The two-year war between Israel and Hamas is at a precarious inflection point after a roller-coaster sequence of events over the past week. On Monday, President Donald Trump unveiled a 20-point plan for ending the war in Gaza, presenting it as a nonnegotiable ultimatum to Hamas. On Friday, Hamas said it would consider discussing the first 10 points, including releasing the hostages in their custody, and effectively sidestepped the rest of the points, including turning over its weapons. Trump enthusiastically accepted this lukewarm response—declaring on Truth Social that “I believe they are ready for a lasting PEACE”—and dragged Benjamin Netanyahu along for the ride.
“Israel must immediately stop the bombing of Gaza, so that we can get the Hostages out safely and quickly,” Trump further demanded in that post, which went up at 5:14 p.m. eastern time on Friday—past midnight in Jerusalem. Faced with this presidential directive, the Israeli prime minister promptly acquiesced. In March, after the end of the previous Gaza truce, Netanyahu promised that Israel would conduct negotiations with Hamas only “under fire”—that is, it would not cease military action prior to a diplomatic deal being struck. On Saturday, the Israeli leader abruptly reversed course. Israel began halting offensive operations in Gaza—most notably around Gaza City, the primary target of the current war effort—and made plans to dispatch negotiators to Cairo.
In short, Trump successfully bullied Netanyahu—and if this latest round of talks is going to get results, he’ll need to do more of it. That’s because despite the president’s confident proclamations of peace for our time, a deal is far from assured. Hamas can easily blow up the fragile process by refusing to release all of the hostages, or otherwise reneging on its hazy commitments to Trump and the mediating states. The terrorist group is reportedly divided between its leaders abroad who want to agree to Trump’s terms and its leaders in Gaza who do not. At the same time, Netanyahu is already facing a mutiny among the far-right members of his coalition, who want to ethnically cleanse and resettle Gaza, and are threatening to bring down his government if the war ends. Today, Trump is the only actor who can provide a counterweight to these radicals and compel Netanyahu to make different choices by changing his incentives. As he showed this weekend, the president holds incredible leverage over the Israeli leader—he just needs to use it.
Contrary to the spin of Netanyahu’s boosters in Israel and the fulmination of anti-Semites in America, Trump has never been beholden to Netanyahu. The reverse is true: Netanyahu has been beholden to Trump. For years, the Israeli leader has marketed himself to voters as the Trump whisperer and presented his alliance with the mercurial American president as an electoral asset. Netanyahu even festooned buildings with photos of himself with Trump on towering campaign posters across Israel. But these boasts have now become a straitjacket. With Israeli elections scheduled for late 2026—and possibly arriving earlier—the prime minister cannot afford a public feud with the president without refuting his own electoral argument. This means Netanyahu not only has to accept Trump’s diktats; he has to spin them as his own ideas—or risk shattering the myth he has built around himself.
The president fully grasps this dynamic. “I said, ‘Bibi, this is your chance for victory,’” Trump told the Axios reporter Barak Ravid on Saturday. “He was fine with it. He’s got to be fine with it. He has no choice. With me, you got to be fine.” The president’s official rapid-response team then posted that quote on social media, in case anyone had missed the implication.
Trump has not only compelled Netanyahu’s recent about-face on Gaza. Over the past six months, he has forced Netanyahu to abort a major counterstrike in Iran; publicly declared, “I will not allow Israel to annex the West Bank,” dashing the aspirations of the Israeli settler right; negotiated the release of an American hostage from Hamas behind Netanyahu’s back; and made the Israeli leader apologize to Qatar for his recent strike there—after which the White House released a humiliating photo of Netanyahu’s phone call of contrition. This week, he signed an executive order granting NATO-level security guarantees to Qatar, the longtime hosts and patrons of the Hamas leadership abroad. Trump has also repeatedly amplified and praised the Israelis protesting against the Netanyahu government and in favor of a hostage deal.
Netanyahu has spun most of these deviations from his desires as part of his plans. Like many successful politicians, he is “a master at disguising retreat as advance,” as the biographer Robert Blake once wrote of the British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli. But the illusion, at this point, is wearing thin. In reality, Trump is not and has never been Netanyahu’s pawn. He is who he has always been: a transactional politician who leads a largely pro-Israel coalition but is also closely tied to an array of Arab states, including Saudi Arabia and Qatar, because of both business and geopolitical considerations. Trump’s agenda is his own. The president has demonstrated time and again that when he acts in the Middle East, he is balancing the interests of his competing stakeholders, not fulfilling the Israeli right’s wish list.
Netanyahu is a similarly political operator: He is a creature of his coalition and a product of the pressures placed on him. Absent Trump’s interference, the strongest force acting on the Israeli leader’s decisions has been his far-right partners, whose influence has shaped Netanyahu’s choices throughout this conflict. Most Israelis oppose the radical right’s messianic designs on Gaza and want to bring the war to a close, but they will need the American president to change the calculus of their prime minister.
