Netanyahu has long frustrated U.S. presidents but his dynamic with Trump is unique

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When Bill Clinton sat down with recently elected Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in June, 1996, the U.S. president was eager to push forward the Oslo process for peace with the Palestinians he had started three years earlier.

Instead, Mr. Netanyahu lectured him on the history of Israeli-Arab relations. “Who’s the fucking superpower here?” Mr. Clinton fumed to his aides afterwards, in an unusually profane reaction to the leader of a close ally.

This moment, recounted by Aaron David Miller, then a U.S. State Department official working on the peace process, would prove to be a preview of Mr. Netanyahu’s relationship with four American presidents across his 18 years of intermittent rule.

White House frustration with such perceived intransigence led to a similar executive expletive this month when President Donald Trump, angry that Mr. Netanyahu was jeopardizing negotiations to end the war with Iran by bombing Lebanon, reamed him out over the phone.

“Everybody hates Israel because of this,” Mr. Trump said, according to Axios. The President later confirmed that he called Mr. Netanyahu “crazy” and swore in the conversation.

But if the dynamic Mr. Trump is colliding with is familiar, his relationship with Mr. Netanyahu is unique in two ways: No previous U.S. president has done so much of what the Israeli leader has demanded, nor so openly given him orders and been so publicly exasperated about the difficulty of doing so.

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Mitchell Barak, an Israeli pollster who worked for Mr. Netanyahu in the 1990s, said Mr. Trump’s frustration is “par for the course” among world leaders who have dealt with the Israeli Prime Minister.

“He does what he thinks is in the best interest of Israel. He doesn’t see anything other than the thing he thinks needs to be done right away,” Mr. Barak said of Mr. Netanyahu’s decision-making.

While Mr. Trump and Mr. Netanyahu worked together to attack Iran this past February, their war aims have since diverged: Mr. Trump is trying to get out of the conflict because Iran’s shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz has driven up the price of oil, fertilizer and other goods that must transit the waterway, while Mr. Netanyahu wants a decisive victory over the Islamic Republic and its regional proxies.

“The U.S. doesn’t want to get involved in Lebanon, Syria or Iran long term, while Netanyahu sees a real threat,” Mr. Barak said.

Mr. Trump has long presented himself as the most pro-Israel U.S. president ever. He moved his country’s embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, proposed a peace plan that would give Israel large tracts of the West Bank, did not restrain Mr. Netanyahu from breaking a ceasefire with Hamas in Gaza last year and launched the Iran war.

But Mr. Miller, the former State Department official, said in an interview that Mr. Trump has also demonstrated a willingness to confront Mr. Netanyahu in a way his predecessors did not. Earlier this week, the President told the Prime Minister not to retaliate against Iranian missile strikes on Israel. And last fall, he eventually cajoled Mr. Netanyahu into accepting a second ceasefire in Gaza.

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Mr. Netanyahu is also particularly vulnerable: He is facing an election in the fall and is on trial for bribery, fraud and breach of trust.

“Trump has leverage with Netanyahu that no other American president has ever had,” Mr. Miller said. “If Netanyahu puts himself between Trump and something Trump really wants, Trump will ask for it, and there is no doubt in my mind that Netanyahu will comply.”

Also working against Mr. Netanyahu is Mr. Trump’s tight control of the Republican Party. It means that, when disputes arise, Mr. Netanyahu cannot go around the White House to solicit sympathetic lawmakers – as he did in 2015 when he criticized then-U.S. president Barack Obama’s negotiations to stop Iran from developing a nuclear weapon in a speech to the U.S. Congress.

Ghaith al-Omari, a former official with the Palestinian Authority, said Mr. Trump has shown his ability to get what he wants from Mr. Netanyahu, such as the ceasefire that ended the 12-day war with Iran last June.

But Mr. Netanyahu has taken advantage of the fact that neither Mr. Trump nor his officials pay close attention to anything beyond top-line developments. This has allowed Mr. Netanyahu, called Bibi by some, to continue ordering air strikes in Gaza despite the ostensible ceasefire, Mr. al-Omari said, and explains why he thought he could do the same in Lebanon.

“Trump doesn’t care about details. For him, the war is over when there’s a ceasefire. And this is the space that Bibi plays in,” he said. “Bibi says ‘the ceasefire is still on,’ and Trump is not surrounded by people who will contradict him. Other presidents always had someone who would.”

Israel long benefited from broad popular support among U.S. voters, and Mr. Netanyahu, who grew up partly in Pennsylvania, has worked to deepen that backing with Americans on the right.

“He speaks to American audiences in ways that resonate with conservatives – civilizational threats, military power and strength, dismissiveness of international law and diplomacy – in very good, American-accented English,” said Dov Waxman, chair in Israel studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.

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The U.S. has helped Israel build the strongest force in the Middle East, with annual military aid of US$3.8-billion and an additional package of US$8.7-billion in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas that started the war in Gaza. Israel, for its part, supplies the U.S. with intelligence on the region.

In recent years, however, the U.S. public has been dramatically rethinking its support for Israel. In a Pew Research survey from April, 60 per cent of respondents held an unfavourable view of the country, up from 42 per cent in 2022.

In a Politico poll last month, 37 per cent of people who had voted for Mr. Trump in 2024 said they approved of Israel’s current government and 37 per cent said they did not, with the rest undecided.

Mr. Trump, meanwhile, remains popular in Israel, which has given him leeway to publicly cross Mr. Netanyahu in ways Mr. Obama and former president Joe Biden never could, Prof. Waxman said.

In the end, both leaders face clear and diverging political imperatives. Mr. Netanyahu does not want to face voters with an inconclusive end to the war, Prof. Waxman said, while an overly weak and chaotic Iran would be a bad result for Mr. Trump.

“Even though Trump and Netanyahu often like to publicize their relationship, it’s the same outcome as usual,” he said. “Netanyahu is someone who confounds and frustrates presidents.”