President Donald Trump on May 6 in Washington, D.C. Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
Columnist
Dan Perry
May 9, 2025
There is a dawning realization in official Israeli circles that President Donald Trump may not be quite the pushover that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government had assumed. After all, the Netanyahu camp greeted Trump’s presidential victory with barely concealed glee. His first term had delivered a series of triumphs for Israel’s right wing — and, truthfully, much of Israeli society.
He recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and moved the U.S. embassy there, ending the long-running anomaly of countries trying to dictate the location of another nation’s capital. Then came American recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, a territory captured from Syria in 1967 and formally annexed by Israel in 1981. He oversaw the Abraham Accords, the 2020 normalization deals between Israel and the UAE, Bahrain, and other Middle Eastern countries. These agreements marked a sea change — particularly the UAE deal, which for the first time offered Israelis not just formal recognition but a warm embrace, with no visible concessions demanded in return.
For many on the Israeli right, Trump seemed like a dream president: uninterested in Palestinian statehood, unbothered by human rights critiques, uncritical of West Bank settlements, and largely aligned with their “might makes right” worldview. But those days may be gone.
How quickly things appear to change. Just a few weeks ago, Trump was proclaiming that he and Netanyahu were “on the same side of every issue.” Now, he’s skipping Israel on the first Middle Eastern visit of his new presidency, and has reportedly stepped back from his once-close relationship with his Israeli counterpart.
But, looked at closely, the cracks in that relationship aren’t quite as new as they seem. When Netanyahu made a last-minute April visit to the White House, largely in an attempt to try and talk Trump down from imposing a major new tariff on Israel,Trump appeared to ambush him with the announcement that the United States was resuming nuclear talks with Iran.
Netanyahu sat beside him, visibly stunned. The three rounds of talks that have since been held appear to be leading to an arrangement that sounds a lot like a return to the Iran deal negotiated under former President Barack Obama: Iran would relinquish highly enriched material, continue lower-level enrichment under verification, and receive sanctions relief.
The shocks kept coming. Earlier this week, shortly after a Houthi missile struck the grounds of Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport — causing most airlines to cease flying to Israel — Trump revealed a deal with the Houthis to end U.S.-led strikes targeting the group in Yemen. In exchange, the Houthis would stop attacking ships heading through the Red Sea toward the Suez Canal.
Left out of the deal? Any promise from the Houthis to stop firing at Israel. The timing, two days after the airport incident, left Israelis once again feeling that Trump had thrown them under the bus.
And Trump, while erratic on Gaza, now seems skeptical of the indefinite war Israel appears to envision.
Yes, his signals have been contradictory at best. Just days before taking office, he was widely seen as having pressured Netanyahu to sign a phased ceasefire deal with Hamas, in exchange for the release of all Israeli hostages. Then, as if pivoting for showmanship, Trump floated the bombastic idea of expelling all Palestinians from Gaza and having the U.S. “buy” the territory.
After allowing Netanyahu to resume military operations, he now wants a quick, decisive win that he can claim as his own — a distant vision from the military occupation the government this week moved toward officially pursuing. The prospect of an endless war may be helpful in keeping together Netanyahu’s benighted coalition, but does not fit Trump’s narrative.
The Israeli right, to be blunt, appears to have read him wrong. They were prepared to overlook the fact that Trump’s affection for Israel was not the result of a true emotional bond of the kind credibly projected, say, by former President Bill Clinton. He never declared himself a Zionist, as former President Joe Biden did upon landing in Tel Aviv in 2022.
But unlike Biden, he also never tried to restrain Israel’s military moves in Gaza. So when Trump returned to power, Netanyahu likely expected a blank check. He may have believed he could manipulate the famously mercurial ex-president — as many credit him with having done in 2018, when he persuaded Trump to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal. (In retrospect, perhaps Trump was simply eager to rip apart a deal struck by Barack Obama).
At the heart of these developments lies an interesting truth: Trump is not former President Theodore Roosevelt. Where Roosevelt said, “Speak softly and carry a big stick,” Trump does the opposite. He speaks loudly — often absurdly so — but for all his bluster, he is, at least militarily, something of a pacifist. His wars are trade wars. He prizes deals that let him declare victory without firing a shot.
Though there have been no public declarations of a rift, the signs are increasingly visible. It’s not just that Trump is avoiding visiting Israel: In another stunning shift, he appears ready to proceed with a strategic defense pact with Saudi Arabia even without conditioning it on normalization with Israel.
Biden had made normalization a key prerequisite; Trump seems to have dropped it. That is certainly not what anyone in Israel hoped for: Normalization with Saudi Arabia is a holy grail of Israeli diplomacy and would be a boost for its economy, a chance to break the last major Arab resistance to acceptance of the Jewish state.
Trump’s next moves are impossible to predict, and he could always, once again, turn on a dime. But the signs are there that he has observed that Netanyahu — who is beholden to far-right coalition partners demanding maximalist war aims —cannot or will not deliver what Saudi Arabia needs to ensure a diplomatic leap. If normalization is off the table because of Netanyahu, Trump sees little value in delaying an agreement with Riyadh that is, for him, a much-needed foreign policy win.
This would be a catastrophic loss for Israel. Instead of seizing the long yearned-for opportunity to establish ties with their powerful neighbor, Israel appears to be squandering it in service of keeping Netanyahu’s coalition intact. The Israeli public can only watch as the price of that goal — paid for by the blood of hostages and soldiers, a struggling economy and missed diplomatic breakthroughs — mounts.
What Trump seems to have realized — perhaps more clearly than many Israelis themselves — is that the current government in Jerusalem is not a true ally of the U.S.
The Israeli people are overwhelmingly so. But Netanyahu’s government, driven by internal survival and beholden to extremists, is out of step not just with American interests, but with Israeli ones as well.
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