Netanyahu's quiet visit to Washington highlights Trump's frustration with the leader

Netanyahu's quiet visit to Washington highlights Trump's frustration with the leader

Submitted by
Yasmine El-Sabawi
on
Tue, 07/28/2026 - 18:24

Visit comes ahead of must-win elections for Netanyahu, and Trump's very public rebukes of the Israeli leader

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meets with US President Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, on 28 July 2026 (Israeli government press office handout via AFP)

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Israel is just under three months out from the most consequential election for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to date. 

To win, he will need to be seen as the only candidate fully endorsed by US President Donald Trump, and the one who can best manage the critical lifeline that the US-Israeli relationship provides. 

So when one of Israel's loudest advocates - who also happened to be a personal friend and loyal ally of the US president - died suddenly earlier this month, Netanyahu seized the chance to be in Washington.

"The visit would not be taking place, had Lindsey Graham not passed," Aaron David Miller, a former adviser at the US State Department on Palestinian-Israeli negotiations and now senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Middle East Eye. 

While no foreign leader other than Netanyahu has had more facetime with the US president since he assumed power in January 2025, Tuesday's 90-minute meeting at the White House likely carried additional urgency, given it followed a series of sit-downs Trump has held with regional stakeholders, including Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa in Ankara, to Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi and Lebanese President Joseph Aoun in Washington. 

'[Trump] has more leverage over this Israeli prime minister than any of his predecessors have ever had'

- Aaron David Miller 

"It's too much facetime with the Arabs," Nizar Farzakh, a former adviser to Palestinian leadership in Ramallah and now lecturer at the George Washington University, told MEE. 

"Only Netanyahu wants the war [in Iran]. Everybody - literally everybody else - does not want escalation. So I guess he's coming to fix what all the others have ruined."

The Netanyahu-Trump meeting was closed to reporters, suggesting there may be more disagreements to iron out between the two leaders than there are successes to boast about, Miller said. 

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt characterised the discussion as "positive and productive", and in a social media video of Netanyahu addressing Israeli reporters, he called the meeting "excellent" and "not just lip service".

"One of the best conversations I've ever had with a president of the United States, our friend Donald Trump," he said. 

Fraught personal relations

But Trump himself has sounded less than pleased with Netanyahu's behaviour of late, telling Fox News earlier on Tuesday that Netanyahu wants him to keep attacking Iran when he may no longer want to. 

"There are reports now that Netanyahu is going to talk to you about... intel indicat[ing] that Iran is actively constructing and fortifying Pickaxe Mountain. How will we respond?" a Fox News presenter asked the US president during a phone interview.

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"Well, I don't need Bibi to tell me that. Bibi is telling me that because he wants me to stay involved. I mean, I don't necessarily [want to]," Trump responded.

"I heard Bibi announce that [and] I said, 'Why don't you just tell it to me? Why do you have to announce it to the world?' I know exactly what's going on at Pickaxe. It's not a big problem. We took out their nuclear sites, and we'll have to take out Pickaxe if we don't make a deal."

Farzakh said Netanyahu's return to hammering the nuclear issue and framing the remaining Iranian energy facilities as a threat is "precisely... that he has very little to show on Gaza and on Lebanon". 

"I think Trump is wondering if Netanyahu is going to be prime minister after the coming few months," he added. "I think he's hoping to get rid of Netanyahu because he's just so unreliable."

On Monday, a reporter asked the president aboard Air Force One how he would handle Netanyahu's disapproval of the US potentially resuming the sales of F-35 fighter jets to Turkey. 

"Turkey's been a great ally for me. You know, I think he's done a very good job. Did a good job with Syria. He's a friend of mine," Trump responded, referencing Erdogan. 

"Nobody tells me what we should be selling. And now Turkey has been a tremendous ally for me... Turkey's not a big fan of Israel. You know that, right?"

And back in May, when pressed on whether Israel could both literally and figuratively torpedo the tentative deal to end open hostilities with Iran, Trump said of Netanyahu: "He'll do whatever I want him to do."

Miller, who spent 24 years working under both Republican and Democratic administrations, said there has not been a more impactful wartime partner to the US than Israel since World War Two.

At the same time, Trump "has said things about an Israeli prime minister that no American -  none of his predecessors - has ever said... He has mocked the prime minister. He has allowed his profanity-laced phone conversations to be leaked. He opened a dialogue with Hamas without Israel's knowledge. He did a deal with the Houthis over and above the objections of the government of Israel," Miller recounted.

"And right now, 90 days before the most consequential election in Benjamin Netanyahu's political life, which could involve his personal freedom, [Trump] has more leverage over this Israeli prime minister than any of his predecessors have ever had at any given moment."

Netanyahu has been embroiled in corruption cases in Israel since 2019. He could face up to 10 years in prison if found guilty, though he denies all wrongdoing. 

'War criminal'

The Israeli leader's Monday arrival at the White House guest residence and subsequent trip to dinner at the Four Seasons hotel in the Georgetown district drew crowds of protesters along the motorcade route, waving Palestinian flags amid shouts of "war criminal". 

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This remains one of the very few countries in the world that Netanyahu can travel to safely. 

But nearly half of Americans still think he should be arrested, new polling conducted by The Economist and YouGov showed on Tuesday.

Among 1,559 US citizens surveyed, 49 percent said Netanyahu should be taken into custody, while 27 percent said he should not. 

Twenty-three percent of respondents said they don't know. 

Among those who said he should be arrested, the majority of respondents were under the age of 50 and non-white. 

A separate YouGov poll from last week conducted with CBS News found that 67 percent of Americans want the US-Israeli war on Iran to end immediately. The vast majority of them are under the age of 30. 

Among Democratic voters, 92 percent want an end to the war. Among Independents, 73 percent of respondents said the same, while among Republicans, the figure was just 30 percent. 

"Nothing is working with Iran. Iran keeps getting stronger," Farzakh told MEE. "[Trump is] way in over his head with this, and he's trying to find an exit strategy."

That strategy is unlikely to come to fruition if Netanyahu's re-election bid depends on casting himself as "Mister Security," Farzakh noted.

The Israeli prime minister is next expected in the US for the United Nations General Assembly in September. 

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