Ep. 135: Trump dislikes ‘forever wars,’ but Israel is stuck with one
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Hello, and welcome to Jonathan Tobin Daily. I'm JNS, Editor-in-Chief, Jonathan Tobin. Now, let's get started. Despite denials from Jerusalem, the U.S.-Israel relationship has hit a bump in the road. The panic among some in the pro-Israel community about the way the Jewish state seemed to be an afterthought during President Donald Trump's recent trip to the Middle East may have been an overreaction.

But recent reported comments from Trump about his frustration about the intractable nature of the conflict with Hamas and concern about the suffering of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have made it clear that the two nations are, at best, not on the same page.

you don't have to be a Washington insider to pick up the signals. The decision not to send Vice President J.D. Vance to Israel after attending the inauguration of Pope Leo XIV in Rome was due to what Axios reported as a desire not to have him in the country at a time when the Israel Defense Forces were ramping up operations there against the terrorists.

Subsequently, sending Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on a solidarity visit was a poor substitute for Vance or Trump had he chosen to make a stop in Israel on his Middle East tour. But Noem, who is not considered a player in the making of foreign policy, was not just there to make nice. The fact that her office described her conversation with Netanyahu as candid was

diplomatic language for an open disagreement, spoke volumes. Apparently she was, among other things, tasked by Trump with reminding the Prime Minister not to do anything that might upset the administration's talks with Iran, about which the President is currently expressing optimism, however ill-founded that sentiment might be.

That means talk about Israel striking Tehran's nuclear facilities anytime soon, before Russia can help repair its air defenses that were destroyed last year by Israeli airstrikes, is fanciful. Despite reports about Israel threatening to attack the Iranians even without American cooperation or support, and as much as Netanyahu may see the threat from Iran as the most important challenge facing his nation, he is not going to risk an open breach with Trump.

As was the case with Trump's trip, these differences should not be exaggerated. The president himself told Fox News' Brett Baier that he wasn't frustrated with the Israeli prime minister, with Netanyahu, and praised his bravery in leading his country during a war that was forced on it by the Hamas-led Palestinian Arab to tax on southern Israel on October 7th, 2023.

For his part, Netanyahu has sought to stay as close as possible to the Americans. During a news conference, he vowed to continue embracing Trump's plans for Gaza and voicing no public criticisms of his stance on engaging with Syria, Qatar, or even the negotiations with Iran, though they appeared to be leading the United States to a rerun of Barack Obama's appeasement of the Islamist regime.

Yet, as every report about the conversations being held between the two allies seemed to confirm, there are clear and obvious disagreements that can no longer be denied. For those who have longed for a return to more daylight between Washington and Jerusalem, something that was an open objective of the Obama administration and pretty much the opposite of what happened during Trump's first term,

This is very good news. Headlines like the one in the New York Times on May 26th that read, Trump's comments on Gaza reflect Israel's growing isolation, illustrate the eagerness of the foreign policy establishment and left-wing media to assume the worst about the White House's attitude toward Netanyahu and his government. The problem isn't necessarily the tendency toward America only rather than America first among some of his counselers.

It is Trump's impatience with being involved in an armed conflict, any armed conflict, especially those he labels as forever wars, even if U.S. troops are not involved, as is the case in Gaza. The fact that Israel is in the middle of a shooting war with Hamas and other Iranian terror proxies is the big difference between Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0.

Of course, throughout his first term and on every day of the 77 years since the modern Jewish state was founded, Israel has faced deadly threats from Arab armies and terrorists. For his part, Trump has been willing to use force against terrorists or to strike enemies. Still, it's important to remember the issues that launched him into politics.

Opposition to illegal immigration, bad trade deals, and forever wars, such as those that the United States fought in Afghanistan and Iraq. The president fancies himself a great dealmaker and, by extension, a peacemaker.

Given his success in helping to forge the Abraham Accords during his first term, he has more cause to claim that title than any other recent president, though he gets no credit for it from the international community and is about as likely to win a Nobel Peace Prize as to be elected pope. Trump believes wars to be wasteful and often pointless, and he's not wrong about that.

Above all, he simply has no patience to stick with generational conflicts that require democracies to expend military resources with no real end in sight. The price for continuing to fight in Afghanistan, for example, wasn't comparatively high in terms of blood and treasure.

It was, however, a conflict that couldn't be won because of the persistence and popularity of the Taliban combined with the incompetence of America's allies. And so Trump worked to end America's commitment there, though to his credit, he never agreed to the sort of disgraceful route that Biden presided over.

Similarly, Trump opposed the open-ended commitment to Ukraine that Biden agreed to after Russia started its war in February 2022. Trump knows that there is a question, there is an obvious compromise solution that can end the fighting. His frustration of Russian President Vladimir Putin's refusal to stop it may lead Trump to increase sanctions on Moscow, something no one thought was likely when he returned to office in January.

The situation facing Israel, however, is different from the past war in Afghanistan and the current one in Ukraine. Trump opposes the continuation of Hamas as a ruling power in the Gaza Strip.

And unlike the Russia-Ukraine situation, he has felt no need to obfuscate which party is the one responsible for the war. While European nations and Canada have become effectively neutral about the campaign to eradicate the genocidal terrorists of Hamas, Washington makes no secret of standing with Israel, even proposing to clear out the Strip and resettle Gazans elsewhere in order to rebuild it into an American-run resort.

But getting from the present situation to that very different Gaza of the future is something that won't happen overnight. It will require Israel to conduct a long, drawn-out battle against terrorists still embedded among civilians and determined to control access to food for the Palestinians under their control. They still hold 24 living Israeli hostages that they are trying to extort a ceasefire.

to enable them to remain in place. Their goal is a permanent halt to the fighting when Israel will be forced to retreat across the border, setting up the possibility of yet another terror assault such as the one that started the current conflict on October 7th, 2023. What Israel needs from the United States is not just the continued flow of arms that enables it to keep fighting without them being slow-walked, as was the case under Biden.

It also needs American support for efforts to restrict Hamas's ability to control the supply of food to the Strip. Above all, Jerusalem needs Washington to ignore the drumbeat of Hamas-orchestrated propaganda about genocide or famine that has helped to mobilize Europe and Canada to condemn and isolate the Jewish state. Doing that for a short period of time doesn't seem to be a problem for Trump.

But the possibility that the fighting will continue for many more months without a ceasefire or a peace agreement involving the release of the hostages, for which the president can take credit, is a problem for the White House. Part of that may involve Trump being influenced by the media campaign against Israel that shows pictures of suffering children, even if much of it can't be trusted. But the real problem is Trump's allergy to wars that have no end in sight.

There's no disguising the fact that Israel is stuck with it forever. Trump might like to expand the Abraham Accords, free the hostages, and turn Gaza into an engine of prosperity, as the Palestinians themselves should have done when Israel withdrew from it in 2005, instead of turning it back into a terrorist fortress. And he wants to bask in the praise for being a peacemaker.

But if the Palestinians have demonstrated time and again that they have no interest in peace, both Hamas and their supposedly more moderate Fatah party rivals, which run the Palestinian Authority, governs Arabs living in Judea and Samaria, have made it clear that they simply won't accept any peace agreement that recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state, no matter where its borders may be drawn.

More to the point, Hamas will never willingly surrender its control of Gaza. That's because it is ideologically committed to endless war against Israel and because they believe that the West will sooner or later force the Jewish state to end the current conflict with the Arab terrorists still in control.

That's a conviction that is reinforced by every free Palestine demonstration in the West and every condemnation of Israel by a Western government that is motivated by Prohommos' disinformation about conditions in Gaza and the real reason why the conflict continues.

There's no quick fix or an economic or trade agreement from which America can profit from in Gaza. The best-case scenario would mean Israel achieving its objective of eliminating Hamas, which is a group of terrorists that can be defeated, rather than, as Israel's critics longly claim, an eternal idea.

That will mean a long, hard slog that will require Israel's government to have the will and the political room it needs to avoid folding to pressure to take a hostage deal, even if that means victory for Hamas. They also need the United States to have the patience and the will not to blame it on the Jewish state because of presidential impatience to get the war over soon.

For all that the trust that Trump has earned from the pro-Israel community and his obvious feelings of goodwill towards the Jewish state, that may be something he isn't capable of providing. That leaves open the possibility that his impatience will lead to the U.S. pushing, as it did in January, for a ceasefire hostage release agreement that will harm Israel's security and undermine American interests by strengthening Iran and terrorist groups that seek to destabilize the region.

This is a point of disagreement between the United States and Israel that is distinct from the one about negotiating with Iran. That contention is based on Jerusalem's belief that any deal with Tehran will be a bad one and Trump's not entirely unreasonable desire to exhaust all diplomatic alternatives before giving up and letting Israel deal with the problem of militarity.

It is possible to envision Trump feeling ill-used by the Iranians and eventually going along with Israel's desire to eliminate Iran's nuclear program, though it remains to be seen if he will stick to his demand or abandon them as Obama did. But on Gaza, Trump doesn't want to be on the hook for a war against Hamas that is likely to drag on for some time if it is to be finally defeated.

And that is true even if he doesn't labor under the same illusions about the Palestinians and their cheerleaders in the international community or buy into genocide blood libels against Israel. The result has been the daylight that Israel's critics are celebrating. If there is one thing that a century of conflict against the Palestinians has made clear, it is that they aren't giving up their fantasy of destroying the Jewish state. That is the ultimate forever warning.

If Trump wants to hold on to the title that he rightly earned in his first term as the most pro-Israel president to ever sit in the White House, then he's going to have to accept that supporting the Jewish state involves a recognition that this is one forever war from which neither Israel nor the United States can withdraw.

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