Netanyahu Finally Learns the Truth About Trump

来源：The Atlantic  ·  作者：Yair Rosenberg  ·  2026-06-17 ·  分类：US News

In 2019, Benjamin Netanyahu draped buildings with giant banners that depicted him shaking hands with a grinning Donald Trump. Captioned with the words Another League, the posters presented Netanyahu’s ties with the American president as an argument for the Israeli prime minister’s reelection. No one else, Netanyahu’s campaign implied, could deliver the mercurial man in the White House.

That was then. Today, Netanyahu’s boast has boomeranged, transformed from an electoral asset into an advertisement of his diminished influence. In June alone, Trump has labeled him “fucking crazy” and said that he has “no fucking judgment.” The reprimands have gone beyond rhetoric. According to Israeli and American reports, over the past week, the president forced Israel to abort imminent retaliatory strikes on Iran and demanded that the country restrict its response to Hezbollah fire from Lebanon that has pummeled the Israeli north. Trump also reportedly denied Israel’s request to view the memorandum of understanding that his administration negotiated with Iran until it was already a fait accompli. Desperate for a deal to wind down his ill-conceived war, the president effectively offered Israeli concessions to his Iranian interlocutors.

Trump has railed against Netanyahu in the past, most famously after the Israeli leader congratulated Joe Biden on his 2020 election victory. But the current contretemps has much higher stakes and comes at the worst possible time for Netanyahu. Israel’s elections are slated for either September or October, and Trump has placed the Israeli prime minister in a fiendish vise that jeopardizes his political future.

[Jonathan Lemire: Trump in defeat]

For years, Netanyahu has built his brand on two promises to the Israeli electorate: that he alone could withstand international pressure to compromise on Israeli security, and that he alone could handle Trump. Now the president is forcing Netanyahu to choose between the two. Either he defies Trump’s diktats about Lebanon and Iran to save his reputation as a stalwart security hawk, or he folds to preserve the perception of his alliance with the president. Whatever path Netanyahu picks, he will imperil Israel’s geopolitical standing and undermine his own case to Israeli voters.

Those voters already aren’t buying what Bibi has been selling. Netanyahu’s coalition of far-right and ultra-Orthodox parties received just 48.4 percent of the vote in Israel’s last election and obtained a parliamentary majority only due to a quirk of the country’s electoral system. Even before the horrors of October 7, 2023, polls had showed Netanyahu and his allies losing the next election. For years after, about two-thirds of Israelis regularly told pollsters that they wanted the prime minister to resign. A similar number today don’t want him to run for reelection. Israel’s opposition is leaderless and fragmented—but nonetheless projected to win markedly more seats than the current government. (Whether it can cobble together a viable coalition is another question.)

Israel’s failed forever wars in Iran and Lebanon have further eroded Netanyahu’s prospects. At the outset of the joint U.S.-Israeli campaign against Iran, the Israel Democracy Institute found that some 70 percent of Israeli Jews believed that the operation could succeed in destroying Iran’s nuclear and ballistic-missile programs, and 61 percent thought that it would topple the Iranian regime. These expectations, stoked by Netanyahu and his media allies, were always unrealistic and have predictably curdled into disillusionment. The institute’s most recent survey found that less than a third of Israeli Jews expected a U.S.-Iran agreement to dismantle the ballistic-missile program or the Iranian regime, and just 29 percent believed that ending the war under current conditions was compatible with Israel’s security interests.

According to Amit Segal, a journalist well sourced on the Israeli right, Netanyahu had hoped to host Trump in Israel before the looming election, in what would essentially have been a campaign rally in diplomatic disguise. Today, such festivities seem fantastical. After the interim Iran accord was announced, the Likud party reportedly canceled a planned electoral blitz meant to highlight its leader’s close ties to Trump. But as a student of power who has done everything he can to hoard it, Netanyahu should have seen this rug pull coming.

As the president has demonstrated time and again, the only person whose interests matter to Trump is Trump. Those interests have often aligned with Netanyahu’s, but this was always a marriage of convenience. Like many of his party and generation, Trump has long held generally pro-Israel inclinations. He cares little for the aspirations of the Palestinian people and has openly fantasized about invading Iran since the 1980s. Tilting toward Israel played to the president’s evangelical-Christian base, as Trump noted when he declared that he recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital “for the evangelicals.”

[Yair Rosenberg: Netanyahu’s very useful war]

But Trump’s interests were bound to diverge from Netanyahu’s as the Iran war stretched on without resolution. Netanyahu needed military achievements to pitch to voters at the ballot box; Trump needed the markets to calm before the midterms. And so when the campaign failed to produce quick results, Trump pulled the plug, first acceding to a cease-fire in early April, then restraining Israel from bombing Iran and Lebanon this month, and today moving toward an interim accord that lifts sanctions on Iran even as it does little about its nuclear program and says nothing about its ballistic missiles or support for terrorist proxies. That 60-day accord is tentative and fragile and may yet collapse into renewed hostilities. But if the president chooses to see it through, the Israeli leader can do very little about it. As Trump put it today, “We’re the big partner, and he’s the very small partner.”

For Netanyahu, who is finally facing a reckoning before the Israeli electorate, this is a disaster on his doorstep. For Trump, it’s someone else’s problem.

原文链接：https://www.theatlantic.com/international/2026/06/netanyahu-trump-israel-iran/687588/?utm_source=feed

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