With Donald J. Trump moving this week back into the White House, Israel must carefully calibrate its relationship with the new-old president and his team. Israel has to evaluate what expectations and demands of Trump are realistic, and what price Israel will likely have to pay to meet his priorities.
This is especially true, in light of the hostage-for-terrorist release deal that Trump forced down the throat of Israel (and Hamas).
The hostage deal and imposed ceasefire cannot come as a surprise. For months now, Trump has made it clear that by his inauguration on January 20 he expects quiet on the Gaza front and other Mideast battle lines so that he can focus without interference on his priorities – which are immigration, the economy, and China. And reaching a grand Mideast strategic accord involving Saudi Arabia.
Everything else, Trump has intimated, can wait. This includes finishing-off Hamas and real military confrontation with Iran. This is what Trump's aides call "sequencing," an ordered set of priorities where not everything can be tackled all at once and early on. In Hebrew, the relevant idiom is parah parah, meaning that you milk (or slaughter) one cow at a time.
It is not only a question of sequencing. It also is "transactional," meaning that Trump runs his foreign policy with a business mindset: give and take.
Thus "Transactional Trump" expects Israel to play along with his priorities, and this is especially true regarding a Saudi deal.
Trump intends to cut a tripartite American-Saudi-Israeli accord this year. For a range of reasons, this is one of Trump's top priorities. It is well within reach, and it mostly jibes with Israel's preferences.
But Israel will have to swallow some bitter pills to facilitate this, like acquiescence to the US sale of F-35 fighter jets to Riyadh and acceptance of a US-backed Saudi civilian nuclear program. Netanyahu also may have to mutter something about a "pathway" to Palestinian independence in the distant future – even though neither he nor the Saudis nor most members of Trump's team believe this is feasible or sensible.
Again, in the context of Trump's transactional approach to politics and foreign policy, Israel will have to play its part in facilitating the Saudi deal.
If Israel does so, it will be well placed to expect a return from Trump down the line on issues closer to home – ranging from Israeli assertion of sovereignty in parts of Judea and Samaria, to pushback against nasty international organizations that are at Israel's throat, to US supply to Israel of heavy ordnance weaponry necessary for striking Iran, and more.
And remember, even if Trump is not going to green light in the near term renewed and decisive warfare against Hamas, he and his team are not going to delegitimize Israel's continuing wars against Palestinian terrorism in Gaza or Judea and Samaria (and against Hezbollah and jihadist terror from Lebanon and Syria) – the way that the Biden-Blinken-Harris team did.
We also are not going to hear Secretary of State Marco Rubio, National Security Advisor Mike Walz, and US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee contribute to "Palestinianization" of regional politics by fetishizing an "immediate" need for Palestinian statehood – especially after the Simchat Torah (October 7, 2023) invasion and massacres.
They are not going to qualify Israel's "right" to defend itself by using the insidious Kamala Harris qualifiers "but" and "only." "But too many innocent Palestinians have been killed, children, mothers…" said Kamala, and Israel can fight "only if this leads rapidly towards a two-state solution where the Palestinians have security, self-determination, and the dignity they so rightly deserve."
Similarly, the Trump team is not going to justify and excuse the radical anti-American, anti-Israeli, and antisemitic rioters on American campuses by allowing that "they have a point". And the Trump team along with the Republican-dominated Congress is not going to hide behind extreme liberal loyalties to the farce known as "international law," whose holy institutions like the UNCHR, ICC, and ICJ have taken to assaulting Israel with false apartheid allegations and war crime arrest warrants.
And the Trump team is not going to fuel the nasty campaign to delegitimize Israel's very presence in Judea and Samaria by conjuring-up and sanctioning so-called "violent settlers" and other "malign" Israeli civil society actors on the right-wing of the political map.
Pushback against all this by the Trump team is crucially important in rebuilding Israel's legitimacy and standing on the global stage.
Forcing Iran off its nuclear weapon and regional hegemonic drives through concrete military action is Israel's top policy priority, and for this it needs Trump administration support and cooperation.
But Trump is not there yet. Until President Trump is convinced – in my assessment, this will take some time – that no degree of "maximum" economic sanctions and no amount of his personal swagger and business acumen will do the trick in defanging Iran, he will not be ready to militarily confront Iran.
But this doesn't mean that time must be wasted. There is a broad range of important immediate initiatives on the table, below the level of direct military assault on Iran, for revitalizing the US-Israel partnership and for hemming-in Iran.
