The assurance that Trump will always have Israel’s back is one upon which Israel cannot afford to rely

PHOTO: AP PHOTO/ALEX BRANDON

IN

his major speech in Riyadh on May 13, President Trump emphasized that he does not believe in permanent enemies. But the flip side of that statement, as Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has surely deduced, is that he also does not believe in permanent friends. Thus, the assurance that Trump will always have Israel’s back is one upon which Israel cannot afford to rely.

Indeed, the press in both Israel and the US have been filled the past two weeks with stories of a growing distance between the two countries with respect to Israel’s renewed campaign in Gaza and the ongoing nuclear negotiations between the US and Iran. The Washington Post, a consistent, harping critic of Israel’s actions in Gaza, reported May 19, “Trump’s people are letting Israel know, ‘We will abandon you if you do not end this war,’ said a person familiar with the discussions.”

There are good reasons to be skeptical of some of these reports. The Israeli press reports in particular are part of the nonstop media campaign to undermine Netanyahu, who survived the hostile Biden “politburo” and has placed great hopes in Trump’s support.

Many of those leaks likely come from the so-called “restrainer” faction in MAGA world, which includes the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., the noxious Tucker Carlson, and apparently Vice President J.D. Vance. That faction believes that the United States can live with a nuclear Iran, and doing so is preferable to war with Iran. And the “restrainers” appear to be gaining power (as will be discussed).

Still, even discounting the reports from biased parties, the rumors of a growing American-Israeli rift are not without any basis in fact. Perhaps the initial warning came when Netanyahu became the first foreign leader to visit Washington after the imposition of the administration’s “Liberation Day” tariffs. He went bearing gifts — an immediate offer to remove all Israeli tariffs on US goods. But he received no such reciprocal offer with respect to Israeli goods entering America, just a comment that Israel receives a lot of aid from the US (almost all spent on American products).

PRESIDENT TRUMP CLEARLY caught Israel by surprise when he announced a separate peace with the Houthis in Yemen, which did not require the Houthis to refrain from further missile attacks on Israel — which they have not. One missile strike was close enough to Ben-Gurion Airport to cause almost all foreign airlines to cancel service to Israel.

The release of hostage Edan Alexander, a dual American-Israeli national, was negotiated without any Israeli involvement. Alexander’s release, however, is best understood as a Qatari present to Trump, in order to further cement the US-Qatar relationship.

Moreover, Israel was excluded from Trump’s much hyped swing through the Middle East. That trip was primarily designed to advance Trump’s domestic agenda of increasing the number of well-paying jobs. Israel simply does not possess the resources to offer the same $100 billion trade deals that Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates could.

While there are few concrete signs that Trump is pressuring Netanyahu to scale back or abandon the campaign to effectively take control of Gaza, he is not a patient man and has frequently expressed his distaste for “forever wars.” Clearly Netanyahu was pressured to resume food deliveries before mechanisms were in place to ensure that Hamas would not continue to seize food deliveries and profit thereby at the expense of Gaza’s civilian population.

Perhaps the president’s most surprising move was his meeting in Saudi Arabia with Syrian leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, who until very recently had a $10 million US bounty on his head, as a consequence of his previous affiliations with both Al-Qaeda and ISIS. Trump offered to remove all US economic sanctions on Syria in return for certain steps, including normalization with Israel and ridding Syria of Hezbollah operatives.

Despite al-Sharaa’s jihadi past, leading pro-Israel analysts, like Tony Doran and Noah Rothman, were cautiously optimistic about Trump’s stratagem. And direct talks are already taking place between Syrian and Israeli officials.

Though Israel was far from the center of attention on Trump’s Middle East swing, it was not totally forgotten. The president expressed his hope that the Saudis and the Syrians will join the Abraham Accords, the greatest diplomatic triumph of his first term. In his major speech in Saudi Arabia, he stated clearly, “All civilized people must condemn the October 7 atrocities committed against Israel.”

Nor was Iran forgotten. In that same speech, Trump mentioned Iran 19 times, all but one time in a highly negative fashion, as sowers of chaos and destruction. Only at the end did he hold out the possibility of brighter future for Iran if it will only abandon its nuclear ambitions.

IRAN CONTINUES to be the issue of chief concern to Prime Minister Netanyahu, and the last few months have been something of an emotional roller coaster on that score. Early in Trump’s term, he moved aircraft carriers capable of serving as platforms for B-52 bombers carrying bunker-buster bombs close to Iran and made a number of bellicose statements directed at the mullahs.

With Iran’s air defenses radically degraded by Israel, the time was ideal for an American or a joint American-Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. But it never came. And the United States explicitly forbade Israel from launching its own effort to destroy Iran’s nuclear reactors.

The advantages of American involvement in any military effort to destroy Iran’s nuclear enrichment program before it produces enough weapons-grade enriched uranium for one or more bombs — something that it is estimated to be capable of doing within a week — are manifold. For one thing, the chances of success are far greater. The US has planes capable of carrying gigantic bunker buster munitions. To be successful in eliminating facilities deeply embedded in mountains and the like, Israel would have to fly multiple sorties over the target area, not rely on gigantic bombs.

Moreover, if Iran responded to an attack on its nuclear facilities by unleashing terrorist sleeper cells against American and Jewish targets around the world, as it surely would, the best chance of getting it to stop would be massive bombing of Iranian oil facilities and Revolutionary Guard sites. The capacity of the US to do so from relatively nearby aircraft carriers is far greater than that of Israel operating at a great distance.

Trump’s early bellicosity was not without effect. Some of Ayatollah Khamenei’s advisors warned him, at the time, that he’d better engage with the Americans or risk losing his country. But even if Trump pushed Iran back to the bargaining table, it is unclear who has the advantage in any such negotiations — the experienced and wily Iranians, or American negotiators led by the novice Steve Witkoff.

The danger is that the Iranians will use the current negotiations to buy time to rebuild their air defenses and to push ever closer toward nuclear capability. Indeed, with respect to repairing their air defenses, they are already doing so, with the aid of Russia. In addition, European allies have warned the Trump administration that Iran will attempt to drag out negotiations past August, at which point the authority to apply onerous “snapback” sanctions under the terms of a 2015 Security Council Resolution will expire.

That model of deceiving the West to buy time has been used in the past by both Iran and North Korea. The Clinton administration celebrated its 1994 Agreed Framework with North Korea, under which the latter agreed to freeze its plutonium enrichment program. Twelve years later, North Korea conducted a successful nuclear detonation, and today possesses dozens of nuclear warheads.

Secretary for Homeland Security Kristi Noem was in Israel this week to deliver a personal message from President Trump to Prime Minister Netanyahu. That message was clear: Do nothing to upset ongoing negotiations. Trust in my ability to negotiate a good agreement.

After that meeting, Noem made all the right noises about the president having given the Iranians a short time frame of no more than a week to respond to American demands. But it is unlikely that Trump’s saber-rattling scares the Iranians to the extent it once did.

But his threats do scare Bibi, who is unlikely to order an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities without the assurance of an American backup. Israel needs the US’s THAAD missile defense system to defend against the return Iranian barrage of ICBMs.

Furthermore, it is not even clear whether America will stick to its demand to end to all nuclear enrichment in Iran, something the Iranians say they will never accept. Initially, both Witkoff and Vice President J.D. Vance indicated a willingness to permit some low level of enrichment for civilian purposes. The problem with that, of course, is that any enrichment program can be quickly repurposed for military purposes, and is rife with opportunities for cheating, of which the Iranian nuclear archives spirited out of the country by Israel provide multiple examples.

Of late, from the president on down, American officials have been insisting that Iran cannot retain any enrichment capacity. Trump has noted — correctly — that Iran is sitting atop some of the world’s largest oil deposits, and therefore has no need for a civilian nuclear program. In addition, virtually every other country with a civilian nuclear program purchases its nuclear fuel elsewhere and returns the spent rods, and without its own enrichment program, Iran can do the same.

At the same time, it is difficult to imagine Iran ever agreeing to end all enrichment. To do so would be a humiliation for the mullahs, who have invested hundreds of billions of dollars in developing a nuclear enrichment program over more than two decades.

The fear is that President Trump will be so eager to make a deal that in the face of Iranian intransigence, he will accept a warmed-over version of Obama’s JCPOA, which he once ridiculed. Nor can he ever a return to “maximum sanctions” deter Iran from going nuclear. They are too close to the goal, and have too much help from China and Russia for those sanctions to be as biting as they once were.

And it is far from clear that Trump would ever exercise the military option. As Reuel Marc Gerecht and Ray Takeyh put it in the May 27 Wall Street Journal, “the mullahs are no longer afraid of the unpredictable American president.... His threats of fire and fury are becoming more recognizably Middle Eastern — words substitute for actions.” They add chillingly that the military option is becoming less viable as Iran burrows ever deeper into mountains for its enrichment sites.

A coup in the National Security Council last Friday, engineered by the “restrainer” faction in MAGA world, adds further cause for concern. As reported by Tablet magazine’s The Scroll, Secretary of State and interim National Security Advisor Marco Rubio announced dramatic cuts in the NSC staff. Included in those placed on administrative leave were Merav Ceren, director of Israel and Iran policy, and Eric Trager, the senior director the Middle East and North Africa, who was also involved on the Iran desk. Both were recent Trump appointees.

Ceren in particular had long been targeted by the “restrainer” faction as a neo-con and (falsely) as a “member” of the Israeli Ministry of Defense. Those charges, according to the Scroll’s Park Macdougald, were amplified on social media by the Qataris and various pro-Iranian outlets, including the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), and organs of the isolationist Koch world network, including the Quincy Institute, whose codirector is none other than NIAC founder and Iranian asset Trita Parsi.

At the same time, Dan Caldwell, a Koch world “restrainer,” who was fired by the Department of Defense in April as a suspected “leaker,” is set to be reinstated. These changes are of a piece with the removal of Mike Waltz, an Iran hawk, as national security advisor.

The Scroll’s sources shared that the chief architect of last Friday’s coup was Vice President Vance’s national security advisor, Andy Baker, and that Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who heretofore has always been considered an Iran hawk, acquiesced.

Not good news.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1064. Yonoson Rosenblum may be contacted directly at rosenblum@mishpacha.com)