Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump bashed his Democratic opponent and questioned how Jews could vote for her during a meeting he held Friday with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach Florida. “I actually do not know how a person who is Jewish can vote for her, but that is up to them,” Trump said as he sat across the table from Netanyahu. The Prime Minister’s wife Sara sat next to Trump.The meeting was closed to Israeli reporters traveling with the Prime Minister but was open to a number of US local reporters — including WPTV News — that asked both men questions.
They were quizzed about the statement Vice President Kamala Harris made after meeting Netanyahu at the White House on Thursday, in which she said that Israel would withdraw from Gaza at the end of the second phase of a hostage deal.Israel has not yet committed to taking that step. Netanyahu met with both Harris and Trump during his visit to Washington this week, to help set up the relationship with whichever one of the candidates enters the White House.
But he quickly found himself in the midst of the highly contentious US presidential election, which has been filled with rabid personal attacks by Trump against his opponents.Harris entered the race only on Sunday after Biden’s surprise withdrawal. Her Thursday night statement on Gaza frustrated those close to Netanyahu who feared it would harm the delicate hostage deal talks, precisely at the moment when they had aligned their position with that of the Biden administration.Netanyahu told reporters at Mar-a-Lago that, “To the extent that Hamas understands that there is no daylight between Israel and the United States that expedites the deal, I would hope that those comments do not change that.”Trump stated that Harris “was certainly disrespectful to Israel in my opinion” adding that, "they were not very nice.”He leveled accusations he has made already on the campaign trail, explaining that Harris is “a radical Left person” who “destroyed San Francisco. She is really a destroyer. She doesn’t know how to build.”
Trump dismissed the idea that relations had soured between him and Netanyahu, explaining that they were “never bad” and that “we have always had a very good relationship.”He joked that his secret weapon for maintaining those ties was Sara, as he affectionately put his hands on her shoulders.With respect to Israel, Trump said that no other US president had done more for the Jewish state than he had when he was in office from 2017 to 2021.This included recognizing Israel's sovereignty over the Golan Heights and the status of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. He also relocated the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and exited the Iran deal which the Obama administration had brokered in 2015.
The Iran deal
Trump speculated that had he been elected to a second term in 2020, he would have been able to replace it with another agreement. Biden had initially hoped to revive the initial Obama-era deal but failed in those efforts.“We terminated the Iran nuclear deal, which was a tremendous thing,” Trump said, noting that the Biden administration did not pick up where he left on Iran. “We could have had a deal one week after the election, and we would have been happy, but they did not do anything with it,” Trump recalled.That kind of agreement Trump that he had envisioned, would have “saved the Middle East.” Now Harris is taking over, Trump said, “and she is worse than him [Biden]. “We will see how it goes. If we win, it will be very simple, it will all work out very quickly.”If he doesn’t win, Trump said, “we will end up with major wars in the Middle East, and maybe a Third World War. You are closer to a Third World War right now than at any time since the Second World War.”In an interview with Fox News on Thursday, Trump called for a quick end to the war and a return of the hostages Hamas holds in Gaza, adding that Israel has to better manage its "public relations.""I want him (Netanyahu) to finish up and get it done quickly," Trump said. "They are getting decimated with this publicity."
Reuters contributed to this report.