Former President of the United States, Donald Trump, hosted the 2023 Israel Heritage Foundation Gala at Trump National Bedminster in New Jersey and accepted IHF’s Keter Yerushalayim (Crown of Jerusalem) award.
“I’m honored to receive your Crown of Jerusalem award, that’s a very big deal, as far as I’m concerned,” the former President told the crowd.
“I can say Israel is under siege politically. It used to be when I was growing up in Queens, my father was a builder in Brooklyn, and my father was very supportive of the whole Jewish movement. And in Congress, you couldn’t say a bad thing about Israel, you couldn’t even talk about it. Today, it’s almost like there’s a revolution against Israel in Congress, especially in Congress. The Senate’s not like it used to be better, but at least it’s still there, but Congress between AOC (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) plus three (Ilhan Omar, Ayanna S. Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib), and all these other lunatics, they’re lunatics. They hate Israel, they hate it with a passion, I hope you know that, and because they have a good line of nonsense, they convinced a lot of people that Israel is a bad place, that you’re bad people and something has to be done. Ten years ago, this would have been impossible. They said things, and they should have had the biggest sanctions or whatever it is that you put on them. And today, they say things, and nobody even says anything. And even some Jewish congressmen don’t want to take it on,” he explained.
“For nearly half a century, the Israel Heritage Foundation has been a powerful testament to the strength and resilience of the Jewish people, and that’s why I tell you what I just told you because you can start right here, but you would have to get a very strong movement because the US backs Israel, but they back it less than they used to. I was having a lot of problems getting support for Israel, and I can’t really understand it because I grew up in a world where everything politically revolved around Israel. It used to be that one bad word about Israel, you were out of politics, today if you say one good word about Israel, you’re out of politics,” Trump claimed.
The former President also expressed his dissatisfaction with the lack of support from American Jewry: “It’s a very interesting phenomenon because, in Israel, I could be elected Prime Minister today. If I ever decided to give this up and go over to Israel, I would be elected very quickly. They have polls of 99%, but in the US, with the Jewish population, it’s 26-27%, and that’s a Republican thing to a large extent, not me, but I should be at 100% because I had been the best friend that Israel ever had. And you had a couple of good ones, but you have me, and we’re at a different league because, under our leadership, the lines between the US and Israel had never been stronger. I had to brush back a lot of bad people that disagreed, in some cases good people who don’t know, and in some cases, actually bad people. The future of the middle east really was looking bright up until the election was rigged.
Trump described the pressure that was applied to him not to move the embassy to Jerusalem: “Every President campaigned that they would move the embassy, and I now know why they didn’t do it. I was bombarded from the first day I got into office not to do it by the heads of other countries. About a year in, the word started to spread that I was going to be doing it soon, and I was called by the most powerful and wealthy nations, ‘Please don’t do it, please don’t do it.’ So what I did is I turned off my phone, and I set a date for signing, which was a Thursday, and when people called, I would say, ‘I’ll get back to you on Monday.'”
The former President mentioned the fact that President Joe Biden has yet to invite Prime Minister Netanyahu to the White House: “Biden really doesn’t like you, that I can tell you. He won’t even see Netanyahu,
Trump also discussed the Iran nuclear deal, which he terminated. “We would have had a deal that would have been so good for Israel, and now they’re on their way to making a nuclear weapon, and nobody does anything about it,” and added: “That deal was a roadmap to having a nuclear weapon. You can not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon. I just don’t think that Israel can allow it.”
Later in his address, the former President mentioned the Abraham Accords, the normalization deal between Israel and Arab states: “We had them lined up to sign if that election was legitimate we would have had virtually every country in the middle east, you would have had peace in the middle east. They (the Biden Administration) have signed exactly no countries, and everybody wanted to sign. They don’t care.”
Trump concluded by telling the crowd: “You’ve got to be more proactive in Congress because you’re not getting support. People who used to support you sort of go and hid, and people who weren’t supporting you much, they’ve become your enemy.”
