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Officials in Israel are starting to realize that President Donald Trump might not be as easy to deal with as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government thought. After all, the Netanyahu camp was absolutely thrilled when Trump won the election. During his first term, he won a lot of battles for Israel’s right side and, to be honest, for most of Israeli society.

He agreed that Jerusalem was Israel’s capital and moved the U.S. embassy there. This ended a long-running trend of countries trying to tell another country where its capital should be located. Then the US recognized Israeli control over the Golan Heights, which Israel took from Syria in 1967 and officially added to its borders in 1981.

He was in charge of the Abraham Accords, which are the 2020 peace agreements between Israel and the UAE, Bahrain, and other Middle Eastern countries. These deals were huge steps forward, especially the UAE deal, which gave Israelis not only official recognition but also a warm welcome without asking for any clear concessions in return.

Many people on the Israeli right saw Trump as their ideal president because he didn’t care about Palestinian statehood, didn’t care about human rights criticism, didn’t care about West Bank settlements, and mostly agreed with their “might makes right” view of the world. Those days may be over, though.

How fast things seem to change. Trump told the world not long ago that he and Netanyahu were “on the same side of every issue.” Now, he’s not going to Israel on his first trip to the Middle East as president, and he’s said to have grown apart from his once-close friendship with his Israeli counterpart.

The cracks in that relationship aren’t quite as new as they seem, though, if you look closely. When Netanyahu went to the White House at the last minute in April, mostly to try to talk Trump out of putting a big new tax on Israel, Trump seemed to surprise him by saying that the US was starting to talk with Iran again about nukes.

Netanyahu sat next to him and looked shocked. Since then, there have been three rounds of talks that seem to be leading to a deal that sounds a lot like the Iran deal that was made when Barack Obama was president: Iran would give up highly enriched material, keep doing lower-level enrichment while having it checked, and get relief from sanctions.

The shocks kept happening. This week, not long after a Houthi missile hit the grounds of Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport, which made most airlines stop going to Israel, Trump announced that the U.S. and the Houthis had reached a deal to stop attacking the group in Yemen. In return, the Houthis agreed not to attack ships going to the Suez Canal through the Red Sea.

Not part of the deal? Any promise from the Houthis to stop shooting at Israel. When it happened, just two days after what happened at the airport, Israelis felt like Trump had once again let them down.

Even though Trump was unpredictable in Gaza, he now doesn’t seem to believe that Israel wants an endless war.

Indeed, his messages have been, at best, broken. A few days before he took office, he was thought to have put pressure on Netanyahu to sign a peace deal with Hamas that would keep the fighting going while all Israeli prisoners were freed.

Then, just for fun, Trump came up with the crazy idea of getting rid of all the Palestinians in Gaza and having the U.S. “buy” the land.

After letting Netanyahu restart military operations, he now wants a quick, decisive win that he can claim as his own. This is a very different goal from the military occupation that the government officially started pursuing this week.

The idea of a never-ending war might help Netanyahu’s weak government stay together, but it doesn’t fit with Trump’s story.

To be frank, it looks like the Israeli right got him wrong. They were ready to ignore the fact that Trump’s love for Israel wasn’t based on a real personal connection like the kind that former President Bill Clinton seemed to have. He never called himself a Zionist like former Vice President Joe Biden did when he got to Tel Aviv in 2022.

But, unlike Biden, he never tried to stop Israel from sending troops into Gaza. So when Trump took back power, Netanyahu probably thought he would get a free pass.

He may have thought he could control the notoriously unstable former president, just like many people say he did in 2018 when he convinced Trump to back out of the Iran nuclear deal. In hindsight, Trump may have just been eager to break up a deal that Barack Obama had made.

One interesting fact lies at the heart of all of these events: Trump is not past President Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt said, “Be quiet and carry a big stick.” Trump does the opposite. He talks very loudly and often in a silly way, but despite all his bravado, he is mostly against war.

His fights are over trade. Deals that let him claim win without firing a shot are very important to him.

There have been no public announcements of a split, but the signs are getting stronger. Trump is also not going to Israel. In a shocking change, he seems ready to go ahead with a strategic defense deal with Saudi Arabia even though he doesn’t want things to get better with Israel first.

After Biden made normalization a must, Trump seems to have dropped it. No one in Israel wanted that to happen: The holy grail of Israeli policy is to get along with Saudi Arabia. It would be good for Israel’s economy and give the Arab world one last chance to stop opposing the Jewish state.

It’s hard to tell what Trump will do next; he could always change his mind. But there are signs that he has seen that Netanyahu, who has to meet the demands of his far-right coalition partners for maximum war goals, can’t or won’t give Saudi Arabia what it needs to make a political breakthrough.

Trump doesn’t think it’s worth putting off a deal with Riyadh that would be a big win for his foreign policy if normalization is off the table because of Netanyahu.

This would be a terrible loss for Israel. Israel should be taking advantage of this long-awaited chance to build a relationship with their powerful neighbor, but it looks like they’re wasting it to keep Netanyahu’s government together.

The Israeli people can only watch as the cost of that goal rises: hostages and troops’ deaths, a struggling economy, and missed diplomatic opportunities.

Trump seems to understand, maybe even better than many Israelis, that the government in Jerusalem is not really a friend of the United States.

The Israeli people are mostly that way. Though, Netanyahu’s government is not only against American interests, but also Israeli ones. This is because they are focused on staying in power and are loyal to radicals.