The Iran war is taking the U.S.-Israel relationship to new heights – and revealing its limits

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Donald Trump presents himself as the most pro-Israel president in U.S. history. He has moved the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. He proposed a peace plan that would grant Israel large tracts of Palestinian land. When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu resumed attacks on the Gaza Strip in March of last year after a brief ceasefire, Mr. Trump did not try to restrain him.

Now, the U.S.-Israel war on Iran is bringing Mr. Trump’s and Mr. Netanyahu’s governments closer together than ever before, but it is also testing the limits of the relationship.

The bombing campaign of the past month has seen the U.S. help fulfill one of Mr. Netanyahu’s longest-held policy aims. Mr. Trump’s abrupt ceasefire, however – and Israel’s insistence on continuing to pound Lebanon, which it sees as a second front in the war – marks a sharp divergence between the two. When Vice-President JD Vance opens talks toward a longer-lasting peace with Iranian officials in Pakistan on Saturday, Israel will not be at the table.

Ironically, Mr. Trump’s increasingly tight relationship with Israel comes at a time when polling shows the country’s popularity among Americans has severely waned. And both he and Mr. Netanyahu have had to contend with perceptions among their people that each leader is playing the other.

Opinion: The U.S. and Israel have already lost the war in Iran

“We are like a big brother and little brother,” Mr. Trump said in an interview with the Axios news website last week, summing up the relationship.

Aaron David Miller, a former U.S. State Department official who worked on Arab-Israeli negotiations, said the joint Iran military campaign has marked an unusual level of closeness.

“With the exception of Britain in Iraq in 2003, we have not co-operated militarily in a real war with any partner, ally or friend to the degree to which we’ve co-operated here with the Israelis,” he told The Globe and Mail.

Launching such a war has been “Netanyahu’s lifetime mission,” Mr. Miller said, and he found a willing partner in Mr. Trump, who seemed to want to “go where no president has gone before” and deal a severe blow to the anti-American regime in Tehran.

“There’s a sort of urban legend circulating in Washington that Netanyahu manipulated Trump into this war. I don’t think that’s a fair reflection of reality. Netanyahu was pushing on a very, very open door,” said Mr. Miller, now a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The White House is certainly sensitive to the perception that Mr. Trump may be doing Mr. Netanyahu’s bidding. Early in the fighting, after Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters that the U.S. attacked Iran because Israel was about to launch a war anyway and Washington wanted to pre-empt retaliation from Tehran, he swiftly walked the comment back.

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This week, after The New York Times outlined a Feb. 11 briefing in the White House situation room during which Mr. Netanyahu made the case for war to Mr. Trump, John Kerry revealed that the Israeli Prime Minister had once similarly pitched Barack Obama.

“He came to President Obama, he made a presentation that asked to strike. President Obama refused,” Mr. Kerry, who was Mr. Obama’s secretary of state from 2013 to 2017, told MSNBC.

Dahlia Sheindlin, a Tel Aviv-based political consultant, said Mr. Netanyahu’s success in getting Mr. Trump to work with him may turn out to be a double-edged sword.

For one, the war has failed to topple the Iranian regime and instead has led to a global energy crisis, with Tehran blockading the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s petroleum supply passes.

For another, by casting his lot with a politician as contentious as Mr. Trump, Mr. Netanyahu may have caused long-term damage to what was once a bipartisan pro-Israel consensus in the U.S.

“In both of those axes, this peak level of co-operation between Israel and the U.S. may be the kind of peak you fall off of,” Ms. Sheindlin said in an interview.

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In a Gallup poll earlier this year, just 36 per cent of U.S. voters said they sympathized more with Israelis than with Palestinians, down from 64 per cent in 2018. Pew Research, meanwhile, found that 60 per cent of respondents to a survey it conducted held an unfavourable view of Israel, up from 42 per cent four years ago.

This week appears to have demonstrated that Mr. Trump’s alignment with Mr. Netanyahu only goes so far. Facing voter disapproval of the war and rising gasoline prices, the White House reached a ceasefire with Iran despite failing to topple its regime or eliminate its supply of enriched uranium, two aims Mr. Trump has cited for the war.

Residents of Israel’s battered north want war against Hezbollah – with or without peace in Iran

Just hours after the ceasefire was announced, Israel killed hundreds of people in Lebanon in what it said was its largest barrage of the conflict against Hezbollah, an Iran-backed militia. The air strikes led to a public argument with Tehran and Islamabad, which had helped broker the truce, over whether Lebanon was covered by the ceasefire. In retaliation, Tehran said it would keep the Strait of Hormuz closed.

After phone calls from Mr. Trump and his envoy, Steve Witkoff, Mr. Netanyahu announced that he had authorized negotiations with the Lebanese government.

Ned Lazarus, a Middle East expert at George Washington University, said Israeli media refers to Mr. Trump’s relationship with Mr. Netanyahu as a “bear hug”: a warm embrace that also gives the U.S. President latitude to direct events in ways the Israeli Prime Minister might not always want.

Both last October’s ceasefire in Gaza and the one this week with Iran, Prof. Lazarus said, happened before Mr. Netanyahu would have liked.

“It’s clear that the war wasn’t going the way Trump wanted − it wasn’t quickly achieving decisive results. It is absolutely Trump’s unilateral decision to have the truce,” Prof. Lazarus said. “But I don’t think it’s a rupture – Netanyahu is grateful to be working with him.”