According to three former and current Israeli officials cited by the Washington Post, a close aide to prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu told President-elect Donald Trump earlier this month that Israel is rushing to complete a cease-fire agreement in Lebanon as a “gift” to Trump as he is about to take office. The aide in question may be Israeli minister of strategic affairs Ron Dermer, who, in a recent U.S. visit, traveled first to Mar-a-Lago before meeting with Biden administration officials in Washington. Netanyahu himself stated two weeks ago that he had talked with Trump three times in the previous few days.
Israel Ziv, a former senior Israeli defense official with continued contacts in the security establishment, said about the impending agreement, “This was a deal that Netanyahu waited to give to Trump.”
An agreement on the timing of a Lebanon cease-fire would be the latest transaction in what has become a deeply rooted alliance between the Trump-led Republican Party and the Israeli Right—which these days has all the political power that matters in Israel.
The transaction follows a U.S. election in which Netanyahu’s policies involved repeatedly humiliating President Biden and continuing and escalating a multi-front Middle East war that almost certainly hurt the presidential campaign of Biden’s vice president, Kamala Harris.
The dynamics of this kind of transnational political alliance are clear. A U.S. president who conspicuously favors a foreign regime gives that regime an incentive to support the same president's re-election efforts. The support, in turn, gives that president all the more incentive to bestow still more favors on the regime.
In his first term, Trump gave multiple favors to Netanyahu’s government in return for nothing other than political support for Trump himself. For Trump, the favors were primarily a way of sustaining support among evangelical Christians, who had become a major part of his political base and who, for theological reasons involving a hoped-for second coming of the Messiah, favor Israeli expansionism. When Trump flouted international consensus and moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, he said he did so “for the evangelicals.”
Trump’s early appointments for his second term indicate he intends to continue the same course. His choice for ambassador to Israel is one of those evangelicals: former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, an ordained Baptist pastor who has said “there’s really no such thing as a Palestinian” and is all in favor of Israeli annexation of the West Bank. Trump’s choice for secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, is another evangelical who has said that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a “story of God’s chosen people” and has talked about how good it would be to get rid of the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem and build a new Jewish temple on the site.
A Trump-Netanyahu deal to delay a cease-fire in Lebanon until near the time Trump re-enters office evokes memories of two similar manipulations by U.S. presidential candidates or campaigns that were timed to the electoral calendar. One was Richard Nixon’s influence on South Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu to balk at a possible peace agreement that might have ended the Vietnam War before the 1968 U.S. presidential election, in which Nixon faced Vice President Hubert Humphrey. The other was the deal—which also involved Israel—that William Casey, chairman of Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign, secretly reached with Iran to delay the release of American hostages from Tehran and thereby hurt the re-election chances of Jimmy Carter.
The cost of Casey’s deal with Iran was extending the incarceration, under often trying conditions, of fifty-two innocent American officials. The cost of Israel’s gifting of a Lebanon cease-fire to Trump, rather than reaching such an agreement sooner, is a continuation of the death and destruction harming thousands of innocent Lebanese. The death toll in Lebanon has surpassed 3,400. The Israeli assault has recently escalated, making the cost to innocents all the greater, the longer that a cease-fire is delayed.
Among the costs of Trump’s return-favor deference to Israel on matters involving the Palestinians is the even greater carnage in the Gaza Strip. A further cost of the approach toward Palestine represented by appointments such as Huckabee and Hegseth is to allow religious scripture rather than U.S. national interests to drive part of U.S. foreign policy.
A potential check on any such deals between a U.S. political candidate or party and a foreign regime is the possibility of the party losing the next election, which ought to make the foreign regime hesitant to become too closely associated with it. In practice, this possibility has not provided much of a check. Not only did Nixon and Reagan win in the years the deals were struck, but also they both enjoyed landslide victories in 1972 and 1984, respectively. Besides, the principal concerns of South Vietnam in 1968 and Iran in 1980 were immediate wars—in Iran’s case, the war beginning with Iraq’s invasion of Iran in September 1980—that made the leaders of those countries unlikely to think beyond the next U.S. election cycle.
In the current case involving Israel, President Biden could have broken the pattern by curtailing U.S. arms exports to Israel but has not done so, even after Israel failed to meet the Biden administration’s own demands regarding humanitarian aid to Gaza. The reluctance to use U.S. leverage and instead to employ Biden’s bear hug strategy toward Netanyahu has been both a policy failure and a political failure that contributed to Harris’s election loss.
Netanyahu, thus, has been further conditioned to conclude that the United States will not be a constraint on whatever he does in Gaza, Lebanon, or elsewhere, no matter how much blood is shed in the process. One of the major American parties has given him whatever he wants, and the other party has been a feckless opposition on any issue involving Israel.
An Israeli government so conditioned might behave in ways that could become a problem even for a second-term President Trump. In this regard, Trump should reflect on Nixon’s experience with Thieu during the Vietnam War. Nixon was indebted to Thieu for blocking a peace agreement when a Democratic administration was in office. Feeling empowered, Thieu repeated his 1968 act in late 1972, when the peace negotiations he sabotaged were ones the Nixon administration was conducting. Thieu made new demands that led North Vietnam to retract earlier concessions, which broke down the negotiations. The war continued until late January of the following year and included the B-52 assault known as the Christmas bombings, intended as much to reassure Thieu as to pressure North Vietnam.
Paul R. Pillar retired in 2005 from a twenty-eight-year career in the U.S. intelligence community, in which his last position was as the National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia. Earlier, he served in a variety of analytical and managerial positions, including as chief of analytic units at the CIA, covering portions of the Near East, the Persian Gulf, and South Asia. His most recent book is Beyond the Water’s Edge: How Partisanship Corrupts U.S. Foreign Policy. He is also a contributing editor for this publication.
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