At the halfway mark of President Donald Trump’s term in office, one can ascertain that with respect to Israel he is a friend in gestures, but hostile in deeds.

Trump's intention to withdraw 7,000 American soldiers from Afghanistan and reach an agreement with the Taliban, in complete opposition to the opinion of his former secretary of defense, Jim Mattis, is a stark example of the geostrategic threat he is creating for Israel by abandoning the region. It’s hard to find someone whose words are cheaper than those of the man who is supposed to be the leader of the free world and to whom gestures have no value if they don’t entail financial gain.

This disposition was revealed at Trump's first official meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, where he refrained from speaking of a Palestinian state and said that he would support any solution, either one state or two states. It then came through in his administration’s treatment of the occupied territories in official reports, in his representatives’ claims that the settlements are not an obstacle to peace and of course in his purely symbolic gesture of moving the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to West Jerusalem. 

With unbelievable lightness, Trump canceled the activity of the the US Agency for International Development, the State Department’s foreign aid arm, in Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, dramatically decreased aid budgets for the Palestinians, halted financial support for the United Nations Relief and Works Administration and abandoned UNESCO for its problematic decisions on Israel. These moves saved money, decreasing his nation’s deficit, and found favor in the eyes of both the Israeli and the American right, which revere him. What could be better than saving money and winning applause from evangelicals?