Does Trump really see ‘eye to eye’ with Netanyahu on Iran, Gaza and the settlements?
While these two leaderships are emphatically allied, they may not be thoroughly aligned
David Horovitz is the founding editor of The Times of Israel. He is the author of "Still Life with Bombers" (2004) and "A Little Too Close to God" (2000), and co-author of "Shalom Friend: The Life and Legacy of Yitzhak Rabin" (1996). He previously edited The Jerusalem Post (2004-2011) and The Jerusalem Report (1998-2004).
This Editor’s Note was sent out earlier Wednesday in ToI’s weekly update email to members of the Times of Israel Community. To receive these Editor’s Notes as they’re released, join the ToI Community here.
Israelis would have voted for Donald Trump by a far, far greater margin than America did, indeed probably by a greater margin than any individual US state did. Two polls here in the run-up to the election showed Israelis favoring Trump over Kamala Harris by 66% to 17% and 65% to 13%, respectively. His support among Jewish Israelis was higher still.
That’s quite the contrast with 2016, when several polls showed Israelis preferring Hillary Clinton to Trump, even though, in some of the polls at the time, respondents also said they thought Trump’s policies would be better for Israel.
One of the differences between then and now is that Israelis are far more concerned and angered today by the deep and growing hostility to Israel on the far left of the Democratic Party.
Another, of course, is that for all that Trump is regarded as dependably unpredictable, he was an unknown presidential quantity eight years ago.
In 2024, by contrast, Israelis could look back on a first term in which Trump advanced core policies appreciated across much of the Israeli political spectrum: recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and moving the US embassy to the city; endorsing Israeli sovereignty on the Golan Heights; ratcheting up economic pressure on the regime in Tehran in an effort to thwart its nuclear weapons drive; and brokering the Abraham Accords normalization with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco.
This time, then, it was Trump who was the familiar leader, and Harris the unpredictable neophyte — seen as broadly supportive of Israel (though not its government), with a Jewish husband and all, but still an unknown.
Benjamin Netanyahu is ecstatic about Trump’s victory — even though the president-elect didn’t so much as speak to him for a long time after his defeat in 2020 because the prime minister had the temerity to congratulate Joe Biden on winning. Trump regarded this as an act of profound disloyalty. As he told Israeli journalist Barak Ravid: “F*ck him.”
They have long since made their peace, with Trump hosting Mr. and Mrs. Netanyahu at Mar-a-Lago in July, Netanyahu rushing to hail “history’s greatest comeback” two weeks ago, and the pair holding several phone calls in the days since.
The prime minister, who denounced the Biden administration from the Knesset podium this week for its efforts at key junctures over the past year to prevent Israeli military actions in Gaza and against Iran, plainly anticipates that Trump will be more accommodating. He and the president-elect see “eye to eye” on the Iranian threat, Netanyahu announced last week, for example.
Netanyahu’s confidence is well-founded. At the most basic level, the prime minister — like that overwhelming majority of Israelis who preferred Trump to Harris — assesses that the ayatollahs are likely to be more worried by him than they would have been by her, and that the Saudis are likely to be more inclined to work with him, and potentially culminate the Abraham Accords by normalizing ties with Israel, than with her.
But while these two leaderships are emphatically allied, they may not be thoroughly aligned. Trump has said loud and clear that Israel needs to get the war won quickly in Gaza, and that “the killing has to stop.” And in his victory speech in Florida, the US president-elect stressed that he intends to “stop wars,” not start them.
He also indicated in that address that his initial focus would be on domestic priorities, saying, “We have to put our country first for at least a period of time,” while his incoming vice president JD Vance noted two weeks before the election that US and Israeli interests would not always overlap, and that “our interest very much is in not going to war with Iran.”
Those kinds of comments hardly constitute a ringing endorsement of current Netanyahu thinking and policy.
Perhaps the major area of unclarity is over the West Bank settlement enterprise and the wider issue of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Trump’s victory has been hailed most euphorically here by the settler leadership and by its political champions in Netanyahu’s Likud and the two far-right coalition parties. Both Religious Zionism’s leader Bezalel Smotrich and Otzma Yehudit’s Itamar Ben Gvir have declared that the re-ascent of Trump brings with it the opportunity to expand and annex the settlements and apply sovereignty in the West Bank.
Trump’s choice of Mike Huckabee as his ambassador to Israel has been reasonably welcomed as emblematic of an incoming administration deeply supportive of the settlement enterprise, with Huckabee, who stated in an interview last week that annexation is indeed a possibility, having memorably adjudged Israel’s ties to Judea and Samaria stronger than America’s to Manhattan.
And yet Trump, in an interview soon after his inauguration in February 2017, made clear his discomfort with the settlements, telling the Israel Hayom daily that they “don’t help the process,” that “every time you take land for settlements, there is less land left” and that “I am not somebody that believes that going forward with these settlements is a good thing for peace.”
Visiting Israel on his first overseas visit as president, in May 2017, moreover, Trump concluded his trip with a speech at the Israel Museum in which he asserted that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas — whom he had met earlier that day in Bethlehem — and the Palestinians “are ready to reach for peace.” Departing from his prepared text, he insisted to his skeptical audience, including his host Netanyahu: “I know you’ve heard it before. I am telling you. That’s what I do. They are ready to reach for peace.”
It is highly unlikely that Trump feels as well disposed toward Abbas and the Palestinians as he did a few years ago — especially in the wake of Hamas’s monstrous massacre in southern Israel 411 days ago, the widespread Palestinian empathy for that barbaric slaughter, and Abbas’s own Fatah faction eulogizing Hamas’s genocidal chief as “a great national leader.”
But the Trump administration’s mixed messages on the settlement issue culminated in something of a fiasco when the Palestinians rejected Trump’s “Peace to Prosperity” vision for Israeli-Palestinian peace in January 2020, and Netanyahu believed he had Trump’s backing to annex all the settlements and the Jordan Valley. The prime minister went so far as to tell Israeli reporters who had accompanied him to DC for the unveiling of Trump’s plan that annexation would unfold within days, before Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner emphatically disabused him of the idea.
Trump would later tell Ravid that Netanyahu “did not want to make peace. Never did” and confirmed preventing his annexation plan: “I got angry and I stopped it.”
Eight months later, Netanyahu signed the Abraham Accords, having agreed as a condition of the deal with the UAE not to annex any of the West Bank — at least until 2024.
This time around, the stakes are even higher. Iran is closer to the bomb. The prospect of Saudi normalization — and a regional alliance against the ayatollahs — is slipping away, with Riyadh accusing Israel of genocide. The settlement movement, and a goodly part of Netanyahu’s coalition, have their eye on Gaza as well as the West Bank.
The incoming US president has a whole world on his plate, and a stated determination to focus first on domestic priorities. But he would do well to urgently clarify his positions on tackling Iran, on ending the Gaza war and saving the hostages — issues he and President Joe Biden discussed last week — and on the settlements.
His enthusiastic ally Netanyahu needs to know. And so does an Israeli nation that would have voted for Trump far more widely than America did, but is desperately and debilitatingly torn over its own prime minister’s leadership and policies.
