By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

The US and Israel Follow the Same Old Script: Trump Restrains Netanyahu’s Regional Ambitions, but Gives Him a Free Hand With the Palestinians.

In recent weeks, an air of crisis has enveloped the United States’ relationship with Israel, Washington’s closest ally and client state in the Middle East. When U.S. President Donald Trump made his first trip to the region in May, he notably bypassed Jerusalem on his way to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. The snubbing of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was coupled with dramatic twists and turns in American regional diplomacy. Against Israel’s wishes, Trump is negotiating directly with the Jewish state’s worst enemies: Iran and Hamas. His team reached out to the Yemeni Houthis, who keep firing missiles deep into Israel and continue to block its marine traffic. He even met with Syria’s ex-jihadist leader, whom he praised as “tough” and “attractive.”

To Netanyahu’s critics at home and abroad, Trump’s behavior is a breath of fresh air. For years, the Israeli leader has boasted about his close relationship with this U.S. president, arguing that their bond is a reason to keep him in power. During Trump’s first term, after all, the United States gave Israel and Netanyahu almost everything they asked for. But this time, Trump is bucking the prime minister, and Netanyahu and his supporters have had only feeble excuses as to why their efforts are failing.

Yet, historically speaking, Trump’s diplomatic overtures to Israel’s adversaries are not new. Since Israel’s establishment in 1948, U.S. administrations have generally followed Washington’s geopolitical interests in the Middle East, even when those interests conflict with Israel’s. Judged by these standards, Trump’s first term—with its near-unequivocal support for Israel’s regional ambitions—was an aberration. His second, by contrast, is more of a regression to the mean.

Where Israel has gotten carte blanche from Washington is about the Palestinians. No U.S. president, not even the most liberal of them, has forced Israel to stop building settlements or to end its occupation of the Palestinian territories. And here, Trump is in keeping with both his first term and with decades of U.S. policy. Trump is allowing Netanyahu to prosecute the war in Gaza with American consent. He has only occasionally put pressure on Israel to let in aid. And in February, Trump declared his support for the “voluntary emigration” of Gaza’s Palestinian population to nearby Arab states or elsewhere, which is exactly what Netanyahu’s far-right coalition wanted to hear. A few weeks later, Israel breached a short-lived cease-fire with Hamas, escalated its bombing campaign, and cut off humanitarian supplies to Gaza’s two million people. Netanyahu declared his intent to occupy the entire territory, disarm Hamas, and implement Trump’s “genius plan” for clearing the land of Palestinians.

Under Trump, the United States continues to serve as Israel’s security guarantor and diplomatic shield. Israel thus remains free to engage in behavior that Washington rarely tolerates from other countries. The United States, for example, stonewalls any efforts to look into Israel’s unacknowledged nuclear arsenal. It vetoes UN resolutions criticizing Israel’s violations of international law. And Washington helps the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) with cross-border operations by providing unparalleled military aid and access to advanced defense technology. Trump may no longer be doing everything that Netanyahu wishes. But the special relationship is alive and well, just as it always has been.

 

Same As It Ever Was

For nearly 80 years, the U.S.-Israeli alliance has withstood political upheavals in both countries and around the world. Ever since U.S. President Harry Truman recognized Israel, minutes after its declaration of independence in 1948—against the advice of his secretary of state, George Marshall—successive administrations have shrugged off criticism from human rights moralists, as well as foreign-policy realists critical of their support for the Jewish state. Israel, in turn, has grown only more dependent on American diplomatic cover and military assistance. But U.S. officials have often ignored or put pressure on the country when its actions proved geopolitically inconvenient to their own agendas.

Consider the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Truman gave Israel diplomatic recognition even as the United States abided by a UN arms embargo on its various belligerents. (The fledgling IDF got its arms from Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and by smuggling excess war materiel from the United States.) When the war ended, Truman accepted the territorial and demographic results of the conflict. That meant he recognized Israel’s land gains beyond the UN Partition Plan of 1947 and accepted as fact the nakba—the exodus of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs, never allowed to return. He put only a token amount of pressure on Israel to accept some of them back.

Yet during the final stage of the war, when Israeli forces chased the retreating Egyptian army into the Sinai Peninsula, clashing with the British troops then deployed around the Suez Canal, Truman forced Israeli leader David Ben-Gurion to retreat. He would not allow Israel to go beyond Palestine’s antebellum borders and threaten the de facto British protectorate in Cairo, which controlled the crucial international waterway. Israel should have learned its lesson: it could enjoy a relatively free hand with the Palestinians but not undermine the interests of its superpower partner.

In the early 1950s, the United States kept Israel at arm’s length as it sought alliances with friendly Arab regimes and focused on the main Cold War fronts in Asia and Europe. It allowed its British and French allies to supply the IDF with tanks and aircraft. But in 1956, when Israel joined France and the United Kingdom in a failed effort to bring down the charismatic Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, Washington balked. To win the race for the hearts and minds of postcolonial countries, the United States decided it could not side with the outdated imperialists. The IDF occupied the Sinai within days, but U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower, furious about his allies’ freelance war, made Ben-Gurion withdraw. Once again, Israel had to face the limits of its outreach.

As the Cold War intensified in the 1960s, the United States grew closer to Israel, replacing Charles de Gaulle’s France as its arms supplier. And when war erupted again in 1967, leading to the Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, the Sinai, and the West Bank, U.S. President Lyndon Johnson allowed Israel to keep these territories as bargaining chips in negotiations with the Arab states. After Israel and its neighbors fought another war in 1973, however, the United States forced Israel to return the Sinai in exchange for normalized relations with Egypt—an agreement that has served as the cornerstone of the regional order ever since its 1979 signing. Before the 1973 fight, Israel had hoped that it would be able to keep the territory. But Washington’s interest in pulling Egypt out of the Soviet orbit was ultimately paramount, so the United States forced Israel to concede.

This push and pull continued to define U.S.-Israeli relations after the Cold War ended. The United States consistently defended Israel in international organizations, using its UN Security Council seat to veto resolutions critical of the country. But it prevented Israel from retaliating against Iraqi missile attacks during the 1991 Gulf War, fearing that Israeli intervention would break apart the U.S.-led coalition fighting Baghdad, which featured several Arab states. Washington sold Israel boundless weapons but forced the country to halt its arms exports to China. U.S. officials keep silent about Israel’s nuclear weapons program and have sanctioned its secret 2007 bombing of a reactor under construction in Syria, but they have prevented Israel from attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities. Under U.S. President Barack Obama, Washington even struck a nuclear deal with Iran, despite Netanyahu’s vocal opposition.

Yet even though Washington has deviated from Israel in some regional matters, no U.S. president, not even Obama, has restrained Israel’s repression of the Palestinians. Instead, successive administrations have essentially given the Jewish state a free hand to expand its settlements in the West Bank, which are aimed at preventing a future Palestinian country from emerging and have been Israel’s key national project since 1967. U.S. presidents have sometimes criticized the settlements for legal and strategic reasons, but their tough talk was just that—talk. Washington has never done anything tangible to stop the incessant building, limiting intervention to a few key Palestinian areas.

Similarly, the United States has never forced Israel to negotiate an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It has come up with all sorts of peace schemes and sponsored round after round of negotiations between Israeli and Palestinian leaders. But Washington has agreed to meaningful talks with the Palestinian Liberation Organization only after Israel did so first. When Israel turned away from the peace process, the United States followed suit. Washington has abandoned the process despite its declared support for the two-state solution. Neither Trump nor Biden did anything to rekindle the dying hope of Israeli-Palestinian peace.

 

Wildest Dreams

Trump’s first term in office shifted away from this tradition. The president retained, and even accentuated, Washington’s disregard for the Palestinians. But he unequivocally aligned the United States with Israel on foreign policy matters, too. Breaking from all his predecessors since Truman, Trump moved the seat of the American embassy to Jerusalem. (Its main office remains in Tel Aviv.) He shut down the consulate general in Jerusalem, which had served as the U.S. diplomatic point of contact with the Palestinians. He recognized Israel’s 1981 annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights. And with Netanyahu’s encouragement, he ditched the nuclear deal with Iran. In response, the Iranians began enriching more and higher-grade uranium.

Then, in 2020, Trump delivered his biggest gift to Netanyahu by negotiating the Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and Bahrain, Morocco, and the United Arab Emirates. In theory, this was a two-way deal, in which Netanyahu was to shelf his plan to annex a third of the West Bank in exchange for normalization. But this was barely a concession; the Palestinians gained nothing real. In fact, the Palestinian Authority didn’t even have a seat at the negotiating table. In his last week in office, Trump also added Israel to U.S. Central Command’s area of responsibility. Since then, the IDF has trained with its counterparts in the Gulf kingdoms, Egypt, and Jordan.

U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration was also exceptionally accommodating of the Israelis. Biden, who has vocally supported Israel since joining the Senate in the 1970s, reversed none of Trump’s Israel policies. In fact, he tried to build on them, pushing for Saudi Arabia to join the Abraham Accords by offering Riyadh defense guarantees and nuclear technology. He exempted Israeli passport holders from U.S. visas. When Hamas attacked on October 7, 2023, and Hezbollah and the Houthis piled on, Biden flooded Israel with arms and deployed aircraft carriers from China to the Middle East. He backed Israel’s counteroffensive into Gaza, and later Lebanon and Syria, even as the Palestinian casualties mounted and American progressives revolted.

Biden did occasionally rebuke Israel for denying humanitarian aid to Gaza. He authorized the construction by U.S. forces of a pier in Gaza designed to receive shipments of aid, but that quickly collapsed into the sea. At one point, he embargoed some weapons shipments and sanctioned violent West Bank settlers whom the Israeli government had enabled to attack their Palestinian neighbors. But the latter policy was fleeting, and all were token gestures. Netanyahu periodically let in some aid to appease Washington, but he continued with his total war. This pattern will likely hold under Trump.

Notably, Biden unequivocally stood with Israel even as the country’s dependence on U.S. support reached new heights. When Iran attacked Israel twice last year with hundreds of ballistic and cruise missiles and drones, Israel needed a U.S.-led coalition to protect its airspace. To strengthen military coordination and joint planning, Washington regularly dispatched General Michael Kurilla, the head of Central Command, to Tel Aviv as a uniformed watchdog. Last year, after the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, charging them with war crimes and crimes against humanity, Biden criticized the decision. His government promised that Netanyahu and Gallant would not be arrested on U.S. territory. (The United States is not a member of the ICC.) Yet Israel never had to give Washington any meaningful quid pro quo for all this help. It was free.

 

The More Things Change

For Netanyahu, Trump’s return to the White House seemed, at first, to be a gift from heaven, after he effectively prayed for a Republican victory. Netanyahu’s popularity plummeted after the October 7 attacks, but he retained his reputation as a Trump whisperer. As a result, Trump’s election gave skeptical Israelis a reason to keep their prime minister around.

Indeed, during the first weeks of the second Trump term, Netanyahu racked up repeat victories. Biden’s sanctions on some West Bank settlers were eliminated. Instead, Trump put sanctions on the International Criminal Court and its employees. Netanyahu was the first world leader to be invited to the White House, and when he arrived, Trump laid out his plan to depopulate Gaza and turn it into a beach resort. Netanyahu could thus defy his critics at home, arguing that waiting out Biden and prolonging the war had paid off. Even Israel’s long-standing dream of attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities appeared to be in reach.

The honeymoon, however, was brief. In April, Trump called Netanyahu back to the White House to tell him that negotiations on a new nuclear deal with Iran were beginning. The encounter was followed by reports that Trump had blocked Israel from bombing Iranian nuclear facilities. Then came news of a U.S.-Houthi cease-fire, which excluded Israel, and American outreach to Hamas and Syria. Trump even decoupled the proposed U.S.-Saudi defense and nuclear agreements from an Israeli-Saudi deal. Canada and Europe interpreted the change of heart in Washington as a green light to threaten Israel with sanctions if the war and the humanitarian disaster in Gaza continued.

Trump has voiced interest in a quick, new Gaza cease-fire and the return of the Israeli hostages. But Trump’s Gaza strategy is strikingly different from his regional one. Washington is seeking a common ground with Tehran, despite threatening its rulers with negative consequences if they keep their uranium enrichment program. In Gaza, however, Trump has signaled that he is fine with Israel’s continued fighting and its retention of freshly occupied territory in the enclave. The United States is keeping an open channel to Hamas. Although the contacts are limited to the evasive hostage-for-truce deal, they give Hamas—which Washington considers a designated terrorist group—unprecedented U.S. recognition as an interlocutor.

Trump’s behavior, in other words, does not mark a fundamental shift in U.S.-Israeli relations. Rather, freed from reelection concerns and with full control over Congress, Trump has returned Washington’s Middle East policy to its age-old basis. The United States will carve its path in the region and beyond. But it will stand by Israel when it comes to the Palestinians, and it will continuously protect the country. Netanyahu has had to accept, however grudgingly, that Trump will no longer bow to his requests on Iran. But just like all his predecessors, Netanyahu retains a free hand in Gaza and the West Bank. He can move ahead with his plans to destroy and depopulate the former and to annex territory in the latter. He ultimately might not take these measures, thanks to broader international pressure or shifts in domestic public opinion, or because he strikes a deal to normalize ties with Saudi Arabia. But he will still have ravaged Gaza with American consent.

 

 

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