The evening that Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris, Netanyahu land rejoiced. The news anchors on Channel 14, Israel’s equivalent of Fox News, toasted Trump’s victory live on air. Yinon Magal, the ultranationalist host of Israel’s premier right-wing talk show, led his audience in a round of celebratory singing while Trump’s face grinned on the screen behind them. Benjamin Netanyahu himself congratulated Trump on “history’s greatest comeback.” The Israeli leader and his allies seemed certain that Trump’s return to the White House heralded unconditional backing for their most fevered fantasies.
They were wrong. Last Friday, Trump wrapped up his tour of the Middle East, where he made deals and hobnobbed with America’s top allies in the region—except one. Israel was not invited to the party and was barely acknowledged in the foreign-policy address that the president delivered in Saudi Arabia. The snub followed more substantive slights. In recent weeks, Trump has surprised Netanyahu by announcing new nuclear negotiations with Iran, halting America’s campaign against the Houthis despite the terrorist group continuing to fire missiles at Israel, and going behind Israel’s back to secure the release of the American Israeli hostage Edan Alexander from Gaza. “There’s a great sense of unease here,” Michael Oren, a former Israeli ambassador to the U.S., said in an interview last week.
None of this should have been unexpected. Trump is famously mercurial and transactional, loyal only to his own self-interest. In his first term, as an unexpected outsider president, he needed international legitimacy and wins, and Israel gave him both in the form of the Abraham Accords. This time, Trump no longer needs legitimacy, and Israel’s war in Gaza is getting in the way of other potential regional wins, such as expanding the accords. In addition, the previous Trump administration’s Israel policy was significantly shaped by staff, and that staff has changed markedly with the introduction of an isolationist faction that seeks to extricate America from international commitments. Netanyahu put all of his chips on Trump nonetheless—a wager that now threatens to cost the Israeli prime minister the remnants of his legacy.
The legend of Benjamin Netanyahu was built on two myths. The first was that Netanyahu was the ultimate guarantor of Israeli security, a far-sighted hawk who, for all his faults, could be relied on to keep Israelis safe. For years, when asked how he’d like to be remembered, Netanyahu routinely responded, “As the protector of Israel,” both in Hebrew and English. “The Jewish nation has never excelled at foreseeing danger,” the prime minister told a talk show in 2014. “We were surprised again and again—and the last time was the most awful one. That won’t happen under my leadership.” After Hamas inflicted the worst day of Jewish death since the Holocaust, Netanyahu’s pose as “Mr. Security” was exposed as a self-flattering falsehood. But he still had one other myth to cling to: his reputation as a geopolitical genius.
In 2019, Netanyahu’s reelection campaign festooned Israel with giant posters, each depicting the prime minister shaking hands with one of three world leaders: India’s Narendra Modi, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump. The banners were captioned with the words Another League. Unlike his small-time Israeli rivals, the placards implied, Netanyahu was a savvy statesman who punched above his weight on the international stage, thanks to his unaccented English oratory and ability to inveigle the world’s most powerful people.
Israelis might not like him or trust him, Netanyahu’s argument went, but they needed him. This line of thinking was so potent that it convinced not just Israelis, but some of Israel’s Arab neighbors, who believed Netanyahu to be the gateway to influence in Washington. One incentive for Arab leaders to normalize ties with Israel, as with the Abraham Accords, was their belief that they could gain Trump’s favor by linking up with his apparent ally.
Most of those campaign posters have not aged well. In the days following the October 7 attack, Putin made multiple public statements on the Gaza conflict, none of which explicitly condemned Hamas. Russia has since voted against Israel repeatedly at the United Nations. Netanyahu’s image could have survived this hit if Trump hadn’t dealt him a more serious and unexpected blow in recent weeks. The president has cut the Israelis out of regional decision making and reportedly kiboshed a plan to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities. Though Trump has not compelled Israel to halt its war in Gaza as yet, he has begun pressing Netanyahu to provide humanitarian aid and conclude the conflict.
By revealing Netanyahu to be a bit player, rather than an elite operator, Trump has not just put the Israeli leader in his place. He has exploded Netanyahu’s carefully cultivated political persona—an act as damaging to Netanyahu’s standing as the Hamas attack on October 7. Worse than making Netanyahu look foolish, Trump has made him look irrelevant. He is not Trump’s partner, but rather his mark. In Israeli parlance, the prime minister is a freier—a sucker.
The third-rate pro-government propagandists on Channel 14 might not have seen this coming, but Netanyahu should have. His dark worldview is premised on the pessimistic presumption that the world will turn on the Jews if given the chance, which is why the Israeli leader has long prized hard power over diplomatic understandings. Even if Trump wasn’t such an unreliable figure, trusting him should have gone against all of Netanyahu’s instincts.
He should have realized that in a competition for the affections of a strongman like Trump, Israel had little to offer. “We can’t invest a trillion dollars in the American economy,” noted Oren, the former Israeli ambassador, “but there are some other people in this neighborhood who can.” Not only does Israel not have spare luxury jets lying around to fob off on the American president, but the country took nine years to retrofit and launch its own version of Air Force One, and the process was a national fiasco.
So long as Netanyahu refuses to go along with any of Trump’s grand diplomatic initiatives, which might require him to end the Gaza war or entertain some semblance of Palestinian statehood, Israel has nothing to give Trump other than symbolic trinkets. But instead of recognizing the precariousness of his position, Netanyahu abandoned his characteristic caution, put his faith in Trump without a fallback, and is now left with nowhere else to turn.
British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli was once said by his biographer to be “a master at disguising retreat as advance”—a passage that Richard Nixon underlined in his copy of the book. Like those men, Netanyahu is the consummate survivor, and he may yet manage to spin his latest predicament to his benefit. To write off the Israeli leader would be foolish, especially with new elections not required until late 2026.
But the body blows to Netanyahu’s reputation should not be underestimated. His current coalition received just 48.4 percent of the vote in the last election and has been polling underwater since before October 7. More than 70 percent of Israelis want their prime minister to resign. Voters sometimes fall for myths, but eventually, like children, they outgrow them.
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