\n<\/p>\n
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\u2014declaring on Truth Social that \u201cI believe they are ready for a lasting PEACE\u201d\u2014and dragged Benjamin Netanyahu along for the ride.<\/p>\n
\u201cIsrael must immediately stop the bombing of Gaza, so that we can get the Hostages out safely and quickly,\u201d Trump further demanded in that post, which went up at 5:14 p.m. eastern time on Friday\u2014past 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 \u201cunder fire\u201d\u2014that 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\u2014most notably around Gaza City, the primary target of the current war effort\u2014and made plans to dispatch negotiators to Cairo.<\/p>\n
In short, Trump successfully bullied Netanyahu\u2014and if this latest round of talks is going to get results, he\u2019ll need to do more of it. That\u2019s because despite the president\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2014he just needs to use it.<\/p>\n
Contrary to the spin of Netanyahu\u2019s 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\u2014and possibly arriving earlier\u2014the 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\u2019s diktats; he has to spin them as his own ideas\u2014or risk shattering the myth he has built around himself.<\/p>\n
The president fully grasps this dynamic. \u201cI said, \u2018Bibi, this is your chance for victory,\u2019\u201d Trump told the Axios reporter Barak Ravid on Saturday. \u201cHe was fine with it. He\u2019s got to be fine with it. He has no choice. With me, you got to be fine.\u201d The president\u2019s official rapid-response team then posted that quote on social media, in case anyone had missed the implication.<\/p>\n
Trump has not only compelled Netanyahu\u2019s recent about-face on Gaza. Over the past six months, he has forced Netanyahu to abort a major counterstrike in Iran; publicly declared, \u201cI will not allow Israel to annex the West Bank,\u201d dashing the aspirations of the Israeli settler right; negotiated the release of an American hostage from Hamas behind Netanyahu\u2019s back; and made the Israeli leader apologize to Qatar for his recent strike there\u2014after which the White House released a humiliating photo of Netanyahu\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Netanyahu has spun most of these deviations from his desires as part of his plans. Like many successful politicians, he is \u201ca master at disguising retreat as advance,\u201d 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s wish list.<\/p>\n
Netanyahu is a similarly political operator: He is a creature of his coalition and a product of the pressures placed on him. Absent Trump\u2019s interference, the strongest force acting on the Israeli leader\u2019s decisions has been his far-right partners, whose influence has shaped Netanyahu\u2019s choices throughout this conflict. Most Israelis oppose the radical right\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":26125,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[6113,7278,10967,81],"class_list":{"0":"post-26124","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-bullying","9":"tag-netanyahu","10":"tag-successfully","11":"tag-trump"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26124","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26124"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26124\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/26125"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}