JERUSALEM–President Donald Trump returned to the White House on Monday with a flurry of executive orders and statements in support of Israel.
Trump issued executive orders reversing the Biden administration’s sanctions on right-wing Israelis, suspending new aid for the Palestinians, and cracking down on immigrants who support terrorism or oppose American values. The president also spoke of confronting Iran and normalizing Israel-Saudi relations—and vowed to bring home the remaining hostages abducted in Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
Day one of Trump’s second term signaled a return to form for the president, whose first administration carried out a “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign against Iran, oversaw normalization between Israel and four Arab states, and recognized Israel’s claims to Jerusalem and the Golan Heights.
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu led a chorus of Israeli and Middle Eastern leaders in congratulating Trump on his inauguration.
“I believe that working together again we will raise the U.S.-Israel alliance to even greater heights,” Netanyahu said in a video message on Monday. “I’m confident that we will complete the defeat of Iran’s terror axis and usher in a new era of peace and prosperity for our region.”
“On behalf of the people of Israel, I also want to thank you for your efforts in helping free Israeli hostages,” Netanyahu added, referring to Trump’s decisive role in a hostage-ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas that went into effect on Sunday. “I look forward to working with you to return the remaining hostages, to destroy Hamas’s military capabilities and end its political rule in Gaza, and to ensure that Gaza never again poses a threat to Israel.”
In a series of executive orders that Trump signed on Monday evening, he rescinded sanctions that former president Joe Biden imposed over the past year on nearly three dozen Israeli individuals and organizations involved in right-wing causes. Two Americans sued the Biden administration earlier this month for their inclusion in the sanctions regime, claiming they had been wrongfully targeted based on faulty information from anti-Israel organizations. Biden administration officials admitted to the Times of Israel last week that the Americans had been mistakenly targeted.
Right-wing Israeli politicians and activists hailed Trump’s reversal of the sanctions as a restoration of justice and Israeli sovereignty.
“Thank you to President Trump for cancelling the discriminatory, un-American and factually baseless sanctions, which were part of the weaponization of government against ideological opponents,” Eugene Kontorovich, an adviser to the legal team behind the lawsuit and a professor at at George Mason University Law School, wrote on X on Tuesday. “Now we need to make sure it can never happen again.”
Kontorovich told the Washington Free Beacon that an investigation of the “weaponization” of federal law enforcement and intelligence—called for by another executive order on Monday—should look into “the process behind the sanctions and its ties to groups like the Muslim-Brotherhood-tied DAWN MENA.”
DAWN did not respond to requests for comment.
Trump also ordered a pause to U.S. foreign development assistance for 90 days, a move that was expected to impact aid to the Palestinians, which Biden restored after Trump cut it during his first term. The executive order said that the “foreign aid industry and bureaucracy are not aligned with American interests and in many cases antithetical to American values” and “serve to destabilize world peace by promoting ideas in foreign countries that are directly inverse to harmonious and stable relations internal to and among countries.” Trump declared that “no further United States foreign assistance shall be disbursed in a manner that is not fully aligned with the foreign policy of the President of the United States.”
Trump also put support for Israel at the center of his Inauguration Day remarks, promising to flex America’s military might as part of a more assertive foreign policy.
“I’m pleased to say that as of yesterday, one day before I assumed office, the hostages in the Middle East are coming back home to their families,” Trump said in his Inaugural Address inside the Capitol Rotunda, drawing a standing ovation from the audience. “America will reclaim its rightful place as the greatest, most powerful, most respected nation on earth, inspiring the awe and admiration of the entire world.”
Later in the inauguration ceremony, Rabbi Dr. Ari Berman, the president of New York City’s Yeshiva University, delivered a benediction in which he led a prayer for the remaining 94 hostages, peace in the Middle East, and calm on college campuses.
During Trump’s post-inauguration rally at an arena in downtown Washington, D.C., his Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, pledged to expand the Abraham Accords, a series of pacts normalizing Israel’s relations with Arab states. Witkoff then brought relatives of Israeli hostages on stage to shake hands with the president and First Lady Melania Trump.
“As you know, Israel would never have been hit on Oct. 7,” Trump told the families, repeating his claim that he would have prevented Hamas’s attack by keeping up pressure on Iran, the Palestinian terrorist group’s patron. “None of you would be up here, none of you would know anything about this tragedy that you’re going through right now.”
“It’s a shame,” he added. “But we’re getting a lot of people out in a short period of time.”
While some Israeli hawks have voiced concern that Trump seeks to permanently end Israel’s war to destroy Hamas, the president suggested on Monday that he would defer to the Jewish state. In response to a reporter’s question, Trump said he was “not confident” he could maintain the hostage-ceasefire deal past the first 42-day stage.
“It’s not our war. It is their war. I am not confident,” he said. “But I think they’re very weakened on the other side.”
Witkoff sounded similarly deferential in an interview with Israel’s Channel 12 news station on Sunday. Asked whether he believed Israel would withdraw from the Philadelphi corridor on the Gaza-Egypt border, as reportedly required in the second stage of the hostage-ceasefire deal, Witkoff said, “That’s ultimately up to Israel.”
Netanyahu said in a video message last week that Trump considers the ceasefire “temporary” and assured him that Israel can return to fighting in Gaza if necessary without any restrictions on U.S. military supplies of the kind imposed by Biden.
National security adviser Mike Waltz told CBS News last week, “Hamas will never govern Gaza. That is completely unacceptable, because they’ve made their intention clear, which is to destroy Israel and to have future October 7s.”
Outgoing Israeli ambassador to the United States Mike Herzog told Axios on Monday that Israel expects Trump to lift the Biden administration’s hold on the supply of 2,000-pound bombs in his first days in office. Herzog also confirmed Hebrew media reports that talks are already underway for Netanyahu to visit Trump in Washington, D.C., as early as next month.
