Netanyahu managed to get his meeting with Trump. To hear him talk about it, you would think it was the most productive meeting of all time. He said, “”I have just concluded an excellent meeting with President Trump. When I say excellent, I don’t mean it in a superficial way, it’s not just lip service.” But the lady doth protest too much. It was a mess, and tensions between Israel and the US are very high now. That isn’t just your typical Barak Ravid superlative hyperventilating drama. The problems are real and Trump is frustrated.
Trump realized a few weeks ago that Netanyahu has trapped him in a nightmare and he has no way to get out. Now, that doesn’t mean anything will actually change now. But there is a lot of disagreement, and it is worth unpacking.
It was not planned. The trip was designed for Lindsey Graham’s funeral and Bibi had to pay to play. And even then, the soundbites he got surrounding the meeting were not what he expected.
To understand why this meeting was such a flop, we have to start with the buildup.
How This Meeting Happened
Trump did not want this meeting to happen. The on-again off-again ceasefire has been killing Trump. If he stops he is seen as a weak loser. If he continues, the price of gas goes up and he looks ineffective. There is just no winning here. He feels the war was one Israel pushed him into and that Israel pushed him into escalating after the MOU. He has a point.
Three hours before Benjamin Netanyahu walked into the White House on Tuesday, Donald Trump went on Fox News and torched him. I don’t usually find Trump funny, but this one was pretty hilarious.
Netanyahu had flown from Nevatim Air Force Base — not Ben Gurion, and without announcing his departure time, on a reported Iranian threat — carrying intelligence that Tehran had moved centrifuges into the tunnels at Pickaxe Mountain shortly after signing its memorandum with Washington. Proof, as Jerusalem framed it, that Iran was cheating while negotiating.
Trump didn’t wait for the briefing.
“I don’t need Bibi to tell me that. Bibi’s telling me that because he wants me to stay involved.”
And then, in case the point was too subtle: “I know exactly what’s going on at Pickaxe. It’s not a big problem.” Followed by the sort of line you say about a subordinate who’s embarrassed you: “Why don’t you just tell it to me? Why do you have to announce to the world?”
Tzipi Hotovely tried to do damage control and told reporters that Pickaxe Mountain never came up in the meeting at all. She added, “the idea that we have some intelligence here is a sort of fake news that ran throughout the day.”
In other words, the intelligence briefing thing failed. Partially because Trump doesn’t trust Israel right now and partially because they made it public in another attempt to box him in.
The entry fee
It gets worse, because Netanyahu had to buy the meeting in the first place.
Israel’s Channel 12 reported that the White House stonewalled the request for weeks and eventually sent word through multiple diplomatic channels that he could not come without producing something tangible. The message, as relayed:
“If you think you’re coming empty-handed, you’re not coming.”
So he produced something. Netanyahu convened his security cabinet by emergency telephone vote during the parliamentary recess — avoiding a floor fight — and approved the entry of an International Stabilization Force into Gaza. Roughly 200 troops, a pilot deployment in Rafah’s Tal as-Sultan district. Morocco first, then Uganda, Albania, Kazakhstan, Kosovo.
The whole move is meaningless. I doubt it will happen and even if it does, those 200 troops will be in some abandoned part of Gaza doing nothing.
The significance isn’t the troop count. It’s that Israel had spent months insisting no international force would enter Gaza until Hamas disarmed. Hamas has not disarmed. An Israeli official familiar with the deliberations described the vote to Channel 12 as “a gesture to Trump that is effectively a retreat,” pushed through “without looking carefully at the consequences.” Itamar Ben Gvir cast the only no vote.
The Prime Minister’s Office denies any condition was imposed.
Ariel Kahana, writing in the reliably pro-Netanyahu Israel Hayom, filed a column titled “The price Netanyahu paid to secure his meeting with Trump.” When your own side is running the ledger, the ledger is real.
Axios had already reported the scheduling humiliation in mid-July. A White House official, on background: “Our impression was that Bibi was trying to will a meeting into existence.” Trump, per the same reporting, was “pissed off” that Netanyahu had gone on Fox to attack the F-35 sale to Turkey days before Trump flew to Ankara for a NATO summit, and felt “Bibi had no right” to weigh in. For a prime minister who’d been welcomed into the Oval Office six times on days’ notice, the freeze was the message.
He got in, finally, because Lindsey Graham died and Netanyahu was coming to the funeral anyway.
Eighty-two minutes, no witnesses
The meeting ran 11:03 to 12:25. No press spray — not even a brief one, breaking Trump’s own pattern across seven prior sit-downs. No joint statement. No press conference. Vance, Rubio, Hegseth and Witkoff in the room throughout; no one-on-one. Netanyahu stayed at Blair House and entered through the side.
A U.S. official explained the blackout to the Times of Israel in terms that are themselves an indictment: both sides wanted to avoid the appearance that Israel is driving American military decisions. Everyone remembered that their February meeting was held with cameras rolling — and that the joint air campaign against Iran began seventeen days later.
Trump’s own account, posted afterward:
“There was nothing definitive reached other than I insisted that negotiations with Iran continue to see whether or not a Deal can be consummated. If it can, I let the Prime Minister know that will be a preference.”
Read the verbs. I insisted. I let the Prime Minister know. This is a president describing, in public, having overruled his guest.
Netanyahu’s version: “one of the best conversations I’ve had with our friend, President Trump.” Full partnership. Mutual support.
Both statements are about the same room.
The leak file
None of this is new; it’s just newly visible. The Trump administration has spent five months conducting its Israel policy partly through Barak Ravid’s phone.
June 1. Seven hours after Netanyahu ordered a strike on Beirut, Trump called him. Three U.S. officials briefed Axios the same evening:
“You’re fucking crazy. You’d be in prison if it weren’t for me.”
“I’m saving your ass. Everybody hates you now. Everybody hates Israel.”
Trump confirmed the call himself two days later on a New York Post podcast, allowing only that he’d been “a little bit perturbed.”
June 8. Netanyahu approved a “massive” strike on Iran at 4:30 in the afternoon. Aircraft were being prepped. Trump phoned and it was cancelled mid-preparation, causing what Channel 12 described as considerable confusion in the IDF command. Trump’s retelling:
“I said, ‘Bibi, you better be careful, or you will be on your own very soon.’”
Israel’s air force chief confirmed on the record a week later that a “Broad Strike” had been called off at the last minute.
To the Financial Times, days later: “I call the shots. I call all the shots. He doesn’t call the shots.”
To Axios on July 4: “We get along very good. He knows who the boss is.” In the same piece, a U.S. official summarizing the mood inside Trump’s circle: “Bibi was wrong about everything.”
Israel counter-leaks — through Israel Hayom, mostly, in stories arguing that it was Netanyahu who blocked the Lebanon escalation, or that Rubio’s backing secured a green light Trump had supposedly forbidden. But Jerusalem is playing defense in someone else’s newspaper.
Why the leaking? Nobody in the administration has said. The most serious outside reading comes from Bilal Habib Qazi at Islamabad’s Institute of Regional Studies, who argues the leak was the message — proof to Tehran and to Gulf mediators that Washington can actually restrain Israel, which a diplomatic note cannot establish. His summary line is the sharpest thing written about this relationship all year:
“Washington is now managing Israel as a variable in a wider strategic equation rather than treating the alliance as an end in itself.”
The London-based analyst Amir Makhoul reads it differently and more brutally: the leaks bypass Netanyahu to reach Israeli voters directly, three months before an election. Call it what it is.
What they actually disagree about
Strip the psychodrama and one hard policy dispute remains. Defense Minister Israel Katz said it on the record Tuesday:
“We are determined to strike Iran’s energy targets. The United States does not currently approve of this, for fear that Iran might attack neighbouring countries, causing a global oil crisis.”
“As far as we are concerned, we are ready to set Iran back 40 years.”
Israel wants the war widened — oil, South Pars, regime infrastructure, and per Israeli reporting, operations designed to destabilize the regime itself. Trump wants out. He has 18 American dead, gas at $4.10, inflation at 3.5%, a 33% approval rating on the war and midterms in November.
And he was holding something over Netanyahu’s head the whole time: Oman’s Gulf-backed proposal for joint management of the Strait of Hormuz with voluntary transit fees, modeled on the Malacca arrangement. Iran and Oman have already signed off. It awaits only Trump’s approval — which he deliberately withheld until after he’d seen Netanyahu.
The ground has moved underneath both of them
The American right is defecting. Steve Bannon, on this meeting: “Netanyahu has had twice as many visits to the White House in 18 months as Churchill had in all of World War II — with every one of them a disaster for America First.” Curt Mills of The American Conservative calls the restrainist mood “DEFCON 1.” Tucker Carlson has left the Republican Party and says flatly that Israel pushed the U.S. into a war it has already lost.
Trump’s own counterterrorism director, Joe Kent, resigned in March and posted his letter:
“Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its American lobby.”
And on July 15, the Vice President of the United States went on Joe Rogan and alleged a “very discreet, extremely well-funded campaign” to derail the Iran talks — “some people within their system we know beyond a shadow of a doubt who are manipulating and trying to change American public opinion to keep the war going on indefinitely.” Vance argued Israel should be treated as a “normal ally.”
He was sitting in the Oval Office on Tuesday.
Pew has 57% of Republicans under 50 viewing Israel unfavorably. MAGA support for continuing the war has dropped thirteen points since May.
Israel’s ground has moved too. Only 7% of Israelis express real confidence in Trump — down from 34% in March. Likud has scrapped the election campaign it built around Netanyahu’s closeness to him, after concluding it wouldn’t win a single vote. Gadi Eisenkot is tied with Netanyahu for preferred prime minister; the Jewish opposition sits one seat short of a majority without Arab parties. And Channel 12 reported in June that Trump administration officials have opened informal back-channels to Naftali Bennett and Eisenkot, acknowledging Netanyahu may lose on October 27.
Ben Caspit, in Maariv, delivered the epitaph: “We’ve lost America. Thank you, Bibi.”
The clocks
Here is why there was no press, no readout and no endorsement — and why there won’t be one soon.
Trump needs this war over before November. Netanyahu needs it restarted before October 27, because a victory is the only thing left that can save him. Their interests aren’t merely divergent. On the only question that matters — when — they are exactly opposed.
Amit Segal put it plainly on Israeli television: “The Americans are making it clear to the Israelis they are the ones who are running the war.”
Netanyahu came to Washington to argue for escalation. He left with a president announcing publicly that he had insisted on diplomacy instead.
He got the photograph and that will stop him from being clobbered by his rivals back home before the elections. He desperately needed that. But Bibi got nothing else.
It was probably the shortest meeting the two had ever had and maybe the worst. But this does not mean much in terms of Trump freeing himself from the Israeli influence. They continue to have incredible control over what the US does through Rubio, Hegseth, Kushner and Witkoff. But it is clear that Trump is unhappy with this.
Trump is Israel’s bitch as before.
Trump is bombing Iran for Israel.
No other reason for this meeting.
Mission accomplished.