“I’m not going to start wars, I’m going to stop wars,” Donald Trump pledged in his victory speech. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and his right-wing coalition partners, are hoping that doesn’t apply to the wars in Gaza and Lebanon.
They aren’t finished yet — and their ultimate target is Iran.
Netanyahu will be hoping to tempt Trump into backing his grand strategy to recast the Middle East, one that has no place for Tehran’s clerical leadership, sponsors of Hamas and Hezbollah. He will, of course, recall that Trump was a proponent of a strategy of “maximum pressure” against Iran.
“Bibi would have woken up to the news of Trump’s win smiling from ear to ear,” said Nadav Shtrauchler, a former strategist for Netanyahu. “Now, he has a friend in the White House, which is a huge thing, and it can change many things. First of all, Bibi thinks about Iran,” he told POLITICO.
The Israeli leader lost no time in hailing Trump’s victory as “history’s greatest comeback.” “Your historic return to the White House offers a new beginning for America and a powerful recommitment to the great alliance between Israel and America,” he wrote on X. “This is a huge victory!”
No doubt his effusive post was partly to make up for his faux pas in November 2020, when he enraged Trump by being the first foreign leader to call Joe Biden and congratulate him on his election win. Trump was still disputing the results and later groused that Bibi was being disloyal. “Bibi could have stayed quiet,” he said later, grumbling that Netanyahu was “the man that I did more for than any other person.”
Even before then, Trump was irritated with Netanyahu for backing out of participating in the assassination in Jan. 2020 of Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s Quds Force, and then compounding the offense after the airstrike by claiming partial credit for the hit. Last year, Trump grumbled during a rally in Florida: “Israel was going to do this with us, and it was being planned and working on it for months. We had everything all set to go, and the night before it happened, I got a call that Israel will not be participating in this attack.”
“I’ll never forget that Bibi Netanyahu let us down,” he added, dubbing the episode a “bad experience.”
The Israeli leader has labored to repair those frayed ties with Trump, Shtrauchler said.
And he has been courting him with phone calls. Only last month, Trump bragged of almost daily conversations with Netanyahu, saying he has a very good relationship with the Israeli leader. He told a rally: “Bibi called me yesterday, called me the day before.” He added that Netanyahu “wants my views on things.” And he promised he would work very closely with Bibi once back in the White House.
Despite the punchy line on stopping wars, Trump seems open to more Israeli action. The president-elect has also said Netanyahu must “finish the problem” in its war against Hamas. During the campaign, Trump criticized the Biden administration for opposing any idea of Israel striking Iran’s nuclear or oil facilities in response to an Iranian missile attack on Israel.
Lawmakers from Netanyahu’s Likud party, as well as the far-right and religious nationalists in his rambunctious coalition, have been pushing for military operations to be maintained at full tilt until Hamas has been obliterated. They have also been dismissive of Biden and European demands for a “day after” plan in Gaza involving genuine negotiations for the establishment of an independent Palestinian state.
During a visit to the U.S. Congress at the end of July, Netanyahu paid tribute to Trump, thanking him for everything he had done for Israel during his first term. That was a reference to the bonanza Israel received from Trump — including his decision to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, his withdrawal from the Iranian nuclear deal, and his recognition of both illegal settlements in the West Bank and Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights.
Earlier this year, Shtrauchler told POLITICO that his former boss had packed into his planning the chances of Trump securing reelection. Now he said: “Bibi’s playbook is being fulfilled. He’s getting to the end of the year with a broader political coalition; he’s strong in Lebanon; he’s finished off Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, and others, and he’s got Trump in the White House.”
With Biden gone, there will likely be few constraints on Netanyahu. Not that he or his aides reckon that Trump will always see eye-to-eye with Netanyahu and will give him total free rein. “Trump is always transactional and will put his interests first and is highly unpredictable,” said a senior Israeli official, speaking confidentially. “But their thinking and instincts are much more aligned than Netanyahu’s were with Biden,” he added.
While Trump’s win was greeted with glee by right-wing politicians in Israel, the reactions from Lebanese leaders and the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas were much more subdued. Abbas congratulated Trump and added in a statement: “We are confident that the United States will support, under your leadership, the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people.”
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