‘They
have screwed each other pretty badly’: tensions emerge in Netanyahu-Trump
alliance
Julian
Borger
in
Jerusalem
Israeli
PM says he has ‘full coordination’ with US president amid reports that
Washington no longer consults him
Sat 9 May
2026 07.00 BST
Benjamin
Netanyahu interrupted an uncharacteristically long silence over the Iran
conflict this week with a video commentary insisting he had “full coordination”
with Donald Trump, with whom he spoke “almost daily”.
The
insistence that all was rosy in the US-Israeli relationship followed weeks of
reports in the domestic press that Israel was no longer being consulted over
the Iran conflict, and even less over Pakistani-brokered peace talks. Such is
the scepticism over Netanyahu’s trustworthiness among the general public and
independent press that the immediate reaction among observers to his video
statement was speculation that the reality could be even worse than they had
imagined.
“He is
doing so much talking about how great the relationship is that it makes me
rather concerned about how much tension there is,” said Dahlia Scheindlin, an
American-Israeli political consultant and pollster. “I wouldn’t be surprised,
as the war is clearly going very poorly from all perspectives related to the
original goals.”
The US
president and the Israeli prime minister have long presented mirror images of
each other. They have both pioneered populist methods to dominate domestic
politics, cutting away at the constitutional underpinning of the very systems
that brought them to power, with little regard for past norms or constraints.
Since 28
February, when they brought the Gulf to a standstill with a devastating
US-Israeli assault on Iran, they have bound their fate together so tightly that
it will be very hard for either of them to unstick themselves from its legacy.
Netanyahu
spent decades trying to persuade a succession of US presidents to join Israel
in a war against the Islamic Republic. He went to unprecedented lengths for a
foreign leader wading into US domestic politics, in particular when it came to
undermining the multilateral nuclear deal with Iran of 2015, which had been
Barack Obama’s flagship foreign policy achievement.
Netanyahu
helped coax Trump to walk out of that deal in 2018, which in turn led to a
ramping up of Iran’s nuclear programme and accumulation of a stockpile of
highly enriched uranium sufficient for a dozen nuclear warheads. And in
February this year, according to extensive reporting in the US press, Netanyahu
was instrumental in convincing Trump that war was the only solution to the
threat, and one that would be easily won.
By then,
the Israeli leader was pushing at a door that was already ajar. The month
before, US forces had pulled off an extraordinary coup, swooping into Caracas
in a surprise raid and whisking away the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro.
“Netanyahu,
being the conman that he is, used Venezuela as an example,” Alon Pinkas, a
former Israeli diplomat, said. “He said to him: ‘Look what you did in
Venezuela. It was painless. It was effortless. It was beautiful. You changed
the regime.’
“Then he
begins bombarding Trump with intelligence data showing that Iran had expanded
its missile production and its missile-launching capabilities, and still has
450kg of highly enriched uranium,” Pinkas said.
With the
help of the Mossad director, David Barnea, Netanyahu portrayed the Tehran
regime as an overripe fruit ready to drop from the branch.
“He told
Trump: ‘The Iranian economy is in shambles. The people are on the precipice of
revolt. The Revolutionary Guards are losing control. Life in Iran is
intolerable. This is our time,’” Pinkas said. “‘What we could do together is
bring down the regime … think that together, jointly, we can win the war in
three, four days.’”
According
to multiple reports, US intelligence and military officials stressed the risk
that Iran could attack US allies in the Gulf and close the strait of Hormuz.
But Netanyahu – and US administration hawks including the defence secretary,
Pete Hegseth – prevailed, arguing that Iran’s Revolutionary Guards were
overrated and would not have the strength to hit back.
They were
proved wrong on every count. The Iranian people did not rise up, the regime did
not fall, the Kurds did not attack from the north-west and the Revolutionary
Guards were able to inflict withering damage on US bases and Gulf monarchies,
close the Hormuz strait and trigger a global economic crisis.
“Some 30
days into the war, by the end of March there were signs that Trump was very
disappointed with Netanyahu,” Pinkas said.
The
president stopped mentioning Israel and Netanyahu in his relentlessly upbeat
public statements about the war. When US negotiators started talking to their
Iranian counterparts and Pakistani mediators in the run up to a ceasefire
announcement on 8 April, Israel was left out of the loop. Israeli officials
complained to the press that they had to use their intelligence assets to try
to find out what was going on.
There are
varying accounts of what is on the table in the peace talks, but there has been
no mention of Iran’s missile arsenal or its use of regional proxies, both of
which are Israeli priorities.
When
Trump did mention Netanyahu, it was mostly to tell him off. After Israel bombed
Iran’s South Pars gasfield, for example, Trump said he had told Netanyahu “not
to do that”.
“On
occasion, he’ll do something, and if I don’t like it … we’re not doing that any
more,” the president said.
When the
ceasefire was agreed, Trump initially sided with Netanyahu’s interpretation
that Lebanon was excluded and then, with the truce in jeopardy, swiftly
reversed himself and made Israel follow suit.
“Israel
will not be bombing Lebanon any longer. They are PROHIBITED from doing so by
the U.S.A. Enough is enough!!!” he said in a social media post on 17 April, in
an unprecedented public rebuke to Netanyahu.
Since
this nadir, Israeli government officials have been briefing reporters that the
ceasefire cannot last and that a return to hostilities was inevitable. Last
weekend, there was a flurry of reporting in Israeli newspapers that intensive
US-Israeli military coordination had resumed at their earlier tempo, in
anticipation of further joint strikes.
Those
strikes have yet to materialise, however, and the Trump administration has
sought to downplay the significance of recent exchanges of fire around the
strait of Hormuz.
Daniel
Shapiro, a former US ambassador to Israel, said Trump is already looking beyond
Iran to his next major challenge: a 14 May trip to China and a critical meeting
with President Xi Jinping.
“President
Trump is going to want to have this war more or less behind him by the time he
goes to Beijing,” Shapiro said. “Otherwise, he will be in the position of a
supplicant seeking Xi Jinping’s help to get them to convince Iran to accept his
terms or to make concessions they haven’t made. And that’s a very weak position
to be in when he would rather focus on getting some of the Chinese-US economic
relations on a more stable ground.”
From
prior experience in the Gaza and Lebanon conflicts, Netanyahu can draw some
confidence that even if he is forced to accept a temporary peace deal that runs
counter to his own interests, Trump’s attention will inevitably be diverted
elsewhere, and Israel’s hands will be freed again.
“If Trump
reaches a deal, the Israelis will have to accept it for the time being, and
then perhaps they will revisit it to ‘mow the grass’, as they say, on the
missile programme or on the nuclear programme at some later time,” Shapiro
said.
Netanyahu
also knows there are limits to the extent Trump can free himself from their
geopolitical embrace. As Trump’s former national security adviser, John Bolton,
points out, Netanyahu can always make waves in US politics.
“I think
Trump’s jealous of Netanyahu because Netanyahu is one of the few people who can
generate more press than he does,” Bolton said, pointing out that despite
Trump’s imposition of a ceasefire, “he’s still giving Netanyahu a pretty free
hand in Lebanon.”
Pinkas,
who served as adviser to prime ministers Ehud Barak and Shimon Peres, argues
that strategic failure in the Iran war will also prove to be too powerful a
glue for Trump to dissolve quickly.
“The
problem Trump has is that if he lashes out at Netanyahu, if he expresses his
disillusionment or desperation, he basically admits he was led into this war,”
Pinkas said, adding that the conflict looks certain to hurt both men at the
ballot box.
Netanyahu
must hold an election by October, which by current polling would finally end
his premiership. The elections in the US are congressional, but they could
still render Trump a lame duck, at least in domestic politics.
“This
affects Netanyahu politically and this affects Trump politically,” Pinkas said.
“In other words, they have screwed each other pretty badly.”
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