What Trump and Netanyahu want from each other

President Donald Trump sounded confident on Sunday when he told a reporter that a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas could be reached by the end of the week. Israel has reportedly proposed a 60-day ceasefire and the return of 10 living and 18 deceased hostages, out of approximately 50 remaining Israeli hostages, of whom 20 are believed to be alive. Hamas continues to push for a permanent end to the conflict. Negotiations between the two sides are being conducted indirectly, with Qatar and Egypt leading the talks. The calculus on the part of the US and Israel appears to be that, with Iran and its proxy forces in the region significantly weakened, Hamas will be ready to make more concessions. These talks are taking place against the backdrop of a worsening humanitarian crisis in Gaza, with daily reports of Israeli troops displacing Palestinians and firing on hungry, desperate people trying to get food as Palestinian children struggle with starvation, malnutrition, and disease. Israeli soldiers have also been killed in recent fighting. Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is making the rounds in Washington, DC, this week. It’s his third visit since Trump returned to office, more than any other foreign leader. At a dinner at the White House on Monday evening, Netanyahu presented Trump with a copy of a letter nominating him for the Nobel Peace Prize. Trump has repeatedly expressed his interest in getting the peace prize — an accolade that President Barack Obama received early in his presidency — and has cited his “peacekeeping” efforts in the Middle East, including attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities, as justification. Ending the war in Gaza, Trump believes, would cement his legacy. But he has to convince Netanyahu to agree to that. To get the latest on where things stand between Trump and Netanyahu, Today, Explained co-host Noel King spoke to Michael Koplow, chief policy officer at Israel Policy Forum. Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify. Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu have run hot and cold on each other since Trump took office in January. Where do things stand between them right now? Right now, it seems that their relationship is at a high point. But even in the past six months, we’ve seen significant ups and significant downs. On the one hand, this is now Prime Minister Netanyahu’s third visit to the White House in President Trump’s second term, and that would indicate that these two men have a closer relationship than any other two leaders on the face of the planet. But these visits have not always been so harmonious, and they’ve not always been so great for Prime Minister Netanyahu, particularly the second visit. On that second visit, Prime Minister Netanyahu seemed to be blindsided in the Oval Office in front of cameras by a number of things that President Trump said. He was blindsided on tariffs when he had come to Washington ostensibly to try to remove any tariffs that President Trump was going to put on Israel. And not only was he not successful in doing so, President Trump sat in front of the cameras and talked about how the United States gives Israel $4 billion a year, and that’s a lot of money and it should get something in return. He was also blindsided in that meeting on the issue of Iran. President Trump announced in that meeting that the United States was going to enter into direct talks with Iran, something that Prime Minister Netanyahu was certainly opposed to. Now we know how that turned out two months later, but at the time, it was seen as a pretty significant signal that President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu were not on the same page. In addition to the awkwardness of that second visit — during President Trump’s last visit to the Middle East, he went to Saudi Arabia, he went to Qatar, he went to the UAE. He made a huge production out of those visits, talking about how much he loved the region, but he didn’t go to Israel and many people interpreted that as a snub. Was it? I don’t think it was a snub. I think that he went to the region because he wanted to come home with high-profile, visible demonstrations of US strength and demonstrate that he could bring deals back home. Ultimately, he thinks of himself as a dealmaker, and there were all sorts of trade deals and promises for investment to be found in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar. Those were not going to be found in Israel. He took that trip to the Middle East back in May. What’s changed since then? The biggest thing that has changed is the campaign against Iran, where you had 12 days of Israeli strikes on Iranian nuclear and military facilities and personnel, and then you had the very high-profile US strike on the three Iranian nuclear sites at Fordo, Natanz, and Isfahan. In Israel and certainly within the administration — and I share this assessment — that campaign is viewed as being incredibly successful. And unlike when President Trump traveled to the region, this is a case where Israel presents him with a big and visible win and he’s touting it as much as he can. So Israel gives him a win on Iran, and now, as President Trump is wont, he’s looking for another win. On Sunday, he tells reporters that a deal on Gaza is close. What do you think he’s trying to telegraph and what happens if he’s wrong? Does he take it out on Netanyahu? There are two things that President Trump has consistently talked about in terms of his vision for the Middle East and what he wants to accomplish. One was preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. And whether that has now been done definitively or not, President Trump is certainly treating it as if this is mission accomplished, and Iran is now not going to get a nuclear weapon. The second thing that he’s consistently talked about is bringing the fighting in Gaza to an end and expanding the Abraham Accords and bringing other countries into the circle of normalization, all of which I think in his mind is supposed to lead to the Nobel Peace Prize, which really I think is the goal that he seems to put above almost anything else in the realm of foreign policy. To accomplish that second one, he needs Prime Minister Netanyahu to go along with what he wants because there is no world in which the fighting in Gaza will end unless Prime Minister Netanyahu agrees to do it. If Prime Minister Netanyahu does not go along with it, there may be consequences, and it may be that President Trump eventually moves on. I think that what we’re seeing right now from Prime Minister Netanyahu is an effort to really extend the clock. The first part of this is a potential 60-day ceasefire in Gaza that will not bring a permanent end to the war, but will give President Trump the opening that he seeks at the moment. And if this negotiation is successful, then it also buys Prime Minister Netanyahu two months to figure out whether he wants to keep it going or whether, at the end of 60 days, the fighting in Gaza will resume. [Netanyahu] likes extending his options as much as he can, and so buying this time will be important and it will allow him to give the president something that the president is really demanding from him, and that should keep the heat off at least for a little bit. These two men have different motivations when it comes to the Palestinian people. Netanyahu doesn’t seem to care about Palestinians. He cares about Israel’s security. Trump wants a deal in Gaza because he likes doing deals. Do you think that Donald Trump cares what happens to the Palestinian people? When President Trump speaks about Palestinians, certainly during this term in office, he tends to do it with a degree of empathy that we don’t always see from him on other issues. It’s pretty consistent when he talks about Gaza for him to talk about the fact that Palestinians are suffering and that they deserve better. We don’t often hear that sort of language from Prime Minister Netanyahu and from many Israeli leaders. The problem is that for any real resolution to Gaza, you need some sort of political vision. President Trump often talks about how Palestinians deserve better lives and should have better lives. But it’s rare to hear him talk about how he thinks they will get there politically as opposed to this just being a quality of life issue. We saw it when he announced his “Gaza Riviera” plan during that first Netanyahu trip to Washington, and we saw it again even last night when President Trump got a question about two states, and he didn’t answer it. He punted it to Netanyahu. Netanyahu made it very clear that Israel does not see a Palestinian state as part of the Israeli-Palestinian political future. Both Trump and Netanyahu need this relationship. Trump needs Netanyahu. Netanyahu needs Trump. Who needs whom more, do you think? Netanyahu absolutely needs Trump more than Trump needs Netanyahu. The things that Trump wants right now from Netanyahu are things that would be nice to have. He wants to expand the Abraham Accords. He wants to have better coordination throughout the region. He wants his Nobel Prize. But ultimately, the United States has lots of other issues on its plate. The United States is a global superpower, whereas Israel is not. And the United States can work on all sorts of other things even if the Trump-Netanyahu relationship turns out to be poor and the coordination turns out to not be what President Trump wants. From Prime Minister Netanyahu’s side, the United States is indispensable, and there are all sorts of things that he wants that he has to have President Trump for. We saw this in practice with Iran, where Israel embarked on airstrikes on its own, but it was clear from the beginning that it needed the United States not only to buy into what Israel was doing but to actually step in and act. Ultimately, Prime Minister Netanyahu cannot afford to be on President Trump’s bad side, and I think that that’s going to cause him some difficult choices ahead when it comes to Gaza, where there’s no question that President Trump wants that war to end. Prime Minister Netanyahu also may want it to end, but he wants it to end on very specific and narrow terms. And if the two men end up crosswise on that question, Prime Minister Netanyahu really cannot afford to get into a rift with President Trump.

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What Trump and Netanyahu want from each other