Former President Donald Trump says Jewish voters should be “ashamed” if they voted for President Biden.
“What Biden is doing with respect to Israel is disgraceful,” Mr. Trump said as he walked into the Manhattan courtroom Thursday for his hush money trial. “If any Jewish person voted for Joe Biden they should be ashamed of themselves.”
“He’s totally abandoned Israel and nobody can believe it. I guess he feels good about it because he did it as a political decision,” he said. “You have to do the right decision, not the political decision.”
His comments come as Mr. Biden pauses weapons shipments to Israel so that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu invasion can’t use U.S. bombs to invade the city of Rafah in the Gaza Strip.
“I’ve made it clear that if they go into Rafah — they haven’t gone into Rafah yet — if they go into Rafah, I’m not supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah, to deal with the cities — to deal with the problem,” Mr. Biden said in a CNN interview.
He said “civilians have been killed in Gaza” as a result of the 2,000-pound bombs his administration suspended shipments of last week.
Mr. Trump is fiercely pro-Israel and was friendly with Mr. Netanyahu when he was in the White House, but he has also criticized the military tactics Israel has been using.
Last month in an interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, Mr. Trump said Israel should “get it over with and let’s get back to peace and stop killing people.”
“That’s a very simple statement,” Mr. Trump said. “They have to get it done. Get it over with and get it over with fast because we have to — you have to get back to normalcy and peace.”
“I’m not sure that I’m loving the way they’re doing it, because you’ve got to have victory. You have to have a victory, and it’s taking a long time,” he said.
He said Israel is “absolutely losing the PR war” from the video coming out of Gaza.
“They’re releasing the most heinous, most horrible tapes of buildings falling down. And people are imagining there’s a lot of people in those buildings, or people in those buildings, and they don’t like it,” he said. “They’re losing the PR war. They’re losing it big. But they’ve got to finish what they started, and they’ve got to finish it fast, and we have to get on with life.”
This isn’t the first time that Mr. Trump has made comments about Jewish voters. Last month, he said that “any Jewish person that votes for Biden does not love Israel and frankly, should be spoken to.”
He said voting Democrat is a “habit” of Jewish and Black voters.