Trump Has Given Netanyahu the Ultimate Gift: A Lifeline

Opinion|Trump Has Given Netanyahu the Ultimate Gift: A Lifeline

Sixteen months after the Oct. 7 massacre, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has concluded his official visit to Washington a victor.

The Israeli leader — who spent years actively strengthening Hamas’s rule in Gaza and bears deep responsibility for the events leading up to the worst disaster in modern Jewish history since the Holocaust — received royal treatment as the first foreign leader to visit the White House in President Trump’s second term. And while the immediate impact of the visit on key issues — the hostage and cease-fire agreement, Iran’s nuclear threat and U.S. military assistance to Israel — is yet to be seen, one outcome is already crystal clear. Mr. Trump has given Mr. Netanyahu an invaluable gift: extending a lifeline to his government.

In the days leading up to the visit, the Israeli left fantasized, and the right feared, that the American president would impel Mr. Netanyahu to commit to the second phase of the cease-fire agreement, which would require declaring the end of the war. Others speculated Mr. Trump might even push the prime minister so far as to mumble his consent to the prospect of a Palestinian state to further the president’s longstanding goal of striking a normalization deal with Saudi Arabia.

Instead, Mr. Trump laid out a plan that not even Mr. Netanyahu would have dared to suggest: the mass transfer of Palestinians out of Gaza, followed by the United States taking over and rebuilding the territory into a “Riviera of the Middle East.” Aides later tried to soften some of the proposal but Mr. Trump has since doubled down on the overall plan.

By presenting an idea so closely aligned with the goals of the Israeli far right, the president put forward a solution to two political problems for Mr. Netanyahu. The first was that the proposal was welcomed enthusiastically by two extreme-right politicians who had been threatening to make Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition government collapse: Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who had insisted he would quit if Israel ended the war in Gaza on terms that he disagreed with, and Itamar Ben-Gvir, who resigned as national security minister last month to protest the cease-fire deal — and is now laying the groundwork to rejoin the government.

During a news conference after the meeting in Washington, Mr. Trump also signaled he would make a decision on whether he would support Israel’s annexation of the West Bank within four weeks — dangling what could be yet another gift for the far right in front of his guest.