Trump says Israel losing ‘world of PR’ amid its ongoing war on Gaza

Israel “may be winning the war” in Gaza but is losing “the world of public relations,” US President Donald Trump said in an interview published Monday by the Daily Caller.

A long-time ally of Israel, Trump acknowledged shifting public opinion after being asked about a recent Pew Research Center poll showing declining support for Israel among younger Republicans.

“Yeah I’m aware of it,” he was quoted as saying. “I have good support from Israel…nobody has done more for Israel than I have, including the recent attacks with Iran, wiping that thing out…if you go back 20 years…Israel had the strongest lobby in Congress of anything or [anybody]…that I’ve ever seen. Israel was the strongest. Today, it doesn’t have that strong a lobby. It’s amazing.”

Trump reflected on shifting attitudes in Washington and cited what he described as a dramatic decline in Israel’s political sway amid its ongoing war on the Gaza Strip saying the war is hurting Israel’s image.

“They’re gonna have to get that war over with. But it is hurting Israel. There’s no question about it. They may be winning the war, but they’re not winning the world of public relations,” he told the Daily Caller.

The US president also said at one point over the past few decades, no one was allowed to speak badly of Israel, but that’s changed in recent years with politicians speaking out against the Middle Eastern country.

“There was a time where you couldn’t speak bad, if you wanted to be a politician, you couldn’t speak badly [of Israel]. But today, you have AOC plus three, and you have all these lunatics, and they’ve really, they’ve changed it,” Trump said.

While President Trump pointed to “AOC plus three,” a reference to Democratic congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib, several Republicans have also voiced criticism of Israel in recent months.

Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene recently became the first House Republican to accuse Israel of committing “genocide” in Gaza.

Steve Bannon, Trump’s former White House chief strategist, has also argued that Israel is not a true US ally and described Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s circle as untrustworthy.

As Israel presses on with its offensive in the besieged strip, the world’s leading genocide scholars’ association passed a resolution saying that the legal criteria have been met to establish Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, its president said on Monday. Eighty-six percent of those who voted among the 500-member International Association of Genocide Scholars backed the resolution declaring: “Israel’s policies and actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide in Article II of the United Nations Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948).”

According to the Council on Foreign Relations think tank, Israel has long been the top recipient of US foreign aid, much of it in military assistance. But that aid, a corner stone of US-Israel relations for decades under several administrations, has been under growing scrutiny amid Israel’s ongoing conflicts in the Middle East.