When Benjamin Netanyahu Prime Minister with President Trump in the White House in February, the two men could not have been more synchronized. The president had appointed Hutis militants in Yemen as a terrorist organization. Both talked about preventing them from acquiring a nuclear bomb. Mr. Trump was even responsible for expelling the Palestinians from Gaza.
“You say things that others refuse to say,” Mr. Netanyahu sprout in the Oval office, with functioning cameras. “And then, after the jaws fall, people scratch their heads. And they say:” You are right. “
Two months later, on another visit from the White House, Mr. Netanyahu sat almost silently with the president for more than half an hour, since Trump presented issues that have nothing to do with Israel.
That meeting, in April, stressed a growing division between the two men, who disagree on some of the most critical security problems facing Israel.
While Trump goes to the Middle East this week for his first great foreign trip, the president has rejected, for now, the desire of Mr. Netanahu of joint military action to get Tehran’s nuclear skills. Instead, Trump has begun conversations with Iran, leaving Mr. Netyahu to warn that “a bad business is worse than any treatment.”
Last week, Trump announced an agreement with the hutis militias backed by Iran in Yemen to stop US air attacks against militants, who agreed to stop US ships in the Red Sea. Mr. Trump’s news, these Israeli officials said it was a surprise for Mr. Netanyahu, there was only a few days after an Hutí missile hit Israel’s main airport in Tel Aviv, it caused an Israeli response.
In a video posted in X, Mr. Netanyahu responded to Mr. Trump’s announcement saying: “Israel will defend ITELF by Itelf. If others join us, our American friends, very well. If they do not, we will defend our delays.”
Mike Huckabee, ambassador of the United States in Israel, said in an Israeli television interview on Friday that “the United States is not obliged to obtain the permission from Israel.”
And there is only some evidence of a division in Gaza. Mr. Trump’s emissaries are still trying to reach an agreement to stop the war, just although he has greatly supported the behavior of the conflict by the prime minister and has almost not offered public criticisms to the increase in bombing and food and Israel’s lock medicine does.
On Monday, the prime minister announced plans to intensify the war as the president’s envoys continued to look for a new diplomatic path to end the conflict. But Trump has not moved his finger to Mr. Netanyahu in the way President Joseph R. Biden Jr. spent the first year of the war in Gaza, which after the attack led by Hamas against Israel on October 7, 2023.
Now, this moment is testing the relationship of the two men, both politicians, fiercely combative and have large egos. At stake is short security and term in a region that has stunned for war. Analysts in the Middle East and the United States say that changing the arch of history there depends on how Mr. Trump and Mr. Netanyahu hold their differences last a time of important geopolitical changes.
“Trump is ‘what you see is what you get’ and rarely hide things. His breach is to say what he thinks,” said Eli Grroner, who served for more than three years as a general director in the prime minister’s office. “Netanyahu’s breach is to keep things extraordinarily close to his chest.”
Mr. Trump and Mr. Netanyahu have publicly summoned a warm and close relationship as evidence of their own political point and have flattering each other repeatedly. People close to the two leaders say that they are somehow the related spirits that respect each other for the political and personal attacks that have suffered the duration of their careers.
Trump has accused the liberals in his government, judges and intelligence officials of conspiracy against him. Netanyahu blamed the courts of his country to block the necessary policies and says that his political rivals orchestrated his judgments for fraud charges, breach of confidence and bribes of acceptance.
“The DNA of both is very similar,” said Mike Evans, an evangelical Christian founded by the Friends of Zion Museum in Israel and is a long -term supporter of both the President and the Prime Minister. “Both have gone through similar experiences: Bibi with the deep state in Israel and Donald Trump with the deep state in the United States.”
John Bolton, who served as National Security Advisor at the White House from 2018 to 2019, said Trump always saw the relationship with Mr. Netanyahu as a criticism for his own political support in the United States, especially among evangelical voters.
“Both saw their political advantage be friendly,” he said about the two leaders. “That was certainly Trump’s calculation.”
But behind closed doors, there are leg disagreements and some clashes, with implications for the situation they now face.
Trump has long hosted anger for Mr. Netyahu’s decision to congratulate Mr. Biden for his 2020 electoral victory. The president falsely said that the prime minister was the first world leader to do so. At the end of 2021, Trump used an improper as he remembered in an interview with a book author.
For his part, Mr. Netanyahu has privately expressed frustration with some of Mr. Trump’s policies, particularly about the president’s desire to reach an agreement with Iran. A right -wing newspaper generally aligned with the prime minister wrote this month that Netanyahu thought Mr. Trump “says all the right things” but does not deliver.
When it comes to Iran, Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Trump can be operating in different deadlines. The president seems to be willing to let diplomats work in an agreement that can restrict Tehran’s ability to enrich uranium and stop his progress towards a bomb. Netanyahu is anxious to move against Iran militarily, before it is too late to stop your progress.
“Netanyahu believes that the timeline is quite short to make a decision,” said Bolton, who is an defender or subsistence military action. In an interview with Time magazine in April, Trump said he had argued against Netyahu’s proposal to launch a joint attack to delay Iran’s nuclear program.
“I didn’t stop them. But I didn’t make it comfortable for them because I think we can make a deal without the attack,” Trump said in the interview.
The White House has said that Trump has no plans to visit Israel on his trip to the region this week, although Huckbee said the president would visit the country by the end of the year. That is a change from the president’s first mandate, when his first foreign trip included Israel along with stops in Saudi Arabia and parts of Europe.
It is not clear how extensively Mr. Trump will face the war in Gaza while in the Middle East.
Trump assumed the position promising to end the war between Israel and Hamas, to end the Palestinian suffering and return to the hostages to whom the militant group seized in the attack of October 7, 2023. illegitimate until
More than 50,000 Palestinians have died, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health, which does not distinguish between civil and combatant deaths. Around 130 hostages have released Bone, and the Israeli army has recovered the bodies of at least another 40. It is believed that up to 24 hostages are still alive, according to the Israeli government.
Some families of Israeli and American hostages who still have in Gaza are working silently to urge Mr. Trump to use their trip to the Middle East as an opportunity to press Mr. Netanyahu, according to people familiar with the effort of diplomatic lobbying.
In recent weeks, Trump seemed less committed to trying to resolve the conflict after presuming in February about his great vision of creating a “Gaza Rivera” once the Palestinians had relocated another country.
When Mr. Netanyahu visited the White House in April, some in Israel saw the scene as shameful for the prime minister.
Mr. Evans, who knows Mr. Netanyahu since he was a young man, said the prime minister would not give in, even if Trump pushed him to end the war before the Israeli army had destroyed Hamas and return all the hostages.
“Does Netanyahu believe that Hamas will give you all hostages if they retire from Gaza?” Evans said. “I don’t think I believe it for a moment.”