Benjamin Netanyahu interrupted an uncharacteristically long silence over the Iran conflict this week with a video commentary insisting he had \u201cfull coordination\u201d with Donald Trump, with whom he spoke \u201calmost daily\u201d.<\/p>\n
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<\/a>. Such is the scepticism over Netanyahu\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n \u201cHe is doing so much talking about how great the relationship is that it makes me rather concerned about how much tension there is,\u201d said Dahlia Scheindlin, an American-Israeli political consultant and pollster. \u201cI wouldn\u2019t be surprised, as the war is clearly going very poorly from all perspectives related to the original goals.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s flagship foreign policy achievement.<\/p>\n Netanyahu helped coax Trump to walk out of that deal in 2018, which in turn led to a ramping up of Iran\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>, Nicol\u00e1s Maduro.<\/p>\n \u201cNetanyahu, being the conman that he is, used Venezuela as an example,\u201d Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli diplomat, said. \u201cHe said to him: \u2018Look what you did in Venezuela. It was painless. It was effortless. It was beautiful. You changed the regime.\u2019<\/p>\n \u201cThen 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,\u201d Pinkas said.<\/p>\n With the help of the Mossad director, David Barnea, Netanyahu portrayed the Tehran regime as an overripe fruit ready to drop from the branch.<\/p>\n \u201cHe told Trump: \u2018The 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,\u2019\u201d Pinkas said. \u201c\u2018What we could do together is bring down the regime \u2026 think that together, jointly, we can win the war in three, four days.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n 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 \u2013 and US administration hawks including the defence secretary, Pete Hegseth \u2013 prevailed, arguing that Iran\u2019s Revolutionary Guards were overrated and would not have the strength to hit back.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cSome 30 days into the war, by the end of March there were signs that Trump was very disappointed with Netanyahu,\u201d Pinkas said.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n There are varying accounts of what is on the table in the peace talks, but there has been no mention of Iran\u2019s missile arsenal or its use of regional proxies, both of which are Israeli priorities.<\/p>\n When Trump did mention Netanyahu, it was mostly to tell him off. After Israel bombed Iran\u2019s South Pars gasfield<\/a>, for example, Trump said he had told Netanyahu \u201cnot to do that\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cOn occasion, he\u2019ll do something, and if I don\u2019t like it \u2026 we\u2019re not doing that any more,\u201d the president said.<\/p>\n When the ceasefire was agreed, Trump initially sided with Netanyahu\u2019s interpretation that Lebanon was excluded and then, with the truce in jeopardy, swiftly reversed himself and made Israel follow suit.<\/p>\n \u201cIsrael will not be bombing Lebanon any longer. They are PROHIBITED from doing so by the U.S.A. Enough is enough!!!\u201d he said in a social media post on 17 April, in an unprecedented public rebuke to Netanyahu.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Those strikes have yet to materialise, however, and the Trump administration has sought to downplay the significance of recent exchanges of fire<\/a> around the strait of Hormuz.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cPresident Trump is going to want to have this war more or less behind him by the time he goes to Beijing,\u201d Shapiro said. \u201cOtherwise, he will be in the position of a supplicant seeking Xi Jinping\u2019s help to get them to convince Iran to accept his terms or to make concessions they haven\u2019t made. And that\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n