JERUSALEM — Three months ago, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hailed Donald Trump as the “greatest friend Israel has ever had in the White House.” But that friendship — and Netanyahu’s powers of persuasion — will be tested on Monday at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, where the Israeli leader will meet a U.S. president with increasingly diverging views on practically every Middle East hot spot.
For Netanyahu, the trip to Florida offers a crucial opportunity to convince Trump to take a tougher stance on Gaza and require that Hamas disarm before Israeli troops further withdraw as part of the second phase of Trump’s 20-point peace plan, Israeli officials say. On Iran, Netanyahu is seeking a green light for another strike against the Islamic Republic’s ballistic missile program, possibly as part of a joint operation with the United States — even though Trump forcefully demanded an end to the 12-day Israel-Iran war in June and declared that Iran’s nuclear program had been “totally obliterated” by U.S. stealth bombers.
On Syria, the Trump administration has bristled at actions by the Israeli military inside the country that undermine efforts by the new president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, to consolidate control, with Trump publicly warning Israel this month against doing anything “that will interfere with Syria’s evolution into a prosperous State.” And in Lebanon, Israel has repeatedly bombed Hezbollah targets while demanding that the militant group disarm in accordance with a U.S.-brokered ceasefire, but the strikes have threatened to tip the region into another conflagration on Trump’s watch.
As they meet Monday for the fifth time this year, Netanyahu’s hawkishness will butt up against a U.S. president who has staked his own image and legacy on promoting peace, and Netanyahu may struggle to win Trump’s backing given how the relationship has deteriorated, according to people familiar with the thinking of the two leaders and political observers.
“This is an emergency summit,” said Dan Diker, president of the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs think tank. “The context is a need to clear or purify the air, because there’s been tensions between the two sides. They have different timelines to get to the same destination, which is a Middle East that is liberated from the Iranian regime and its terror proxies, particularly Hamas.”
In recent months, Netanyahu has often appeared to undercut Trump’s self-congratulations for making peace in the region. Israel carried out additional airstrikes on Iran after the president had declared the 12-day war with Israel over last summer, prompting an expletive-laden warning from Trump on television.
Then, following Israel’s airstrike against Hamas negotiators in Qatar as the Gaza peace deal was being hammered out in September, Trump strong-armed Netanyahu into apologizing. “I think he felt like the Israelis were getting a bit out of control in what they were doing and that it was time to be very strong and stop them from doing things that he felt were not in their long-term interests,” Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and U.S. negotiator, said on CBS’s “60 Minutes” in October.
Now, Israeli officials have indicated that Netanyahu wants to discuss what Israel sees as a dangerous expansion of Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities and the possibility of new joint strikes by Israel and the U.S. This week, the prime minister’s office released an AI-generated video showing Netanyahu and Trump sitting side-by-side, co-piloting a B-2 bomber — the iconic stealth aircraft that the United States used in June to strike Iran’s nuclear facility at Fordow at Netanyahu’s urging.
But while Trump continues to see Iran near or at the top of his regional concerns, his administration has launched another attempt to negotiate with Tehran and first wants to see the effort play out, according to several people familiar with the president’s thinking, who spoke on the condition of anonymity about the sensitive issue. Morgan Ortagus, Trump’s deputy special envoy to the Middle East, told a meeting of the U.N. Security Council on Tuesday that Washington “remains available for formal talks with Iran,” while repeating U.S. insistence that “there can be no [uranium] enrichment.”
Other Trump concerns include Lebanon, where a truce with Israel, brokered by the U.S. and France late last year, is teetering as Netanyahu’s government continues to carry out almost daily bombardments and maintains an army deployment in the southern part of the country, amid charges that Hezbollah has failed to disarm.
“There are mixed policy currents,” said another person familiar with U.S. administration deliberations. “There are those who believe only Israel [is capable of doing] something that can even begin to change Hezbollah’s calculations. … There are others that think you cannot trust what Israel might do as exploding the situation and creating broader chaos.”
Gaza takes center stage
For both Trump and Netanyahu, the most contentious issue will likely be Gaza, not only because of security implications but also its political significance for both leaders. Three months after Trump hailed the peace deal between Israel and Hamas as a “new dawn” for the region, implementation of his 20-point plan has bogged down after the first phase of a ceasefire plan, which has so far seen the release of hostages and prisoners and an increase in humanitarian aid.
Amid contentious conversations between the two governments over who will have final word on what happens in Gaza, none of the main elements of a second phase — a supervising Board of Peace, a committee of Palestinian technocrats to govern Gaza’s internal affairs and an International Stabilization Force to oversee in part the demilitarization of Hamas — is yet in place, even as Israel frequently strikes at Hamas targets inside Gaza despite the ceasefire agreement.
Israel has been reluctant to advance to the deal’s second phase, which could also see Israel eventually withdraw further from the enclave’s interior, without Hamas first disarming. Israeli officials have also balked at the prospect that Turkey — a bitter rival of Israel but an ally of the U.S. — may gain a foothold in Gaza by deploying its troops there as part of the International Stabilization Force.
On Tuesday, tensions with Washington spiked after Netanyahu’s defense minister, Israel Katz, appeared to flout Trump’s peace plan by declaring that Israel will establish Jewish settlements inside the Gaza Strip, drawing a rebuke from U.S. officials. Two days later, Katz doubled down and reiterated that Israel would never fully withdraw from the Strip.
Earlier, after Israeli forces killed the Hamas commander Raed Sa’ad in Gaza on Dec. 13, Trump told reporters he was “looking into” whether Israel had violated the ceasefire agreement. U.S. officials, meanwhile, warned Netanyahu that “we won’t allow you to ruin President Trump’s reputation after he brokered the deal in Gaza,” Axios quoted a U.S. official as saying.
“I’m not sure the Americans will like [the Israeli perspective on] Gaza because it’s not working according to their plan,” said an Israeli government adviser who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. “But for Israel, it has to be total demilitarization, no weapons, no [Hamas] tunnels. And it could take years. We cannot withdraw now.”
For Netanyahu, the trip to Palm Beach, Florida, is further complicated by his political need ahead of the 2026 Israeli elections to project strength and victory on every front, particularly Gaza. Since Oct. 7, 2023, when a Hamas attack left more than 1,200 Israelis dead and 250 taken hostage, Netanyahu has been lambasted by his political opponents for failing to protect Israel. He has also been criticized by Israel’s far right for not doing enough to destroy Hamas, even though the Israeli military carried out a withering, two-year campaign that left more than 70,000 dead in Gaza and much of the Strip in ruins.
“There’s the potential for a significant clash on Gaza, because for both of them, it’s the most central issue,” said Daniel Shapiro, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel. “For Trump, he wants to show that this grand deal he struck actually gets implemented, even if he has cut some corners. For Bibi, it’s a serious political risk to go into the election with an arrangement in Gaza that looks like Hamas will survive in some form.”
DeYoung reported from Washington.
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