli public. The latest round of talks has only intensified speculation that Washington is laying the groundwork for a military confrontation with Tehran, with critics warning that the United States is being drawn into a war that serves Israeli strategic interests far more than American ones.
Trump’s overall time in office reveals a pattern of unyielding subservience to Israel, from the relocation of the U.S. embassy and Golan Heights annexation to direct assaults on Iranian nuclear facilities—actions that no previous administration dared undertake. Further, his administration’s lackluster response to the protracted mass immigration onslaught engineered by Jewish advocacy networks since the 1960s underscores the superficiality of his nationalist posturing, which functions as rhetorical camouflage for the real agenda of bolstering Israeli primacy and the extant Judeo-capitalist order. This disparity, illuminated by JPPI polling wherein Israeli praise surpasses American approval by margins exceeding 30 points, confirms that Trump’s presidency prioritizes the interests of the Jewish community, while gentile interests figure as mere afterthoughts.
https://www.josealnino.org/p/israels-favorite-american-president