Trump’s Gulf tour doesn’t bode well for Israel

Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor at POLITICO Europe.

When U.S. President Donald Trump won his reelection bid last year, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his aides were relieved.

Indeed, a President Kamala Harris would have been irksome — even potentially dangerous — for Bibi. He likely would have faced efforts to coerce him into a credible day-after plan for Gaza aimed at reviving the two-state solution — a bomb that would have blown apart his coalition government. And he would have had to deal with inevitable U.S. threats to cut off military aid, which could well have been acted on.

But with Trump back in the White House instead, Netanyahu and his aides knew the Israeli leader would gain a much freer hand in Gaza, and likely become even more unbound than he was with former U.S. President Joe Biden in office. And so it has proven: Netanyahu suffered no consequences for launching surprise airstrikes on Gaza and breaking the ceasefire with Hamas.

But that might be about to change.

As this column predicted back in November, it hasn’t all been smooth sailing. While Netanyahu did gain a freer hand in Gaza for a while, the two leaders don’t actually see eye-to-eye on much else. And with Trump’s three day-visit to the Gulf this week, that may become more apparent.

The U.S. president will first be stopping in Saudi Arabia for talks with the de facto Saudi ruler Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, followed by Qatar and then the United Arab Emirates. Glaringly, there is no visit to Israel on his schedule.

The tour is a repeat of his first trip as U.S. president back in 2017. And as per usual with Trump, all will be transactional. He’s looking for quick wins and multibillion dollar deals on oil and trade, and investment he can advertise back home, said Steven Cook, a Middle East expert with the Council on Foreign Relations.

Speaking to reporters at a media briefing last week, Cook noted the Saudi crown already announced his intention to invest $600 billion in the U.S. — possibly up to a trillion dollars — and both the Qataris and Emiratis are poised to ink deals as well. “It’s important to recognize that the president’s approach to foreign policy is heavily influenced by … his version of economic statecraft, which is to look towards the wealthy states in the Gulf and their very large sovereign wealth funds as sources of investment in the United States,” he explained.

But this presents Bibi with a problem.

For Trump, money speaks louder than anything else, and Gulf leaders will be looking for quid pro quos. Ending the war in Gaza will be high on their list — a war that Bibi, largely for the maintenance of his own rambunctious coalition and to avoid elections, is determined to continue, if not expand.

The Gulf countries have also underlined, time and again, the need for a return to two-state negotiations. Saudi leaders, for instance, have insisted there can be no “normalization” of relations with Israel without clear diplomatic movement in that direction.

Finally — and unlike in 2017 — these leaders want a nuclear deal with Iran, as they crave regional stability. They see an opportunity to establish some calm now that Iran’s proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah, have been sorely damaged and Tehran’s Syrian ally Bashar Assad has fallen. And while the Saudis had launched a war on the Iran-backed Houthis in 2015, this time around, they want the conflict in Yemen to end. Hence, their support for Trump’s deal to stop bombing Houthis in return for their promise to cease targeting U.S. shipping in the Red Sea.

The deal’s announcement blindsided Israel, coming just after a Houthi missile struck near Ben Gurion airport and triggered a flurry of international airlines to suspend flights to Israel. The development only added to Netanyahu’s growing frustrations, as the Israeli leader was recently rebuffed on two fronts during his trip to Washington — he left empty-handed, without an endorsement for an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities or a tariff deal.

Despite publicly gushing over Trump’s reelection, declaring it a “huge victory,” and “history’s greatest comeback,” Netanyahu knew it wouldn’t be a slam dunk to have him back in the Oval Office. As his aides noted last year, Bibi was aware Trump still harbored personal distrust toward him, after the Israeli leader became the first foreign leader to congratulate former President Joe Biden on his election win in 2020 — while Trump was still disputing the results.

Netanyahu and his advisers are also well aware that some in the MAGA camp, including Vice President JD Vance and special envoy Steve Witkoff, harbor doubts about any open-ended adventurism in the region that may risk entangling Washington — something demolishing Iran’s nuclear facilities would certainly do. “Our interest very much is in not going to war with Iran. It would be a huge distraction of resources. It would be massively expensive to our country,” Vance said in an interview before being sworn into office.

Even so, it appears Netanyahu still held out hope he could persuade Trump to strike at Iran — or that, at the very least, Trump allow him to do so. But with the Saudis on a promise worth billions of dollars, and the Qataris prepared to replace the aging Air Force One, this seems like a highly misplaced hope.

And ahead of Trump’s Gulf trip, the mood music from his team appears to be changing, with Witkoff abruptly criticizing Israel for prolonging the war in Gaza and arguing that a new ceasefire and hostage deal are the correct next steps. According to a report by Israel’s Channel 12, he told the families of Israeli captives still being held by Hamas: “We want to bring the hostages home, but Israel is not prepared to end the war.”

Even Trump himself has, for the first time, explicitly called for the war to end.

So, it seems Netanyahu may soon learn what Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy also found out the hard way: For Trump, Gaza and Ukraine are sideshows, and he doesn’t want them disrupting his bigger diplomatic agenda of resets and mega commercial deals.