In a podcast appearance last month, historian Adam Tooze described how the Chinese government assigned a state think tank with the task of tracking US President Donald Trump on a daily basis to understand him — then gave up early in his current term.

Instead, Tooze told the New York Times podcast, the Chinese have resorted to “these really crude, psychologizing rules of thumb about what makes him tick. So far, it’s kind of worked well for them.”

Over the past few weeks, Israel has turned into one big version of that Chinese think tank. The entire country is consumed with one question: Will Trump attack Iran, or won’t he?

It’s a fixed feature on the nightly newscasts. It’s become the prime consideration in planning, or deciding whether to cancel, family vacations. In Tel Aviv, where talking about real estate is a constant, friends banter over whether they have a basement shelter, a reinforced room in their apartment — or contingency plans to abscond to relatives in the suburbs whose house is more accommodating during a potential regional war.

This isn’t the first time such talk has swept across Israel. Predicting whether or not there’s going to be a war is something of a pastime. The difference here is that the question doesn’t turn on our own government, or even on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Instead, the answer depends on the most powerful, and unpredictable, man in the world.

So while other things are going on in the news here — it is, after all, an election year in the aftermath of a war, with the prime minister on trial — the main story in Israel hinges on reading Donald Trump.

That’s even more the case as Netanyahu heads to Washington, DC, for a flash meeting with the US president, and as the American military builds up its forces in the Middle East and sends its envoys to negotiate with the Iranians in Oman.

Israelis already know what Netanyahu will say; he has communicated that he’ll call for curbs on Iran’s ballistic missile program and its support for........

© The Times of Israel