Netanyahu Will Never Have a Better Moment to Claim Victory

Set aside, if you can, the jaw-dropping spectacle of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu handing a Nobel prize nomination to Donald Trump over dinner Monday night. This, from a leader who is wanted for alleged war crimes in Gaza, to a US president whose main peace-making efforts to date have served only to facilitate Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s bombing of Iran. In the courts of powerful monarchs, unhinged flattery was always a tradable coin.

And yet, peace is indeed Netanyahu’s to give. He has the power not just to end the bloodshed in Gaza, but to enable a much broader settlement for Israel’s place in the Middle East that could mark out a place in history for both men. All he needs to do is give the order. All Trump has to do is persuade him.

Netanyahu is in Washington this week to talk about yet another US-backed ceasefire deal for the strip. On offer is a 60-day truce and the release of more hostages to make room for talks on a more durable agreement, at a time when a wider regional deal that tames the threat from Iran and normalizes Israel’s position among Arab neighbors is there for the taking. It’s this more lasting peace that should be the test of success for the Israeli premier’s visit to Washington.

On Monday, I spoke about the trip with the heads of two prominent organizations that represent very different strands of American Jewish thought. Both say this could prove a turning point for Israel. Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, worries Trump might be able to press Netanyahu to change course. Jeremy Ben-Ami, who heads the more moderate J Street, worries that he won’t. Because if they agree on anything, it’s that the 47th American president is the only person on earth with the leverage to do it.

The challenge is the same as the one that tripped up an almost identical US-led ceasefire effort earlier this year. Netanyahu sees Hamas’s horrific terrorist attack of Oct. 7, 2023, as creating a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to crush prospects for the creation of a Palestinian state on lands that he, Klein and many like them consider historically Jewish. This belief goes deep. He has opposed efforts to negotiate a two-state settlement with the Palestinians throughout his political career. It was also the life’s work of his father, Benzion Netanyahu, an academic who opposed even the 1947 partition that enabled Israel’s creation a year later.

To end the Palestinian question by displacement, rather than by negotiation, is also the single-minded obsession of the extreme right-wing coalition partners on which Netanyahu depends for his political survival. And last week, 15 of his own Likud party’s 32 legislators wrote an open letter asking him to annex the West Bank to Israel by July 27.

Klein is terrified that Trump may prod Netanyahu into abandoning that cause by making peace in Gaza and agreeing to a negotiated settlement with Iran. These are Nazi regimes that can’t negotiated with, only destroyed, in Klein’s view. The same goes for the Palestinian Authority, he says.

“They have forfeited their right to run Gaza,” Klein told me, speaking not of Hamas but the wider Palestinian population. “Ninety percent of Gaza Palestinians support Hamas, supported what Hamas did on Oct. 7. Like 85 to 90% of Germans supported the Nazis. It is the same problem.”

I find these beliefs misguided, if not dangerous, as does Ben-Ami. His fear is that Netanyahu will agree to a ceasefire only because he fully intends to break it on expiry. He agrees there is a huge win available for Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, if he will only take it. Yet he worries that the combination of Netanyahu’s convictions and fear of government collapse will dissuade him.

Ben-Ami’s reasoning is as rooted in concern for Israel’s long-term security as Klein’s. “Put aside morality, put aside Jewish values, this is not a successful long-term strategy for the state of Israel,” he said, referring to any policy for Gaza and the West Bank that ultimately relies on Palestinian expulsion. “The potential for regional normalization and integration will be off the table, the Jewish diaspora will be horrified and distance themselves from the Jewish state.” Israel would end up isolated, vulnerable and permanently insecure.