Donald Trump has been making the rounds of the Middle East this week, with stops in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. But there was one glaring omission on his itinerary: Israel, the US's closest ally in the region. And this week, following direct negotiations between the US and Hamas, the group released the last living American hostage: Edan Alexander, a US-Israeli citizen. The US president described it as a step "to put an end to this very brutal war and return all living hostages and remains to their loved ones".
Israel was not involved in the process: according to Axios, Benjamin Netanyahu discovered the negotiations only via Israeli intelligence. In Israel, the fact that the prime minister is apparently "relying on his intelligence agencies" to find out what his closest ally is up to in his own backyard "has been taken as a worrying sign of drift" between the two men, said The Telegraph.
When Trump won re-election, Netanyahu was "relieved", said Politico. With a Republican back in the White House, Netanyahu knew he would gain a "much freer hand" in Gaza, "even more unbound" than he was by Joe Biden. And so he has: Netanyahu "suffered no consequences" for breaking the ceasefire with Hamas. But the two leaders "don't actually see eye-to-eye on much else".
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Most recently, Trump is frustrated with the war in Gaza and "unhappy" about Netanyahu's planned military expansion, said Columbia University's Institute of Global Politics fellow Kim Ghattas in the Financial Times. Humanitarian reasons aside, it runs counter to his "unworkable" vision for a Gaza Riviera. More importantly, it offers "no victories that make the US president look good". And so the US keeps "cutting Israel out of the deals it is making".
Israel was already "feeling particularly sensitive" after Trump's surprise announcement last week that the US would stop bombing the Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen, as long as they stopped firing on US cargo ships in the Red Sea, said The Telegraph's Jerusalem correspondent Henry Bodkin. Not only did the US not coordinate with Israel on discussions, it didn't even demand that the Houthis stop firing rockets at Israel, which they are doing several times a week.
Trump and his Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, are "suspicious of, tired of, and disgusted by Netanyahu and his tricks", said Haaretz security analyst Amos Harel. The Israeli PM is as committed to a "Netanyahu first" policy as Trump is to "America first". The divide isn't as much between Trump and Israel as it is between Trump and Netanyahu, said Yair Rosenberg in The Atlantic. Polls have shown that about 70% of Israelis support ending the war in Gaza in return for a deal that would free the remaining hostages, and the same percentage want Netanyahu to resign "either now or after the war". Trump knows this; his team has "picked a side", of both "the Israeli preference and the American interest".
What next?
"The decades-long alliance between Israel and the US will endure and reports of a rift have been swiftly denied," said the FT's Ghattas. But Trump's "envoy for everything", Witkoff, is "stretched thin". As with "everything from tariffs to Ukraine", the key problem with Trump's vision for the Middle East is the White House's "spaghetti approach: throw ideas at the wall, see what sticks, bag the first whiff of a win as a major victory, move on or change tack".
Netanyahu "may soon learn what Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy also found out the hard way: for Trump, "Gaza and Ukraine are sideshows", said Politico.
