Israel’s Relations with the US Have Deepened |
There has never been an American president like Donald Trump regarding his relationship with Israel.
No less a figure than Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel who has worked closely with Trump during his two presidential terms, has repeatedly hailed him as the most pro-Israel president in history.
This is quite a claim, but it happens to be true.
Trump was the first US president to join forces with Israel to wage a war.
Last June, during the close of Israel’s 12-day war with Iran, Trump ordered B-2 stealth bombers to strike three Iranian nuclear sites — Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan — in Operation Midnight Hammer.
Trump, in a speech from the White House, said that the objective of the air raid was “the destruction of Iran’s nuclear enrichment capacity and a stop to the nuclear threat.” Calling the strikes “a spectacular military success,” he claimed that the facilities had been “completely and totally obliterated.”
Roughly eight months later, following Netanyahu’s visit to the White House on February 11, Trump agreed to mount joint US-Israeli air strikes in Iran. Netanyahu had convinced Trump and most of his advisors that Iran was weak and ripe for regime change.
Slightly more than two weeks later, on February 28, the two allies, in an unprecedented display of cooperation, struck Iran, killing its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and more than 40 of Iran’s top commanders in one fell swoop.
For the next 39 days, the US and Israeli air forces worked collaboratively day and night, bombing military command and control centers, the offices of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, nuclear sites, missile storage depots and missile launchers, weapons production factories and critical infrastructure.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth hailed the joint fighting force, saying that Iran’s “worst nightmare” had some to pass as it confronted “the Stars and Stripes and the Star of David.”
That level of coordination would have been “unthinkable” only a few years ago, former US diplomat Dennis Ross told The New York Times.
Although Israel has been its key ally in the Middle East for several decades, the United States was loath to carry out military missions with it until last June.
In 1991, during the first Gulf War, US President George H. Bush asked Israel to refrain from launching retaliatory air strikes after 39 Iraqi Scud missiles crashed into Israeli cities. Bush feared that Israeli involvement would jeopardize US interests in the Arab world. Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir deferred to Bush’s request.
Twelve years later, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld advised Israel not to “get involved” in the planned US invasion of Iraq. Israel, yet again, stayed out of the war.
No such imperatives troubled Trump when he and Netanyahu conferred at the White House this past February. Trump was bent on denying Iran, Israel’s arch enemy, a nuclear arsenal.
Trump had already laid the ground work for an armed clash with Iran.
During his first term, he unilaterally withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement co-signed by Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany — and imposed crippling economic sanctions on the Iranian regime.
Furthermore, Trump moved Israel into the US Central Command, which is........