Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu responded to former President Donald Trump's statement that Israel would not have lasted two hours without US support. Eliyahu said the Jewish people endured 2,000 years without Trump, and that Israel won its wars even when the US imposed arms embargoes. He urged Trump not to sign "Munich agreements" of this generation.
Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu, a prominent religious-Zionist figure and former chief rabbi of Safed, issued a detailed rebuke Monday morning in response to former President Donald Trump's assertion — reported over the weekend — that Israel would not have survived two hours without American support. In a statement circulated via his media channels and reported by Israel Hayom's Ariel Kahana, Eliyahu rejected the claim by pointing to Jewish endurance across 2,000 years of exile and persecution without a state or American backing. He cited Israel's 1948 War of Independence, when the U.S. imposed an arms embargo, and the Six-Day War, when both France and the U.S. banned weapons sales to Israel, as cases where Israel prevailed without American military aid. Eliyahu also criticized the Oslo Accords and the 2005 Gaza disengagement as diplomatic failures driven by U.S. pressure that led to thousands of deaths. He argued that Israel's struggle against Iran also benefited the West, which he said stood idle before "radical Islam." The rabbi concluded by warning Trump that history will remember him either as a leader who stood with Israel, or one who "was confused into thinking he runs the world" and left destruction behind. The comments continue a cycle of public tension between Trump and Israeli religious-nationalist figures over Trump's Iran deal and his broader critique of Netanyahu.
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