Trump Pivots Away From Netanyahu
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has learned the hard way that his political relationship with US President Donald Trump comes at a high price.
While Trump has often been supportive of Israel, the United States’ chief ally in the Middled East, he has occasionally differed with Netanyahu on such hot button issues as Iran and Lebanon and pressured him to comply with his whims and policies.
With Israel’s image in the United States having deteriorated due to its military campaigns in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon,Trump – an erratic, temperamental, transactional and unpredictable person – has adopted a far more critical and even harsh tone toward Netanyahu in particular and Israel in general.
No one should be surprised by Trump’s increasingly cool attitude toward Netanyahu. A disciple of the insular America First credo, he has upset old allies like Canada and India, alienated international trading partners by imposing a raft of higher tariffs, sided with Russia over Ukraine within the context of their protracted war, and hinted that the NATO alliance may have outlived its usefulness.
Until now, Netanyahu, Israel’s longest serving prime minister, has glowingly described his partnership with Trump as “an alliance like no other.”
Early in the Iran war – which broke out on February 28 and effectively ended yesterday with the signing of a memorandum of understanding between the United States and Iran – Netanyahu portrayed himself as Trump’s peer. In defence of his position, he said he talked to Trump “almost every day,” trading ideas and “deciding together.”
Netanyahu’s upbeat portrayal was accurate, at least to some extent. Netanyahu convinced Trump to attack Iran in a joint operation with Israel, assuring him that they could create the conditions for the overthrow of the theocratic and autocratic Iranian regime.
This was the first time that the United States and Israel jointly embarked on a war against a common enemy at exactly the same moment. Trump’s Democratic Party predecessors, from Barack Obama to Joe Biden, staunchly resisted Netanyahu’s overtures to attack Iran, which is widely regarded as Israel’s most dangerous foe.
As the war dragged on and the price of gasoline and natural gas rose and bit into the U.S. and global economy, and as Iran refused to submit to Trump’s demand of “unconditional surrender,” disillusionment gradually set in at the White House.
Trump desperately sought to extricate himself from the economic fallout of the war, which, he feared, could affect midterm elections in November and the standing of his Republican Party. Netanyahu, on the other hand, wanted to press on until his objectives had been met.
Netanyahu’s goals were four-fold: to topple the Islamic regime, which rejects Israel’s very existence; to destroy Iran’s nuclear program, which already had been badly damaged by Israeli and the US air strikes in the 12-day war in June 2025; to eliminate its ballistic missile arsenal, which poses a real threat to Israel and the Arab Gulf states, and to demolish Iran’s network of proxies within the Axis of Resistance.
Trump and Netanyahu were on the same page until Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, through which about one-quarter of the world’s supply of oil and liquified natural gas transits. With the prices of these vital commodities exploding and further driving up inflation, Trump was tempted to declare victory, accept a ceasefire and end the war, which, judging by public opinion surveys, was quite unpopular in the United States.
In short order, Trump abandoned the notion of regime change in Iran, which some of his advisors had scorned from the outset, and focused on reopening the Strait of Hormuz by means of a truce and a political settlement.
From that point forward, the war was fought on Trump’s terms, The New York Times noted in mid-March. And as the Israeli columnist Nahum Barnea wrote in the daily Yediot Aharonot, “Israel is in the war, but is not leading it … Israel is operating in the dark. Over everyone of its actions hangs a large question: When will Trump, the supreme leader on our side, decide to … stop the fire?”
Once the ceasefire clicked into place, Israel was, as The New York Times observed, “demoted from equal partner to something more akin to a subcontractor to the US military.”
During this period, Trump vetoed an Israeli proposal to send Iraqi Kurdish fighters into Iran to foment an uprising. He also voiced disapproval of an Israeli air raid in mid-March that struck the South Pars natural gas field, which is shared by Iran and Qatar, a US ally. Iran retaliated by bombing Ras Laffan, a liquified natural gas plant in Qatar, and oil refineries in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.
Claiming that Israel’s strike had not been coordinated with the United States, Trump said that there would be no more Israeli attacks on South Pars on the condition that Iran ceased attacking Qatar.
The Trump administration exerted yet more pressure on Netanyahu by asking him to prematurely halt Israel’s military campaign in southern Lebanon. Israel launched its operations after Hezbollah fired rockets into the Galilee on March 2.
In his typically blustery style, Trump let it be known that he was in charge of the war. “He’s fine,” he said on May 20 in a reference to Netanyahu. “He will do whatever I want him to do. He’s a very good man.”
“I call all the shots,” he subsequently told the Financial Times. “He doesn’t call the shots.” And in an interview with the BBC, he boasted, “If I tell him to do something, he does it.”
Despite Trump’s rhetoric, Israel has continued its campaign in Lebanon, but on a somewhat reduced level. Earlier this month, Netanyahu aroused Trump’s ire when the Israeli Air Force bombed Dahiyeh, a Hezbollah bastion in southern Beirut. The air strikes angered Trump because the Iranian regime issued a warning that Israel’s bombardment of Beirut would scuttle the chances of ending the war in Iran.
In a blistering and unprecedented tirade, Trump denounced Netanyahu as “fucking crazy,” claimed that “everyone hates Israel because of this,” and demanded that Israel agree to a ceasefire with Hezbollah.
About two weeks later, following another Israeli air strike in Beirut, he lashed out again at Netanyahu, accusing him of a lack of “fucking judgment” when the United States and Iran seemed so close to putting the finishing touches to “a peace deal.”
More recently, Trump criticized Israel’s campaign against Hezbollah, saying that the Israeli armed forces have not been sufficiently surgical and have killed too many innocent civilians in Lebanon.
And in a bizarre comment plainly out of touch with reality, he suggested that Syria would “do a better job” of fighting Hezbollah. He made this astonishing pronouncement in the full knowledge that Syria has been consumed by a nation-building project since the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in 2024 and has neither the resources nor the capabilities to combat Hezbollah.
Trump’s attempt to curtail Israel’s freedom of action in Lebanon is in sync with Iran’s overall objective. Netanyahu has pushed back, saying that Israel has no intention of withdrawing its forces from its newly-created buffer zone in Lebanon until Hezbollah is disarmed. “We will remain in the security zone as long as required in order to defend our country,” said Netanyahu on June 15. In the meantime, Iran has threatened to attack Israel if it presses ahead with its operations in Lebanon.
In another flashpoint, Trump pressured Israel to suspend a set of new air strikes in Iran. After Iran launched some 30 ballistic missiles at Israel in reaction to Israel’s latest air strike in Beirut, the Israeli Air Force struck Iran, hitting air defense batteries and a petrochemical plant. Israel planned a second wave of deadlier strikes in Iran until Trump’s intervention.
Today, the Israeli government is concerned that Trump’s memorandum of understanding with Iran will impinge on its security, particularly as it relates to Iran’s nuclear program, its stockpile of missiles and its support of surrogates like Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis in Yemen.
Interestingly enough, Trump’s tirades have intersected with reports in the US media that Israeli spy agencies have eavesdropped on American negotiators working on a memorandum of understanding with Iran. One wonders whether this story was planted by US officials hostile to Israel.
In any event, Netanyahu has been careful not to offend Trump by criticizing him publicly. Ye he and his ministers are very skeptical of the 14-point Iran deal, says the usually reliable Axios news site.
The Israeli government is concerned that Iran has no genuine intention of relinquishing its nuclear and ballistic missile programs and will string along the United States in protracted but futile negotiations.
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz has said that Trump has pursued a deal “based on his assessment of American interests.” Katz believes that the United States should uphold shared “principles” around Iran’s nuclear program, missiles and proxies.
And in an implicit warning, Katz has said that Israel retains “the ability to act independently to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon” and would prepare accordingly.
As for Trump, he has indicated that Israel will have to accept whatever agreement Washington signs with Iran. “He won’t have any choice,” he said of Netanyahu. “I call the shots. I call all the shots. He doesn’t call the shots.”
Netanyahu, having presented himself as both close to Trump and also independent of him, has rejected the idea that Israel has lost its autonomy in strategic decision-making and that he is at Trump’s beck and call.
As he put it, “In the US, they say that President Trump does everything I ask, and in Israel, they say the opposite, that I do everything he asks. Neither is true. We have a relationship of partners who know each other. Many times, we agree. Sometimes, we don’t agree. That happens in the best families.”
He added that Israel has no choice but to take American interests into account and reminded critics that Trump “brought the US military to fight with us against our common enemy. That’s a big deal. I respect it.”
Netanyahu’s rivals think that Netanyahu is deluding himself.
Yair Lapid, the leader of Israel’s opposition, argues that Netanyahu is turning Israel into “a total vassal state.” Naftali Bennett, a former prime minister, contends that the government had “lost control over Israeli sovereignty.”
Dan Perry, an Israeli journalist who writes for The Forward, says that Trump has acted in an overbearing fashion toward Israel of late.
“For Israel, the alliance Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has spent years cultivating with the American right and with Trump personally has become dangerously fragile. As pressure mounted to stabilize energy markets and prevent wider regional escalation, Trump increasingly presented himself not as a partner coordinating with Israel but as a superior authority managing Israeli actions. He repeatedly framed Israeli military action as dependent on his approval. He cursed Netanyahu in public. He presented Israel as a vassal doing his bidding – something no US president has previously done.”
Yaakov Katz, the co-founder of the Middle East-America Dialogue and the former editor of The Jerusalem Post, believes that Netanyahu did not properly size up Trump. “The strategic mistake he made was failing to understand that, just as Trump is with you, he could also flip on you.”
To no one’s surprise, the latest flareups between Netanyahu and Trump have diminished Trump’s popularity in Israel. According to the Israel Democracy Index Survey, only 44 percent of Israelis currently think that Israel’s security is one of Trump’s foremost concerns. The corresponding figure in March was 60 percent.
Due to the current tensions, Netanyahu’s Likud Party has reportedly cancelled a planned election campaign highlighting his close ties to Trump. The general election is scheduled to be held in September or October. At present, Netanyahu is trailing in the polls.
Prior to the latest events, Trump was widely perceived as the most pro-Israel president in American history.
During his first term, he won hearts and minds in Israel. He recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and moved the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. He recognized Israel’s sovereignty over the disputed Golan Heights. He stated that Israeli settlements in the West Bank do not contravene international law. And he downplayed relations with the Palestinians and shuttered the PLO office in Washington.
Trump, too, brokered the 2020 Abraham accords, which enabled Israel to normalize bilateral relations with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan.
Trump, though, blasted Netanyahu after he congratulated Joe Biden on his presidential victory in 2020. The pair mended fences a few years later, and since his reelection, Trump has been favorably disposed toward Netanyahu. Trump gave Israel a free hand during its wars in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon and vetoed anti-Israel resolutions at the United Nations. And he unblocked the shipment of US weapons that Biden withheld from Israel during the final stages of the war in Gaza.
Toward the close of 2024, however, he imposed a ceasefire in Gaza after receiving an assurance from Hamas that the rest of Israel’s hostages would be released. Last June, in an acrimonious phone call with Netanyahu, he abruptly forced Israel to cancel its air offensive in Iran. And in September, he compelled Netanyahu to issue an apology to Qatar after Israel tried to assassinate several top-level Hamas officials in Qatar.
What comes next in Trump’s relations with Netanyahu is difficult to predict. But if the recent past is any guide, Trump is likely to come down hard on Netanyahu if he crosses him.
What this will mean for Israel’s long-term security is anyone’s guess. But what seems certain is that Netanyahu’s honeymoon with Trump has ended, and that Israel’s relationship with the United States will become increasingly complex, with all its attendant consequences.
