Benjamin Netanyahu and his lobbists in the United States, which went all-in for Trump during the 2024 US presidential election campaign, are experiencing a severe case of buyer’s remorse. They seem to have genuinely believed that during Trump’s first few months in office Washington would not only continue to provide unlimited support for his genocidal campaign in the Gaza Strip and further increase weapons deliveries to Israel, but would also endorse the annexation of the West Bank, obliterate the Houthis in Yemen on his behalf, engineer Saudi-Israeli normalization in a manner that renders the Palestinians irrelevant, and take the lead in a joint US-Israeli war against Iran. Trump’s harebrained “Gaza Riviera” proposal this past February, calling for the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland, convinced them the second Trump administration will exceed even their wildest expectations, and by comparison make Trump I look like a Squad policy platform.
Rather than celebrating the fulfilment of the above wish list, not much of it has come to pass. More to the point, the Israeli state and its bipartisan support groups in the United States are currently in the midst of a total meltdown. How did Netanyahu’s genocidal apartheid regime get it so very wrong?
While Netanyahu correctly understood that Trump has few if any principles, and that he lacks the fanatic devotion to anything and everything Israel of his predecessor Joe Biden, he nevertheless believed Trump would be the better option, and even more so compared to Kamala Harris. Leaders motivated primarily by their own self-interest and possessing no discernible agenda, after all, can easily be persuaded that a certain course of action is in their best personal and political interest. The approach worked spectacularly well during Trump’s first term.
Netanyahu’s problem is that he is encountering a different Middle East today, a different United States, a different Republican Party, and a different Trump than those which it so easily bent to its will during Trump’s previous stint in the White House.
In the Middle East, the close alignment that formerly existed between the US, Israel, and Arab states on a common agenda to shred the JCPOA (the Iran nuclear agreement) and weaken Iran, destroy the Axis of Resistance, oust AnsarAllah (the Houthis) in Yemen from power, and marginalize the Palestinians no longer exists and has been overtaken by events. Saudi Arabia and the UAE have ended their blocked of Qatar and war against Yemen, and while they would love to see the Houthis out of power, are unable to make this happen and are no longer willing to pay its price. Washington recently came to a similar conclusion and reached a bilateral ceasefire with the Houthis that leaves the latter free to continue attacking Israel as long as it continues with its brutal war in Gaza.
While there is no love lost between Iran and the Gulf monarchies, Saudi Arabia in particular has determined that neither the US nor Israel are capable of protecting it against Iranian retaliatory attacks in the event of full-scale war, and have encouraged Washington to reach a diplomatic resolution with Iran rather than further turn the screws on their Persian Gulf rival. Previously considered a valuable and trusted security partner, Israel is today viewed as a regional arsonist determined to set the entire region on fire. As for the Axis of Resistance, the Assad regime has been ousted from power in Syria, a weakened Hezballah is for the time being constrained by domestic Lebanese developments, and the Rubicon of direct Iranian attacks on Israel was in any case crossed in 2024.
Regarding Israel, its policies have ensured that further normalization efforts are a waste of Arab time, and Trump is no longer investing any effort into making this happen. While Arab governments were prepared to ignore public opinion and stand idly by while Israel slaughtered Palestinians in Gaza by the tens of thousands, the prospect of their mass expulsion to Arab states set alarm bells ringing, forming, as it would, a direct threat to their national security, domestic stability, and already attenuated legitimacy.
Within the United States, public opinion increasingly views Israel as a strategic burden rather than as a benefit and, during the past eighteen months, those who view it as a blight rather than light unto the nations are in the ascendant. The bipartisan consensus of decades past that Israel is Washington’s greatest regional and even global asset is becoming a thing of the past.
Israel’s greatest miscalculation, which has its origins in the alliance between the Israeli right and evangelical Christians engineered by Menahem Begin during the 1980s, and since turbocharged by Netanyahu, was to make Israel a partisan issue in US politics. Israeli leaders allowed themselves to believe that their support was instrumental in helping Republicans win elections, and that the GOP would reciprocate with support for Israel’s extremist policies.
While Israel’s open disdain for the Democrats didn’t affect the loyalty of seasoned devotees like Bill Clinton and Joe Biden, it did help with the emergence of politicians within the party who were either critical of Israel or indifferent to it, and just as importantly produced fissures within the US Jewish community — traditionally an important Democratic constituency — regarding Israel.
Within the Republican Party, the partisan approach did seem to bear fruit, as could be seen during Trump’s first term. But the Democrats seized the mantle of the war party from their raivals, and anti-interventionist constituencies became increasingly influential within Republican ranks, giving the party’s neocons and hawks a run for their money.
More importantly, under Trump, the party was transformed into a personality cult. Israel’s supporters can still put the fear of God into Democratic politicians, buy them, primary them like Jamal Bowman if they don’t toe the line, and crow about removing them from office. However, those tactics don’t achieve much in a personality cult, where the party elite are more afraid of their leader than a foreign power, even one they would prefer to obediently support.
Who, for example, would ever have imagined Mike Huckabee uttering the words, “The United States isn’t required to get permission from Israel” to cut a deal with the Houthis that essentially permits them to continue attacking Israel? Trump is indisputably an opportunist, but Huckabee and others he has elevated to positions of influence demonstrate that this is equally true of those that serve him.
While Trump is certainly transactional, and, at the end of the day, cares for Israel and, for that matter, any other state only to the extent they can serve his interests, he does also have political instincts. One is to avoid unnecessary and costly wars that drain the American blood and treasures further, particularly in the Middle East. Hopefully, the efforts by Mike Waltz and Netanyahu to foment a US war with Iran is unlikely to be quickly forgotten.
The focus noe is to strengthen relations with those who can serve Trump’s economic agenda. That would be Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar, not Israel, which drains the US treasury of billions per year and acts as if it is doing Washington a favour. Under Trump, the US has decided to pursue bilateral relationships in the Middle East – with the Saudis, Iran, Qatar, Yemen, and even with Hamas, independently of Israel. If Israel can’t deliver the goods to make a normalization agreement with Saudi Arabia happen, Trump will proceed with delivering a nuclear program to Riyadh, and any Republican congressman who does Israel’s bidding to prevent this will be replaced by a more loyal member of the personality cult at the next election.
While it would be exaggerated to describe this as a major crisis in US-Israeli relations, it is being experienced as such by the Israeli state and its supporters in the United States, which explains their total meltdown. Israel’s leadership and its supporters often respond with strong criticism of opposing world leaders, but such reactions may be counterproductive when directed at a charismatic figure with a devoted following.
There’s also more at stake here for Israel than Washington’s favour. For decades, Israel has successfully impressed upon other governments around the world that the road to Washington goes through Tel Aviv, and that Israel has the power to make things happen, or not happen, in their respective relations with the US. The perception that Washington is going its own way, sidelining Israel, demoting its loyalists, negotiating with its enemies, and ignoring its priorities, will over time have a severe impact on Israel’s international relations. As the saying goes, be careful what you wish for.
Will the above changes also benefit the Palestinians? Not necessarily. Arab governments, recognizing that they can pursue relations with Washington bilaterally, now have less incentive to seek a change of US policy towards Israel. Because the Palestinians are not viewed as a significant issue in Washington, the Trump administration may well compensate Israel for its growing independence in Middle East policy by letting it have its merry way in Gaza and West Bank while Arab states sit idely and watch the annexation of Palestine and the ethnic cleansing of its peoples.
Donald Trump and Steve Witkoff may however also decide to call time on Netanyahu’s war on Palestine for reasons of their own. While he has repeatedly stated that Israel will renew and intensify Israel’s offensive in the Gaza Strip once Trump leaves the region, the decision will be made not by him but by Trump.
* Originally appearing on the author’s Facerbook page, the text has been edited for clarity and reaching a wider audience.