[ad_1]
Last week, an Israeli news outlet reported that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu believed his close aide and chief hostage negotiator, Ron Dermer, failed to anticipate a shift in U.S. policy. According to the report, Dermer believed the United States under President Donald Trump would not be oppositional to Israel—“but in effect it is.” Netanyahu’s office rejected the report as fake news. Still, one could be forgiven for thinking there was some truth in the assessment. After nearly four months of delivering a pro-Israel record that even trumped the Biden administration, the past month or so has signaled a change: The president has reached out to Israel’s adversaries—Hamas, the Houthis, and Iran—without close coordination with Israel and moved in ways that none of Trump’s Democratic or Republican predecessors would have dared. Whether Trump’s newfound independence from Israel will lead to serious or sustained pressure on Israel remains to be seen.
It was unrealistic to expect (as many Israelis did) that the sugar high Trump delivered to Israel in his first term would be replicated in the second. After all, many of Trump’s deliverables were essentially unilateral one-offs and easy lifts: recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and moving the U.S. Embassy there and recognizing Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights. The Abraham Accords required more effort but were seen by Trump and Netanyahu as a way to prioritize peace between Israel and the Arab states over the more complicated Palestinian issue.
Last week, an Israeli news outlet reported that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu believed his close aide and chief hostage negotiator, Ron Dermer, failed to anticipate a shift in U.S. policy. According to the report, Dermer believed the United States under President Donald Trump would not be oppositional to Israel—“but in effect it is.” Netanyahu’s office rejected the report as fake news. Still, one could be forgiven for thinking there was some truth in the assessment. After nearly four months of delivering a pro-Israel record that even trumped the Biden administration, the past month or so has signaled a change: The president has reached out to Israel’s adversaries—Hamas, the Houthis, and Iran—without close coordination with Israel and moved in ways that none of Trump’s Democratic or Republican predecessors would have dared. Whether Trump’s newfound independence from Israel will lead to serious or sustained pressure on Israel remains to be seen.
It was unrealistic to expect (as many Israelis did) that the sugar high Trump delivered to Israel in his first term would be replicated in the second. After all, many of Trump’s deliverables were essentially unilateral one-offs and easy lifts: recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and moving the U.S. Embassy there and recognizing Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights. The Abraham Accords required more effort but were seen by Trump and Netanyahu as a way to prioritize peace between Israel and the Arab states over the more complicated Palestinian issue.
Still, by the end of the first Trump term, it was clear that Netanyahu—as he had done with previous administrations—had worn out his welcome. As the president proclaimed his “deal of the century” peace plan for Israel and the Palestinians in 2020, Trump was angered by Netanyahu’s public statement that he planned to legalize Israeli settlements. Trump also came to believe that Netanyahu was using him on Iran and felt that, having helped Netanyahu politically, he was not reciprocating. Indeed, what sparked Trump’s fury and triggered the famous “fuck him” comment shortly after Joe Biden’s election was Netanyahu’s congratulatory message to the new president.
In July 2024, Netanyahu made an obligatory pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to pay homage to the then-presidential candidate. By then, it was clear that there wasn’t a whole lot of love lost between the two men. Unlike many of his predecessors, including Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and Biden, Trump was neither sentimental nor emotional about Israel. And, despite his flowery and fulsome praise of Trump as the greatest friend of the Jews since Persian King Cyrus the Great (who had allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple), Netanyahu was wary as well. Their relationship was transactional: driven by what one could do to further the other’s objectives. Indeed, with both eminently adept in the art of the con, it may well be that Trump and Netanyahu understood one another only too well.
Trump inherited a very different Middle East in his second term, which was certain to complicate his relationship with the Netanyahu government. Two issues defined the landscape—the Hamas terror attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, and rapid advances in Iran’s nuclear program as a result of Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear agreement in 2018. Not only did Trump face the most right-wing government in Israel’s history, but he encountered a risk-ready Netanyahu determined to keep his hard-line coalition together at any price. Fresh from Israeli military successes against Hezbollah and Iran, Netanyahu was eager to convince a risk-averse Trump to eschew diplomacy and take advantage of the moment to strike Iran’s nuclear sites.
Still, Netanyahu quickly understood that he was no longer dealing with Biden, or even Trump in his first term. There was little doubt that the prime minister agreed to a cease-fire with Hamas—just before Trump’s inauguration after months of unsuccessful efforts by Biden—both to stay on Trump’s good side and out of concern for how Trump might react if Israel failed to reach a deal. Netanyahu seemed to grasp that he could neither manipulate nor resist Trump without cost the way he had handled Biden. First, while Trump may have styled himself as the most pro-Israeli president in history, he had scant investment in the idea, security, and people of Israel that had emotionally gripped Biden and had stayed his hand when it came to applying pressure. Trump was not anti-Israel, but instead pro-Trump, looking for wins instead of headaches from Netanyahu. Second, Trump had control of the Republican Party, leaving Netanyahu, who famously had tried to oppose then-President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran by allying and aligning himself with Republicans, scant room to maneuver in Washington. In short, Netanyahu had no court of appeals in pushing back against Trump policies he didn’t like. The prime minister now understood that he was playing with a much weaker hand, and Trump knew it, too.
At first, in Trump’s second term, it appeared that the U.S.-Israeli relationship would sail on in fairly calm and pleasant waters. Netanyahu was the first foreign visitor to the White House, and during that February visit, the two leaders couldn’t have been more in step with one another—or so it seemed. Trump had redesignated the Houthis a terrorist organization; both agreed on the importance of preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon; and Trump talked openly about rebuilding Gaza, perhaps even free of Palestinians. Within his first 100 days, Trump undid the minimal pressure Biden had applied on the Israelis, releasing shipments of 2,000-pound bombs, repealing a Biden directive linking U.S. arms sales to human rights, and lifting sanctions on right-wing settlers. He backed Israel in international fora, imposing sanctions on the International Criminal Court and signing an executive order ending American engagement with the U.N. Human Rights Council and funding to UNRWA, the U.N. relief agency for Palestinian refugees. He also increased weapons sales to Israel, including approving military sales to Israel worth $7.4 billion, and supported the Israelis when they did not withdraw their forces from Lebanon.
And yet, even before Trump’s regional visit, a new pattern had begun to emerge, suggesting that the Trump administration was willing to try new tactics that Israel was certain to oppose, often doing so with little or no coordination. Early in March, Trump’s hostage negotiator broke through years of taboos by meeting directly with Hamas’s external leadership in Doha. From there, the situation from Israel’s perspective got worse. In April, during a second, not-so-warm-and-fuzzy visit by Netanyahu to Washington, Trump announced with Netanyahu by his side (and much to his dismay) that the United States and Iran had agreed to open negotiations on the nuclear issue. The Israelis had also learned that despite their decision to drop tariffs on U.S. products, the White House had imposed a 17 percent tariff on Israeli exports.
From there, the non-coordination dominoes seemed to fall one after another. In May, Trump announced, without informing Israel beforehand, that he had worked out a cease-fire deal with Yemen’s Houthis that protected U.S. naval vessels and shipping but did not preclude attacks on Israel. The pattern of keeping Israel in the dark continued, with back-channel U.S.-Hamas negotiations that freed dual Israeli American hostage Edan Alexander. Israel found out about the talks not from the White House but from its own intelligence channels.
More surprises would follow. Unlike during Trump’s first term, he left Israel off his itinerary during his recent regional trip, focusing only on the Gulf, leaving Israel sidelined and marginalized. Indeed, it was on that trip that Trump announced the removal of sanctions on Syria, stunning Netanyahu, who had asked Trump not to lift them. It didn’t help matters when a possible follow-on trip to Israel by the vice president, perhaps as a consolation prize, was scrapped, reportedly as a result of an expanding Israeli offensive in Gaza.
Over the years, there have surely been tensions and surprises in the U.S.-Israeli relationship. But no administration, Republican nor Democratic, has acted as independently of Israel on matters deemed to be vital to Israeli security interests or to the political interests of an Israeli prime minister.
Part of the new dynamic is surely tied to the fact that Netanyahu is pursuing policies that are in many areas contrary to U.S. interests. But the main driver is Trump, whose decision-making tree consists of one branch: Does the matter at hand advance my needs and that of my “America First” view of the world? Israel is definitely in the mix, but it’s not top of mind. Listen to Mike Huckabee, the first Christian evangelist to be ambassador to Israel and as staunch a supporter and believer in Israel as exists: “The U.S. doesn’t have to tell Israel everything that it is going to do.” Nor does Trump, because of his control of the Republican Party, seem at all concerned about the political blowback of his actions. One can only imagine the reaction had any of his Democratic predecessors reached out to Iran, the Houthis, and Hamas within the first several months of their term. Trump has overturned decades of U.S. thinking on Israel by acting without worrying about how Israel or its supporters—whether on Capitol Hill, in the Jewish community, or within Israel itself—might react, often without consulting them at all.
Not since Eisenhower in the Suez Crisis has any U.S. president threatened serious and sustained pressure on Israel. Could Trump be the first in decades to do so? Would Trump use any of the pressure points on Israel that Biden didn’t: restricting or conditioning U.S. military assistance to Israel; introducing resolutions critical of Israel at the U.N. or not defending Israel in international fora; or unilaterally recognizing Palestinian statehood?
What we’ve seen in the first four-plus months isn’t real pressure, it’s Trump following policies that prioritize what he sees as U.S. interests. So far, he hasn’t taken much away from Israel, and with the exception of warning Netanyahu not to attack Iran, he’s allowed him to dictate both the tactics and the strategy in Gaza. Trump seems to have no real emotional stake in Palestinian suffering or statehood as ends in themselves. The administration’s conduct in the Israel-Hamas negotiations clearly favors Netanyahu’s position, and it is more than likely Trump has concluded that the chances of a happy ending there are quite small. Look at what Trump has enabled the Israelis to do in the West Bank, pursuing policies that are annexationist in everything but name. Twenty-two new settlements were approved, and not a word of objection. No, these issues would become important only if they somehow became a personal embarrassment for Trump, Netanyahu willfully crossed him in some way, or they interfered with something he really cared about.
But what would that look like? Trump is a short-term dealmaker looking for quick wins—he’d like a Nobel Prize for ending the fighting between Russia and Ukraine, but not the war; he’d like to see a nuclear accord with Iran that parks the issue and gets it off his plate; and in Gaza, he’d like to see the war end but so far has evidenced no interest in embracing any broader initiative aside from turning Gaza into the Riviera, let alone trying to negotiate Israeli-Palestinian peace. At one point, he seemed to be enamored with Israeli-Saudi normalization, which would expand the Abraham Accords and possibly get him a Nobel Peace Prize. That, of course, would require ending the war in Gaza and getting something from Netanyahu on the Palestinian issue. It’s Trump: He’s unpredictable, and at some point, he might decide to make a push at least to end the war in Gaza.
If he does, one thing is clear: Netanyahu would do well to replay Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s February encounter with Trump and U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance in the Oval Office. Israel isn’t Ukraine. But nearly five months in, Netanyahu is right to be worried about what an unpredictable Trump might do should he come between the president and something he covets and deems to be in America’s interest.
[ad_2]
Source link