Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu landed in Washington on Sunday to become the first foreign leader to visit US President Donald Trump since his return to the White House.
Trump and his Middle East envoy Steven Witkoff have been credited with bringing the ceasefire in Gaza to fruition thanks to pressure on Netanyahu to accept the deal that was later revealed to have been on the table since December 2023.
Netanyahu is expected to meet with Witkoff on Monday, along with advisors to the president, before his Oval Office visit on Tuesday. He is reportedly spending the entire week in Washington before returning home on Saturday.
The trip comes as phase 1 of the ceasefire rolls out in Gaza, with weekly prisoner swaps that by 1 March should see 33 Israeli captives released from Gaza in return for just under 2,000 Palestinians released from Israeli prisons, many of whom have never been charged.
Netanyahu, whose government is comprised of influential, far-right elements – has long maintained that Israeli forces have “the right to return to fighting” after Hamas releases all the captives it has held since the 7 October 2023 attacks on southern Israel.
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In many ways, his own political survival in Israel depends on it, even if more than 47,000 people were killed in Gaza, the vast majority of them women and children.
So, was this highly-coveted visit for Netanyahu part of what he was offered in return for a Gaza truce?
“Coming to stand next to one of the most powerful people in the world is to show that he has not suffered a loss of international legitimacy,” Dylan Williams, vice president for government affairs at the Center for International Policy (CIP) told Middle East Eye.
“Nonetheless, I still think there are large swathes of Americans and certainly people around the world very upset about the fact that there seems to be no accountability for the Israeli government’s conduct in the Gaza war.”
A close but rocky relationship
The prime minister was the target of mass protests in Israel long before the war on Gaza, thanks to the judicial crisis triggered by Netanyahu’s attempts at judicial reforms, which were widely viewed as a ploy to weaken the country’s judiciary.
He is also facing corruption charges in a trial that began last month, and could face up to 10 years in prison if convicted.
If a lasting peace is achieved in Gaza, it is widely believed that Netanyahu will face accountability within Israel for failing to prevent the 7 October attacks.
Families of the Israeli captives in Gaza have slammed his rejections of the prisoner swaps that Hamas has repeatedly offered for more than a year, and now, along with his former defence minister Yoav Gallant, Netanyahu has an arrest warrant out for him from the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.
‘The president is very aware that the major obstacle to peace in the Middle East is Netanyahu’
-Bishara Bahbah, Arab Americans For Trump
Despite Trump’s close association with Netanyahu, conducted largely via his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, he has publicly derided the Israeli prime minister several times.
Trump famously said “fuck him” when Netanyahu embraced Joe Biden after the 2020 US presidential election.
Trump also revealed that he was irritated when Netanyahu pushed for the US assassination of a top Iranian commander in January 2020, but then backed out of the operation and still took credit for it.
“The president is very aware that the major obstacle to peace in the Middle East is Netanyahu,” Bishara Bahbah, who heads the Arab-Americans For Trump (AAFT) initiative, told MEE. “In fact, in a conversation which I cannot reveal, the president indicated that.”
Trump will likely want phase 2 of the truce to proceed, given he has promised “lasting peace in the Middle East”, Bahbah noted.
But Netanyahu did not come to Washington to leave empty-handed.
“You could anticipate maybe some new arms sales, new systems, maybe [something] that Israel’s wanted for a while,” Williams told MEE. “There’ll be some show of raising the bilateral relationship a notch.”
On Monday afternoon the Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump administration was “readying” a $1bn arms sale to Israel that would include bombs and other military hardware like armored bulldozers. The administration has asked congressional leaders to approve the transfers.
In the two weeks he’s been in office, Trump has already lifted the suspension of 2,000-pound “bunker-busting” bombs to Israel, and he has also removed the sanctions the Biden administration placed on some extremist Israeli settlers in the West Bank that have torched Palestinian homes.
“From my perspective, these are minor issues,” Bahbah said.
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What Trump will give Netanyahu, he added, is “not going to be the annexation of the West Bank. It’s not going to be the removal of Palestinians forcibly or voluntarily from the Gaza Strip. It’s going to be: ‘You want to live in peace and security? You want a Jewish state? Now is the time to do it.’ So [Trump] is going to offer a lasting peace, both for Israel and the neighbouring Arab countries.”
But observers have been concerned by Trump’s insistence on Egypt and Jordan taking in Palestinians and his proposal to “clean out” Gaza. An invitation to Jordan’s King Abdullah II to visit the White House later this month has many speculating that Trump will further pressure the monarch to take in Palestinians.
As with the prior administration, the Trump team is focused on Israeli normalisation with Arab nations, given the so-called Abraham Accords were initiated under the first Trump administration in 2020. Opening up Israeli-Saudi diplomacy remains the ultimate goal.
“Trump doesn’t want to be responsible for having to manage a hot war,” Williams said. “He, or at least Witkoff, understands that if the ceasefire doesn’t hold, then the plans they have for great strides on further normalisation between Israel and Arab states is unlikely to move forward.”
“Donald Trump sees himself as the ultimate deal maker, and he thinks there’s some wins to be had in this region,” he added.
The Iran Question
Historically, Netanyahu’s visits to the US have focused on ramping up economic and military pressure on Tehran, which Tel Aviv views as the main instigator of anti-Israel violence – or what Iran-backed groups see as resistance – across the region.
This visit will be no different, except that Trump appears to be adopting a different approach for his second term.
The president has recently made some pivotal appointments – and dismissed other diplomats – which seem to suggest he’s pursuing a path to some level of engagement that could lead to a deal with Iran.
Trump fired his former Iran envoy, Brian Hook, from a Wilson Center role appointed by the White House. Hook had led the “maximum pressure” campaign and was a known hawk in government circles.
Trump also withdrew the security detail assigned to his former national security advisor, John Bolton. Earlier that day, he called him a “warmonger” who helped “blow up the Middle East”.
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Netanyahu will likely make a push among congressional Republicans – most of whom are hardliners on Iran – that the US should partake in Israeli missile attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities.
“I think Netanyahu [will] actually try to wave Trump off from opening the door to diplomacy with Iran,” Williams told MEE.
“There has been a lot of panic among neo-conservatives and those who have wanted the US to press for regime change in Iran for decades with some of the rhetoric and personnel choices that the president has made,” he said.
“We are seeing him publicly denigrate and humiliate people associated with the ‘maximum pressure’ policy of his first administration, and seeing him appoint people who, while extremely conservative, have supported the notion of diplomacy with Iran in the past.”
Diplomatic outreach, ever since a China-brokered deal in 2023, has also been notable between longtime foes Saudi Arabia and Iran, and while the kingdom has made it clear that normalisation with Israel depends on a lasting ceasefire in Gaza, a war with Iran directly involving both Israel and the US may not bode well toward that goal – one which is already deeply unpopular in the Arab world.
“A lasting peace in the Middle East that is satisfactory to all parties… is what the president promised us as Arab Americans and Muslim Americans during the electoral campaigns,” Bahbah told MEE.
“I wanted to remind the president that he has a mandate from us as Americans,” he added.
“There are elections that will take place next year that will determine who will control both houses of Congress, and and we’re going to be there… Our votes are still needed.”
