A New Dynamic in the Trump-Netanyahu Relationship

The parade of Trump administration officials to Jerusalem over the past week to ensure Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sticks to the cease-fire in Gaza drew a catchy shorthand in the Israeli news media, playing on the prime minister’s nickname: “Bibi-sitting.”

Beyond the supposed adult supervision being given to a sovereign ally, however, was a more striking change. A distinct new phase in the U.S.-Israel relationship is being cemented, particularly in the relationship between the two countries’ leaders.

In President Trump’s first term, he showered Mr. Netanyahu with political gifts, including recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and recognizing Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights.

Early in his current term, too, Mr. Trump indulged Mr. Netanyahu, briefly feeding right-wing Israelis’ fantasies of depopulating and developing the Gaza Strip as a Middle Eastern “Riviera,” and then backing Mr. Netanyahu in March when he broke a cease-fire with Hamas. And he delivered an entirely new level of support to Israel by deploying B-2 bombers to strike Iran’s nuclear sites in June.

“The term used in Israel was that he works for us,” Reuven Hazan, a professor of political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said of Mr. Trump. “Everybody thought that Trump was mouthing words that Bibi wrote for him.”

That is no longer the case. Rather, Mr. Trump has increasingly aired his frustrations with Mr. Netanyahu. One early example was Mr. Trump’s eruption at the prime minister over an Israeli airstrike on Iran in June after a cease-fire had been reached in that 12-day war.

After Israel’s botched airstrike on Hamas negotiators in Qatar last month, Mr. Trump, meeting with Mr. Netanyahu in the Oval Office, forced him to call the Qatari prime minister and apologize.

Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, elaborated in a “60 Minutes” interview on Oct. 20. “I think he felt like the Israelis were getting a little bit out of control in what they were doing,” he said, “and that it was time to be very strong and stop them from doing things that he felt were not in their long-term interests.”

It was an extraordinary revelation by Mr. Kushner, who indicated that Mr. Trump believed he was acting in Israel’s interests and that Mr. Netanyahu was not.

Mr. Trump went on to push Mr. Netanyahu into agreeing to his Gaza peace plan and then told Axios a day later: “He’s got to be fine with it. He has no choice. With me, you got to be fine.”

For all of his tough talk toward Mr. Netanyahu, Mr. Trump and his aides remain supportive of Israel, as he demonstrated abundantly on his trip to Jerusalem this month. And he continues to threaten Hamas with harsh action if it fails to meet its commitment to return all the bodies of Israelis — though in a social media post on Saturday, he made it clear that “other countries” would be the ones to “take action” against Hamas if it did not comply.

Israelis have also begun to question how long the United States will keep up the pressure if Mr. Trump shows signs of losing interest.

“He doesn’t have staying power,” Mr. Hazan said. “He can’t continue to be the Bibi-sitter. And he can’t continue having people flying in. The question is, Who will break first?”

But the president hasn’t just asserted his dominance over Mr. Netanyahu in relation to Gaza. In an interview with Time magazine, Mr. Trump was asked whether he believed Marwan Barghouti, a popular Palestinian figure convicted in 2004 on terrorism charges for his role in attacks that killed five people, should be released from Israeli prison.

Mr. Barghouti was not among the 250 Palestinian prisoners serving life sentences whom Israel released in a trade for Israeli hostages. Mr. Trump said he had just been discussing the idea of releasing Mr. Barghouti, adding, “I’ll be making a decision.”

I, he said. Not we.

Mr. Trump has also rejected the idea, in increasingly emphatic terms, that Israel would annex the West Bank. This is a longstanding goal of Mr. Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition partners and one that has gained support since a host of countries recognized Palestinian statehood last month

“It will not happen,” Mr. Trump said in the Time interview. “Israel would lose all of its support from the United States if that happened.”

The U.S. effort to sustain the truce in Gaza appears to have constrained Mr. Netanyahu as well.

On the ground, Israeli officials are accustoming themselves to a new arrangement in which U.S. counterparts appear to be taking a more assertive role in maintaining the cease-fire. When Israel threatened to stop all humanitarian aid from entering Gaza after two of its soldiers were killed on Oct. 19, the order was reversed within hours, and trucks carried aid into Gaza the next day. Reports in the Israeli news media attributed the reversal to U.S. intervention.