Xi Jinping said no thanks, Vladimir Putin said he wasn’t even asked, and Bibi Netanyahu is a delighted yes, aides report. The Israeli prime minister plans to attend Donald Trump’s second inauguration – if he can get time off from his criminal corruption trial.
He may be bringing the new president a very special gift, but first he’s planning one he hopes to be able to deliver next week when the first day of Hanukkah and Christmas coincide.
Bibi could hardly contain his enthusiasm over Trump’s election, racing to be among the first to call with a hearty mazel tov. He doesn’t want to risk angering the disgraced former president, who was furious when Netanyahu called to congratulate Joe Biden for winning an election Trump still insists he won.
By inserting himself into the Gaza negotiations – declaring there will be “all hell to pay” if the war is still going on when he takes office – Trump has apparently motivated Netanyahu to make a deal. The Israeli leader is anxious to avoid starting off on the wrong foot with the grievance-obsessed president-elect, who has recently told Time magazine that he doesn’t really trust the prime minister. The two leaders have spoken several times since the election, most recently as Bibi assured his friend “at length about the efforts we are making to free our hostages.”
Leaks coming from all directions indicate Israel and Hamas could finally be ready. Both combatants may be anxious to score points with the incoming administration and poke their fingers in Biden’s eyes, one blaming him for not doing enough to help destroy Hamas and the other for doing too much.
Netanyahu has frequently shown contempt for Biden, but he fears Trump, and one reason can be found on Capitol Hill. Netanyahu over the years has shifted Israel’s traditionally wall-to-wall bipartisan American political base to the partisan Right, starting in the 1990s with a partnership with GOP Speaker Newt Gingrich by provoking each party to out-Israel the other. But it deteriorated to an alarming level the longer Bibi was in office.
Most American Jews and Democrats, the party that consistently wins Jewish votes by 3:1 margins, were increasingly uncomfortable with Netanyahu’s right-wing governments dominated by religious and nationalist extremists. Republicans, particularly the religious Right, were much more receptive.
TODAY NETANYAHU sees his and Israel’s American political base among the Evangelicals, ultra-Orthodox Jews and hard-core Jewish conservatives. Evangelicals dominate Trump’s MAGA base, and despite their avowed love of Israel, their first loyalty is to their president. If he turns on Bibi, they will follow. And the prime minister, particularly this prime minister, can’t turn back to the Democrats, where he has burned so many bridges.
An attempt by Senate progressives, led by Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, to block selected munitions sales to Israel last month garnered 19 votes, not enough to block but more than enough to cause considerable concern. Observers say that if it had been a secret ballot, the vote would have been much higher. Many senators with longstanding pro-Israel records, including three Jewish lawmakers, accused Israel of not doing enough to get food, medicine and other basic supplies to Gaza civilians.
How much of that may dissipate if Bibi is replaced by a centrist government is open to speculation, but there is no denying that much damage has already been done to hopes for restoring Israel’s historic bipartisan support.
Trump's threats added impetus to a deal?
Biden administration officials are crediting Trump’s “hell to pay” threats with adding impetus to a deal that both sides long avoided in preference to watching the other one suffer. Hamas seemed to have little concern about the Palestinians casualty toll so long as Israel was suffering international condemnation and domestic unrest for its scorched-earth warfare.
Trump is popular in Israel, where a pre-election poll by the Israel Democracy Institute showed 72% of Jewish Israelis preferred the MAGA candidate, virtually the opposite of how Jewish Americans just voted.
In his Time magazine “Person of the Year” interview, Trump indicated he doesn’t care one way or the other about the two-state solution, a long-standing US policy pushed hard by Biden. It’s just one of “numerous” options, he said. “What I want is a deal where there’s going to be peace and where the killing stops.”
He made Netanyahu very happy by naming former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee as the next US ambassador. A frequent visitor to Israel, he is a Southern Baptist preacher who opposes Palestinian statehood, supports annexation of the West Bank and denies the existence of the Palestinian people.
IN THE AFTERMATH of October 7 and the Gaza war, most Israelis oppose a two-state solution, and support among American Jews has softened. Biden said the war shows the need for statehood, and Netanyahu insisted that it is proof this must never happen.
Bishara Bahba, the Palestinian American leader of Arab Americans for Trump, told Israeli Channel 12 that the president-elect “100%” committed himself to a two-state solution. He worked closely courting Arab and Palestinian votes for Trump with American-Lebanese businessman Massad Boulos, who was rewarded with the post of senior White House advisor on Arab and Middle East affairs. Boulos just happens to be the father-in-law of Trump’s daughter Tiffany. (His other daughter’s father-in-law, a convicted felon like Trump, was named ambassador to France.)
Netanyahu has not given up on annexing major West Bank settlement blocs, if not more. Trump said he “stopped” that in his first term as a concession to several Arab states for signing the historic Abraham Accords.
Both men want Saudi Arabia to join the accords, but in the wake of the Gaza war, the Saudis have upped the ante to include serious Israel-Palestinian negotiations about statehood. Netanyahu rejects Palestinian sovereignty, but he’s been known to engage in negotiations that seemed serious but were going nowhere. The prize for the Saudis is a mutual defense treaty with the United States and civil nuclear cooperation; Trump and Netanyahu will look for flexibility when it comes to the Palestinians.
The Chanukamas gift Bibi would like to give his friend Donald is the Gaza ceasefire he’s demanding (the holidays last eight to 12 days), and for Inauguration Day, don’t be surprised if he brings along a freed American-Israeli hostage.
Trump is still grousing that he didn’t get the Nobel Peace Prize for the Abraham Accords. Bibi probably thinks they both were cheated out of that recognition. Maybe by signing up the Saudis, mollifying the Palestinians and ending the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, there’s a chance.
‘Tis the season for sugar plums dancing in the heads that think they wear crowns.
The writer is a Washington-based journalist, consultant, lobbyist, and a former legislative director at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.