WASHINGTON, DC, USA – Since first entering the White House in 2017, US President Donald Trump has pursued a foreign policy that fulfills the wish list of right-wing Israel and lifts the political fortunes of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The Israeli leader, in turn, is portraying himself as the best steward of Israel’s most important foreign relations, overcoming some public criticism and leaked complaints from President Trump that have brought little concrete policy change.
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But despite the long history between the two, President Trump has so far taken a decidedly shoddy approach to Israel’s October 27 election. The vote shows Prime Minister Netanyahu’s Likud party and the far-right coalition it leads face increasing threat from Yashar leader Gadi Eisenkot and the opposition coalition he seeks to build.
This is ambivalence, at least in public, and is likely driven by changing political winds in both the United States and Israel, as well as the evolving relationship between President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu, said Youssef Munayer, director of the Palestine/Israel program at the Arab Center in Washington, D.C.
“Given Trump’s past support for right-wing allies, the history of the relationship between Trump and Netanyahu, and how close Trump and Netanyahu were, he seems to be more distant than you might think,” Munayer told Al Jazeera.
The US president has three times avoided directly endorsing Netanyahu in a recent interview with Time magazine, even as he defended the Israeli prime minister’s leadership ahead of the Hamas-led offensive on southern Israel on October 7, 2023.
As for Eisenkot, he admitted, “I haven’t heard anything bad.”
Migration support?
Indeed, Trump’s actions toward Israel, especially Netanyahu, often speak louder than his words.
During his first term, which ran from 2017 to 2021, Trump moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, recognized Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights, withdrew from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, and spearheaded a series of normalization deals with Arab countries aimed at averting the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
During his second term, which began in January 2025, he continued to proliferate even the most devastating US weapons against Israel during the genocide in Gaza, escalated the International Criminal Court (ICC) crackdown, and entered, as a crown jewel, a war with Iran that is shaking the global economy.
President Trump has also sought pardons in Netanyahu’s ongoing corruption trial and has hosted Israeli leaders at least seven times since returning to the White House last year, far more than any other world leader.
Throughout the relationship, signs of discord over Netanyahu’s obstruction of Washington’s push for a more lasting peace in Gaza and an end to the war with Iran have not translated into actual policy changes.
“This is a relationship that they carefully engineered for the public, and some of the interesting things we learned were almost entirely Trump’s choices,” said Michael Ommerman, director of Israel and Palestine at DAWN, a think tank based in Washington, D.C., who did not rule out a full-scale U.S. gesture to back Netanyahu in the final stages of the campaign.
“I don’t think President Trump has abandoned Prime Minister Netanyahu,” he told Al Jazeera. “But he’s also a realist, and he’s seen many of the candidates he’s endorsed lose as well as win elections in different countries.”
Omerman assessed that the stakes may not be that high for Trump.
Eisenkot has promised to take a more moderate approach than Netanyahu, especially when it comes to stopping rampant settler violence in the occupied West Bank. But these changes are primarily aimed at boosting Israel’s standing among European governments and the world’s public, and have little to do with relations with the already tolerant Trump administration.
“I don’t think we’ll see a big change in our relationship with the United States, because there doesn’t seem to be a lot of friction in our relationship with the United States,” he said.
“The Eisenkot government may stop occupying every hilltop in the West Bank. It may allow more (aid) to Gaza, but they are not going to undo the steps they have already taken,” he said.
“friend and foe”
Mairav Zonszein, senior Israel analyst at the International Crisis Group, also pointed to the changing situation surrounding the relationship between President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu.
President Trump’s silence reflects in part the rift within his administration over Netanyahu, and the growing rift within the Republican Party as the US midterm elections approach.
“This is probably a combination of the Iran war and the Trump administration’s divisions with people like[Vice President J.D.]Vance, who has strongly opposed Prime Minister Netanyahu’s role in promoting the U.S. attack on Iran,” Zonszein said.
Polls have repeatedly suggested that support for Israel remains high among Republicans, but that support has declined in recent years. Confidence in Prime Minister Netanyahu within the party is also declining.
At the same time, perceptions of President Trump’s influence are changing in Israel, with Netanyahu’s critics focusing on the U.S. role in limiting Israeli operations in Lebanon, which they fear could derail a June memorandum that suspended the U.S.-Israel war on Iran.
An Israel Democracy Institute poll released in June found that only 44% of Jewish Israelis believe Israel’s security is a top priority for President Trump, down from 61% in March, just after the United States and Israel began their war with Iran.
Prime Minister Netanyahu has avoided billboards boasting of his close ties to President Trump during this campaign, a departure from his previous approach, Zonszein said.
Instead, it has featured figures it considers to be Israel’s greatest regional and international enemies, including Hezbollah Secretary-General Naim Qassem, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and New York City Mayor Zoran Mamdani.
Zonszein said Netanyahu is emphasizing “enemies and friends.”
