Is the US really preparing to drop Israel?
With relations between Israel and the US fraught, some are speculating if the real special relationship may be at an end For many in Israel
With relations between Israel and the US fraught, some are speculating if the real special relationship may be at an end For many in Israel, it appears inevitable that US President Donald Trump will re-evaluate Washington’s ties with Israel, an alliance that has helped sustain the Israeli military since its formation in 1948 from a myriad of Zionist militias. Currently, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is embarked on a hazardous course for his political survival, potentially facing prison due to his ongoing corruption charges and a general election that could throw him out of office later this year. Between Washington’s need to secure an agreement with Iran that includes Lebanon – which Israel has been bombing since 2023 – and the Israeli public’s desire to see that war continuing, Netanyahu is faced with one of the most challenging periods in his four-decade political career. After reports of frictions between the US and Iran during the previous war on Iran in June 2025, a year later relations appear to have deteriorated further due to disagreements on how to proceed with Tehran. Iran has made the end of Israel’s war in southern Lebanon a key demand in its negotiations with Washington on an eventual peace deal between the two countries, setting the US and Israel on course for major disagreements. Last month, an alleged leak of a phone call—not denied by the White House—saw Trump, apparently desperate to end the war with Iran, berate Netanyahu for refusing to halt attacks on Lebanon. Trump reportedly called Netanyahu “crazy” and accused him of ingratitude, telling him that he would already be in jail if it had not been for the president’s intervention.
“Everybody hates you now. Everybody hates Israel because of this,” he allegedly told Netanyahu. In an interview with Axios last week, Trump said that Netanyahu “knows who the boss is” – an admission that relations between the two leaders are tense. In a media conference in June, JD Vance described Trump as the only world leader presently sympathetic to Israel. He also pointedly warned Israeli ministers criticising the prospective US-Iran deal that “two-thirds of the defensive weapons that have protected [their] homeland have been built by American hands and paid for by American tax dollars”. Trouble in MAGA-land Recent polls show that not only is the US public turning against Israel, but there is also strong scepticism among certain sections of Trump’s right-wing populist ‘Make America Great Again’ (MAGA) movement. Defectors from MAGA, such as high-profile loyalist Marjorie Taylor Greene, have been unsparing in their criticism of US support for Israel. Among the most vocal critics in the right-wing political sphere is former television host Tucker Carlson, who in late June said Trump had finally realised that Israel marked the greatest threat to his administration. Opening his podcast, Carlson accused Israel of having “cajoled, convinced, threatened” Trump into attacking Iran as a pretext to launch “another war against a neighbour, Lebanon”. Daniel Byman, of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and a professor at Georgetown University in Washington, said that while Trump heads traditionally the most pro-Israel party in the US establishment, the Republicans, he also has options in dealing with Israel. “I believe President Trump has considerable flexibility.
The BriefWire