How the US elections could impact the Middle East

BBC / Joe McNally

The last time Donald Trump was president, the Israeli prime minister was so happy he named a community after him.

Trump Heights is an isolated cluster of prefabricated homes in the rocky, mine-studded landscape of the Golan Heights, a soaring eagle and menorah statue guarding the front gate. The purple mountain peaks jut into the azure sky on the horizon.

It was Trump's reward for upending half a century of American policy and broad international consensus by recognizing Israel's territorial claims to the Golan, captured from Syria in the 1967 war and then unilaterally annexed.

The question for residents of this region, two dozen families and a few soldiers stationed there, is what impact Republican candidate Trump or his Democratic rival Kamala Harris might currently have on Israeli interests in the region.

Elik Goldberg and his wife Hodaya moved to Trump Heights with their four children for the safety of a small rural community.

Since the October 7 Hamas attacks in southern Israel last year, they have seen the war between Israel and Hezbollah, a Hamas ally, intensify along the northern border with Lebanon, to 16 kilometers from them.

For the past year, there has been a lot of smoke on our beautiful green space and our beautiful view is a view of the rockets that Hezbollah is sending us, Elik said. This is a war zone and we don't know when it will end.

Elik tells me he wants the new US administration to do the right thing. When I ask him what that means, he replies: support Israel.

Support the good guys and have a good sense of right and wrong, he says.

BBC / Joe McNally

Elik Goldberg and his wife Hodaya

This is the kind of language you hear a lot in Israel. This is also the kind of language Trump understands.

He won favor with Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu during his final term as U.S. president by canceling an Iran nuclear deal that Israel opposed, negotiating historic normalization deals with several Arab countries and recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capital, countering decades of US policy.

Mr. Netanyahu once called him the best friend Israel has ever had in the White House.

As America prepares to vote, Israel's leader has made no secret of his appreciation for the Republican candidate – and polls suggest he is not alone.

About two-thirds of Israelis would prefer to see Trump return to the White House, according to recent polls.

Less than 20% seem to want Kamala Harris to win. According to one poll, that figure drops to just 1 percent among Mr. Netanyahu’s supporters.

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Gili Shmuelevits, 24, shopping at Jerusalem's Machane Yehuda market, said Ms. Harris showed her true colors when she appeared to agree with a protester at a rally who accused Israel of genocide. The vice president said what he was talking about was real.

She later clarified that she did not believe Israel was committing genocide.

Rivka, who shops nearby, said she is 100 percent for Donald Trump.

He cares more about Israel. He is stronger against our enemies and he is not afraid, she said. I understand that people don't like him, but I don't need to like him. I need him to be a good ally to Israel.

BBC / Joe McNally

Rivka says Trump would be leader and strongest ally

For many people here, good allies never pressure, criticize or coerce. The war in Gaza has helped drive a wedge between Israel and its American ally.

Harris has called more openly for a ceasefire in Gaza and placed more emphasis on humanitarian issues.

After meeting with Netanyahu at the White House in July, she said she would not remain silent about the situation in Gaza and said she had expressed deep concern to him about the scale of human suffering and to the death of innocent civilians.

Mr. Trump has framed the end of the war in terms of Israel's victory and has opposed an immediate ceasefire in the past, apparently telling Netanyahu to do what he must do.

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Palestinian children in Gaza refugee camp receive food aid

But many Palestinians see little hope in either candidate.

The general assessment is that the Democrats are bad, but if Trump is elected it will be even worse, said Mustafa Barghouti, a respected Palestinian analyst and politician in the occupied West Bank.

The main difference is that Kamala Harris will be more sensitive to the evolution of American public opinion, and therefore more favorable to a ceasefire.

The war in Gaza has increased pressure from U.S. allies, such as Saudi Arabia, for progress toward a Palestinian state.

But neither candidate has put the creation of a Palestinian state at the top of their agenda.

When Mr. Trump was asked during the presidential debates whether he would support him, he replied: “I’ll have to see.”

Many Palestinians have given up on the promise of a Palestinian state and, more generally, American support.

The general feeling is that the United States has failed drastically in protecting international law and has repeatedly failed the Palestinians. [and] took the side of a total bias in favor of Israel, said Mustafa Barghouti.

The question of a Palestinian state is just a slogan.

On broader regional issues like Iran, the two candidates have historically had different approaches, with Trump recently advising Israel to go nuclear first and worry about the rest later.

He was speaking before Israel carried out strikes against Iran in retaliation for an Iranian missile attack earlier this month.

Maybe Trump would play a tougher role and Iranians would be more hesitant if he were president, said former Israeli Ambassador to the United States Danny Ayalon, but he says it's easy to exaggerate the differences between the two candidates.

Harris and Trump are now talking about striking a new deal to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons, and both want to expand normalization deals between Israel and neighboring Arab countries, particularly Saudi Arabia.

What would be different is their approach.

I think if it's Kamala Harris [in the White House]the direction will be bottom-up, Danny Ayalon said, meaning ceasefires in Gaza and Lebanon would come first, before turning to the broader issues of Iran or new regional alliances.

With Trump, he said, the direction would be top-down: he would go directly to Tehran and from there try to resolve all the aspects and all the theaters of the Middle East.

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Netanyahu and Harris met in July

Political insiders in Israel and the United States view Kamala Harris as closer to America's traditional bipartisan positions on Middle East foreign policy and Donald Trump as unpredictable, reluctant to involve America in foreign conflicts and prone to to conclude one-off agreements.

But Ambassador Ayalon believes that it is not only this policy that has an impact on the public mood in Israel.

Biden stood by Israel throughout the year, he said. But didn't get his recognition [because of] things like not inviting him to the White House, things that are more appearances than real problems.

When it comes to U.S.-Israeli relations, he says, public gestures – and emotions – matter.

A lot of things are personal. THE [shared] interests are obvious, but personalities matter.

Ahead of the US elections on November 5, BBC correspondents around the world are looking at what impact the results could have where they are, and what people around the world think about this race for the White House.

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