TEL AVIV—Israelis overwhelmingly feel safer and are prepared to take risks for peace following Donald Trump’s election as president, according to a recent poll.
Three-quarters of the Israeli public says Trump will "strengthen Israel’s security," pollsters at Agam Labs, a political consultancy affiliated with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, found last month. Even larger numbers of Israelis are ready to make major concessions as part of a peace deal led by Trump—a double-digit jump compared to when Biden was the one asking.
"Sometimes, the messenger is more important than the message," Nimrod Nir, the CEO of Agam Labs, told the Washington Free Beacon. "The public believes that Trump supports Israel and understands Israel’s enemies in ways that Biden does not. People are more willing to trust him to deal with these issues that they see as existential."
The findings, which have not previously been published, are the latest indication that Trump’s message of peace through strength is resonating in the Middle East after 14 months of war between Israel and the Iranian axis.
Agam Labs began tracking wartime public sentiment within days of Hamas’s Oct. 7 invasion of southern Israel, which started the war. Over the past 14 months, the pollsters found, Israelis have become increasingly willing to end the fighting, primarily due to growing concern for the 100 remaining hostages taken on Oct. 7. As of this October, 75 percent of the public, including 72 percent of Jews, supported a ceasefire in exchange for the release of the hostages, up from 56 percent of Jews in March.
Support for a broader peace plan pushed by Biden, meanwhile, grew more modestly, from 55 percent of Jews in March to 66 percent in October. In addition to a hostage-ceasefire deal, Biden’s proposal included the normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia and Israel’s agreement to the eventual creation of a Palestinian state. Large majorities of Israelis do not consider Saudi normalization a wartime priority and oppose Palestinian statehood as an unacceptable security threat, polling has consistently found.
But according to Agam Labs’s latest poll, conducted Nov. 12-18, if Trump were to propose a version of Biden’s peace plan, the cost-benefit calculation would change for many Israelis. Eighty-two percent of the public, including 81 percent of Jews, say such a deal "must be agreed to"—more than the 74 percent of Jews who back a standalone hostage-ceasefire deal.
Sixty-three percent of Israeli Jews see Trump as more pro-Israel than Biden compared with the 15 percent who hold the opposite view, according to the poll. Eighty-three percent expect Trump to advance Saudi normalization, and 60 percent think he will provide American backing for a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Just 5 percent think Trump will follow Biden in withholding U.S. security aid to Israel, and 8 percent think the president-elect will oppose an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear program.
The poll, like Agam’s other omnibus polling during the war, was based on a representative sample of about 2,000 Israelis. The margin of error was 3 percent.
Asa Shapiro, an analyst at Agam Labs and the head of advertising and marketing studies at Tel Aviv University, said that Israelis are ready for Trump to "make America great again in the Middle East."
"Biden really confirmed our worst fears about Democrats when he started withholding weapons in the middle of the war," Shapiro said. "Trump proved he is on our side during his first term, so there’s definitely a sense of relief that he’s back."
"At the same time, Israelis are very aware of our reliance on the United States," Shapiro added, pointing to spreadsheets filled with Agam Labs’s polling data on the subject. "We know we don’t want to get on Trump’s bad side. So if he wants peace, we’d better give him peace."
In a press conference on Monday, Trump reiterated that if the hostages were not released before his inauguration on Jan. 20, "all hell is going to break out" in the Middle East. He also declined to rule out a U.S. or U.S.-backed Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear weapons program, saying, "You don't talk about that before something may or may not happen."
Last week, Trump's Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, reportedly met with Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman in Saudi Arabia and discussed the kingdom’s potential normalization with Israel. In an interview with Fox News the same day, Rep. Mike Waltz (R., Fla.), the incoming national security adviser, vowed a return to Trump’s first-term "maximum pressure" sanctions campaign on Iran.
In the runup to the election, Trump said that as president, he would reverse Biden’s "weakness" toward Iran—which was blamed for the war—and restore regional peace by supporting Israeli victory.
"With strength and the right leadership, the dawn of a new, more harmonious Middle East is finally within our reach," Trump said in remarks on the first anniversary of the Oct. 7 attack. "I will not allow a jihad to be waged on America or our allies, and I will support Israel’s right to win its war on terror, and it has to win it fast no matter what happens."
There have been signs that Israel's enemies have gotten the message. Three weeks after Trump won a second term on Nov. 5, Hezbollah, an Iran-backed Lebanese terrorist group, agreed to a U.S.-brokered ceasefire that gave Israel the right to enforce violations. In response, Iran backed off its threat earlier in the month to launch a third "crushing" missile attack on Israel. In recent days, Israeli and U.S. officials have expressed hope for a breakthrough in hostage-ceasefire talks in Gaza, saying Hamas has shown new flexibility.