It was during the Suez war, you mean – when Great Britain and France and Israel launched an invasion of Egypt.
Yeah. No American president for which I worked, from Jimmy Carter to George W. Bush, has never created this kind of pressure. Trump essentially said, “You do what I say. I am the most pro-Israeli president in world history. You do what I say. I have given you a document which, on the whole, is a very pro-Israeli affair which does not imagine a Palestinian state. What we don’t know is what “or other” was.
Are you talking about what Trump said to Netanyahu in the oval office last week?
Exactly. Axios Barak Ravid and Marc Caputo reported that Trump said essentially that if Netanyahu did not agree with that: “We will get away from you.” Biden had three pressure points on which he could draw. He could have conditioned or restricted American military assistance to Israel. He didn’t really do that. He could have present his own resolution of the United Nations Security Council criticizing Israel, or vote for someone else and began to report in international forums that he was not going to defend Israel. He didn’t do that. And he could have unilaterally had handed his hand to the Palestinians, reversed his policies on economic assistance and joined more than one hundred and forty other nations which recognize the Palestinian state. He didn’t do that.
Trump, in my opinion, would have done none of these things if Netanyahu had not accepted. But the conformity was based on the fear of Netanyahu only if he did not register, Trump begins to carry out a campaign by saying that Netanyahu disinclipily the American -Israeli relationship – “undermine my interests and yours”. Netanyahu’s attention right now is on re -election, probably in the spring of 2026. To win, he needs Trump. Trump is more popular in Israel than Netanyahu, and Netanyahu cannot break up with him. And Israel depends more on the United States than ever, militarily and politically, so that this relationship is more important. So we don’t know what Trump has really threatened. My suspicion is that he had nothing to threaten. My suspicion is that Netanyahu understands who he is dealing with.
So you say that it was a little different from what it was in 1956, when the Eisenhower administration actually threatened the Israelis with sanctions and threatened the British government with the collapse of the book. Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles, his Secretary of State, threatened real threats. You say that Trump may not really have threatened Netanyahu, but that there was a feeling that Netanyahu needs Trump.
Okay, there is no longer any Meld spirit, which had been more or less. Trump had essentially nodded both tactically and strategically to Netanyahu’s policies in Gaza in the past nine months.
But it seemed to me that Bibi and Vladimir Putin were very intelligent on the way they played Trump, that is to say that they would essentially let them criticize them from time to time or criticize Israeli or Russian politics. You saw Trump do this around famine in Gaza. But the two men fundamentally knew that Trump was not going to stay and stay coherent.
Yeah, he was not concentrated. He was unexpected.
So why not keep this strategy now if you are Netanyahu?
Trump is more exposed, more invested, more identified with the efforts of the peace last Monday than with the anchorage summit, where he discussed Ukraine with Putin, or, frankly, the ceasefire in January between Israel and Hamas. He is the chairman of the board of directors. It was a plan developed in Washington, essentially shaped by Trump. Some adventurous journalists will have set up a tiktok on what Trump really knew on the Israeli strike on Qatar on September 9, and when he knew it. [The Times reported that Trump learned about the strike “as it was happening.”] But I think that Trump had already reached the conclusion that war must end, because he was frustrated by Netanyahu, and because he thought that the public image of the war was so bad, and he thought he had to take a blow – not by a partial agreement but by a complete.
An additional point: in the past nine months, Netanyahu had seen Trump do things that no American president, certainly none for whom I have ever worked, had never done in Israel and around Israel. He opened a direct dialogue with Hamas in March this year. He concluded an agreement with the Houthis in Yemen, which the Israelis only learned after the fact. Despite Israeli objections, he raised sanctions against the new government in Syria. And he said he wanted negotiations with Iran.
So even if Trump’s policies towards Israel herself were incredibly favorable, I think Netanyahu read Trump correctly. We don’t know if Trump threatened to use the three levers that Biden would not draw.
We also do not know about Trump’s relations with the Gulf States. You have mentioned the agreement on the Qatari plane – I do not want to be naive and claim that these types of things, and others like them, will not seem crucial when historians write about it in thirty years.
Do you say Trump’s investment in the Gulf?
I don’t know, but I don’t want to pretend that these things are not potentially important here.
