Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Trump ‘Surprised’ That Israel Wants Peace Deal With Palestinians

WASHINGTON — Donald Trump said Israel appears more ready to make an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal than he previously believed.

“From the Israeli side, they would love to see a deal,” Trump, the front-runner in the race for the Republican presidential nod, told The New York Times in an extensive foreign policy Q&A posted over the weekend.

“And I’ve been a little bit surprised here. Now that I’m really into it, I’ve been a little bit surprised to hear that,” he said. “I would’ve said, I would’ve said that maybe, maybe you know, maybe Israel never really wanted to make a deal or doesn’t really want to make a deal. They really want to make a deal, they want to make a good deal, they want to make a fair deal, but they do want to make a deal.”

Trump had said at a Republican Jewish Coalition candidates forum in December that he questioned whether the Israelis or the Palestinians had the commitment to make a peace deal.

In a speech last week at the annual American Israel Public Affairs Committee policy conference, Trump showed he had gravitated toward center-right pro-Israel orthodoxies, and he repeated some of them in his conversation with the Times, including a demand that the Palestinians recognize Israel’s Jewish character.

“The Palestinian Authority has to recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state,” he said. “And they have to stop the terror, stop the attacks, stop the teaching of hatred, you know? The children, I sort of talked about it pretty much in the speech, but the children are aspiring to grow up to be terrorists. They are taught to grow up to be terrorists.”

Discussing the Iran nuclear deal, Trump expressed surprise that sanctions remaining in place keep Iran from spending money released in the deal in the United States.

“They are, they are now rich, and did you notice they’re buying from everybody but the United States?” Trump said.

He has derided the sanctions relief for nuclear rollback deal between Iran and six major powers as giving up too much to Iran.

“They’re buying planes, they’re buying everything, they’re buying from everybody but the United States.”

David Sanger, a New York Times reporter, told Trump that sanctions in place kept Iran from trading to the United States. The Obama administration is keeping sanctions in place and in some cases adding new ones to maintain leverage against Iran in its backing of terrorism and its human rights abuses.

“Uh, excuse me?” Trump said, apparently unaware of the sanctions. “So how stupid is that? We give them the money, and we now say, ‘Go buy Airbus instead of Boeing,’ right? So how stupid is that?”

A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

With your support, we’ll be ready for whatever 2025 brings.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at editorial@forward.com, subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.

Exit mobile version