The Stakes: What Trump and Harris plan to do about Iran, Israel and the war in Gaza

The latest entry in an ongoing series about where the 2024 presidential candidates stand on issues of major importance to voters. Previous entries have covered their positions on abortion and the border.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has long been one of the world’s thorniest problems — a bloody, intractable dispute over land and statehood that has riven the region and vexed American presidents ever since the Jewish state was established in 1948.

But Hamas’s brutal Oct. 7 attacks — and Israel’s brutal response in Gaza — have taken things to a whole new level. In September, Iran fired a salvo of ballistic missiles at Israel in retaliation for Israeli strikes against Tehran's Hezbollah allies in Lebanon, who had been launching rockets and drones deep into the Jewish state. On Sunday, the Pentagon announced that it was sending an advanced missile defense system to Israel, along with about 100 American troops to operate it — the first deployment of U.S. forces to Israel since the Oct. 7 attacks.

The chances of a wider Middle East war now hinge on Israel’s next move. Whatever happens, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is likely to weigh on the U.S. ballot like never before.

So how could the differences between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump — on Israel, Gaza and Iran — reshape U.S. policy going forward?

The 2024 election will be the first in U.S. history to feature a former president competing against the current vice president. As a result, this year’s candidates already have extensive White House records to compare and contrast.

Here’s what Harris and Trump have done so far about the Israel-Palestinian conflict — and what they plan to do next.

Where they're coming from

Where Trump is coming from: As a first-time presidential candidate, Trump’s initial forays into the Israeli-Palestinian thicket were … vague, to say the least.

He mentioned his daughter Ivanka’s conversion to Judaism. In 2016, he boasted about his ceremonial role — 12 years earlier — as grand marshal of New York’s Salute to Israel Parade. And when Trump finally did try to flesh out his views, he angered Republican hawks by pitching himself as “sort of a neutral guy” and predicting that future peace talks would hinge on Israel being “willing to sacrifice certain things.”

But soon enough, Trump started toeing the party line. During an uncharacteristically sober and scripted speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in March 2016, he accused then-President Barack Obama of “treating Israel like a second-class citizen” — and pledged to “send a clear signal that there is no daylight between America and our most reliable ally, the state of Israel.”

“The Palestinians must come to the table knowing that the bond between the United States and Israel is absolutely, totally unbreakable,” Trump said.

Yet one thing remained consistent throughout. Trump kept describing himself as a master negotiator — and portraying a possible Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement as “the ultimate deal.”

Where Harris is coming from: Harris launched her 2016 U.S. Senate campaign in early 2015, a few months after marrying Doug Emhoff, who is Jewish. It was her national debut. In the years that followed, Harris positioned herself as a staunch supporter of Israel.

“I believe the bonds between the United States and Israel are unbreakable,” she told New York’s Salute to Israel Parade at AIPAC's annual conference shortly after taking office as senator in 2017. (AIPAC is a powerful — and particularly hawkish — pro-Israel lobbying group.)

According to Harris, her commitment to Israel started as a child. “It is just something that has always been a part of me,” Harris said at a private AIPAC conference the following year. “It’s almost like saying, ‘When did you first realize you loved your family or love your country?”

In the same speech, Harris recalled raising money for the Jewish National Fund as a Girl Scout. “We would … collect donations to plant trees for Israel,” she told the audience. “Years later, when I visited Israel for the first time, I saw the fruits of that effort and the Israeli ingenuity that has truly made a desert bloom.”

One of Harris’s first acts as a U.S. senator was to break — over Israel — with outgoing Democratic President Barack Obama, whose administration pointedly abstained in late 2016 from vetoing a United Nations Security Council resolution that condemned the Jewish state for annexing land via settlements. Harris co-sponsored a Senate resolution that declared Obama’s position “inconsistent with long-standing United States policy.” Likewise, one of Harris’s first international trips as a senator was to Israel, where she met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 2017.

As a Democratic presidential primary candidate in 2019, Harris signaled that she would govern to Obama’s right on the Iran nuclear deal as well. “We will reenter the agreement,” Harris told a pro-Israel voter in Ames, Iowa, “but also I will want to strengthen it. And that will mean extending the sunset provisions, including ballistic missile testing, and also increasing oversight.”

What they've done in office

What Trump did in office: Today, Trump frequently describes himself as the most pro-Israel president ever. That’s debatable — but what’s clear is that once in the White House, he ditched his earlier emphasis on neutrality and consistently ignored Palestinian interests in pursuit of something he could sell as a “peace deal.”

According to a former aide who spoke to the Washington Post, Trump was primarily “interested in the idea of winning the Nobel Peace Prize because President Barack Obama had won it” — and he “thought the Israeli-Palestinian conflict afforded him a chance.”

Entrusting the Middle East portfolio to his son-in-law, the Orthodox Jewish real-estate developer Jared Kushner, Trump sided with the Israeli right again and again.

In December 2017, he announced that the United States would move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, breaking with decades of U.S. policy to recognize the city as Israel’s capital — a move seen as provocative to Palestinians, who also claim it as their capital.

In September 2018, Trump stopped funding the United Nations’ agency for Palestinian refugees.

In March 2019, he recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, disputed territory with Syria that was seized during the Six-Day War.

In November 2019, Trump abandoned the decades-old U.S. position that West Bank settlements are a key barrier to peace.

The Trump administration framed each decision as one that would ease the path to a peace deal. And indeed, in January 2020 Trump released his Peace to Prosperity plan, followed a few months later by the Abraham Accords, an effort to normalize relations between Israel and various Arab states.

The problem is that both measures were completely unacceptable to Palestinians, who had been boxed out of negotiations.

The Peace to Prosperity plan, which was put together by Kushner in consultation with Netanyahu’s government, would have eliminated a path to a viable Palestinian state by dividing up Palestinian territories, surrounding them by Israel and giving Israel total control over Palestinian security. It was immediately rejected by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

The Abraham Accords, in contrast, did go into effect. Previously, the U.S. had insisted that any steps toward normalizing relations between Israel and Arab states would have to be accompanied by progress toward a sovereign Palestine. Trump nixed that precondition and announced a series of bilateral agreements between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco.

Palestinians felt betrayed. “This agreement is very damaging to the cause of peace,” Husam Zomlot, the head of the Palestinian mission to the United Kingdom, told the New York Times, “because it takes away one of the key incentives for Israel to end its occupation — normalization with the Arab world.”

In May 2018, Trump abruptly withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal — an agreement clinched by the Obama administration three years earlier in an effort to contain the country’s nuclear program. Trump chose a strategy of “maximum pressure” economic sanctions instead. In the years that followed, Iran’s nuclear program advanced, and proxies such as Hezbollah grew stronger.

In 2020, Trump ordered a strike that killed a top Iranian military commander — then chose not to retaliate when Iran fired missiles at U.S. bases.

What Harris has done in office: Before assuming the vice presidency in early 2021, Harris could best be described as a conventional pro-Israel Democrat. In 2019, she condemned the pro-Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, claiming that it is “based on the mistaken assumption that Israel is solely to blame for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” The following year, she co-sponsored legislation calling Trump’s Abraham Accords an “historic achievement.”

Throughout, Harris has advocated for a two-state solution — but always against the backdrop of America’s “ironclad” commitment to Israel’s defense.

In the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks, however — and in the context of her own 2024 presidential bid — Harris’s emphasis has shifted.

A little more than a year ago, Hamas militants invaded southern Israel, killing more than 1,100, wounding more than 3,500 and taking more than 250 hostage — most of them civilians.

In line with Biden, Harris responded by stressing Israel’s “right to defend itself” and arguing that the threat posed by Hamas must be “eliminated.” But first in private, and then increasingly in public, the vice president started to chart a different course.

For the president’s initial Oct. 10 speech on the outbreak of war, Harris “suggested” that Biden add a line denouncing Islamophobia; he ultimately took her advice. In late 2023, people close to Harris began leaking to reporters that she had been pressing Biden to get “tougher” on Netanyahu and be more vocal about Palestinian civilian deaths (which today number over 40,000).

On March 3, Harris became the first member of the Biden administration to call for an “immediate ceasefire.” “What we are seeing every day in Gaza is devastating,” Harris said in a speech endorsing a conditional six-week pause in the hostilities. “People in Gaza are starving. The conditions are inhumane.”

Harris went on to bluntly criticize Israel for limiting humanitarian aid (“no excuses”); to meet with Netanyahu’s chief political rival; and to threaten “consequences” if Israel invaded Rafah, a city in Gaza. In short, Harris has “consistently gone further than President Joe Biden by at least half a step” in her rhetoric, as Politico recently reported.

At the same time, there hasn’t been any daylight between Biden and Harris on actual policy. As the extent of the humanitarian suffering in Gaza has become impossible to ignore — and as disagreements over U.S. support for Israel have divided Democrats ahead of the 2024 election — the administration as a whole has increasingly emphasized restraint: pressing Netanyahu to limit civilian casualties; urging postwar planning and diplomacy; and imposing sanctions on violent Israeli settlers.

Both Harris and Biden, however, have ruled out more forceful steps such as an arms embargo against Israel.

What they want to do next

What Trump wants to do next: As he campaigns in the 2024 election, Trump’s plan for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is unclear — just as it was in 2016.

This may reflect political opportunism, ??as discontent with the Biden administration’s approach — on both the right and the left — complicates Harris’s bid.

After Oct. 7, Trump’s first move was to criticize Netanyahu, who reportedly angered the former president by recognizing Biden’s 2020 victory. Trump also referred to the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah as “very smart” while its fighters fired across Israel’s border in the wake of the Hamas attacks.

As public opinion turned against Israel, Trump warned the Jewish state to “finish up” and “get the job done” because it was “absolutely losing the PR war.”

At the same time, Trump has made sure, as usual, to blame the entire crisis on Biden, saying Israel was attacked because “we show great weakness” and that it “would not have happened” if he had been president. He has also weaponized his immigration policy to signal pro-Israel sentiment, pledging to bar refugees from Gaza, expel immigrants who sympathize with Hamas and impose “strong ideological screening” to keep out foreign nationals who “want to abolish Israel.”

But when outlets such as the Guardian have asked the Trump campaign to clarify the candidate’s views on the war itself — “whether he supports a ceasefire, how he would handle hostage negotiations, whether there are any circumstances under which he would consider conditioning aid to Israel and whether he supports a two-state solution” — they have gotten a “no comment” in return.

During the June presidential debate, Trump was asked directly whether he would support an independent Palestinian state. "I'd have to see,” he responded.

Perhaps the best guide to what Trump might do in a second term, then, is to look at what his closest Middle East advisers have said. David Friedman, Trump’s former ambassador to Israel, recently unveiled a plan for Israel to annex the West Bank; Kushner has described a Palestinian state as a “super bad idea.”

On Iran’s recent missile barrage, Trump has mostly just repeated his argument about the war in Gaza: that it would not have happened if he were in the White House.

What Harris wants to do next: A self-described “Zionist in my heart,” Biden has always publicly emphasized his “unshakable” support for Israel’s security while pushing for moderation primarily in private.

The idea, according to a former staffer, was that “if Israel felt insecure in the world or isolated because America had somehow distanced itself, then Israel would be less likely to listen to our advice.”

But after observing Biden’s strategic balancing act from inside the White House — and seeing how little it has done to check Israel’s military campaign — there are signs Harris will feel even more emboldened to say the quiet part out loud if elected in November.

In July, for instance, Harris expressed sympathy for pro-Palestinian campus protesters. “They are showing exactly what the human emotion should be, as a response to Gaza,” Harris told the Nation. “There are things some of the protesters are saying that I absolutely reject, so I don’t mean to wholesale endorse their points. But we have to navigate it. I understand the emotion behind it.”

In an interview that aired Oct. 7 on CBS News, Harris avoided answering affirmatively when asked if Netanyahu could still be considered a close U.S. ally.

"I think, with all due respect, the better question is: Do we have an important alliance between the American people and the Israeli people?” Harris said. “And the answer to that question is yes.”

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Harris is expected to replace some of the chief architects of the Biden administration’s strategy in Gaza, including national security adviser Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.

Her own national security adviser, Philip Gordon, has emphasized diplomatic rather than military solutions in foreign policy and written extensively about the challenges of regime change in the Middle East.

Regarding Iran, Harris told CBS News that it's one of her "highest priorities" to ensure that Tehran "never achieves the ability to be a nuclear power." Harris did not answer when asked if the U.S. would take military action if proof emerged that Iran was building a nuclear weapon — but she did tell Jewish voters last Friday that “all options are on the table” to contain the country’s nuclear ambitions.