Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s Likud party has scrapped a planned election campaign centered on his close relationship with US President Donald Trump, concluding that the once-prized alliance has become a liability rather than a vote-winner, i24 News reported.
The decision was made several days ago, according to the report, as Trump finalized the terms of an Iran deal that has landed badly across much of the Israeli political spectrum. Likud strategists assessed that showcasing Netanyahu’s bond with the American president would neither draw new voters nor improve his standing at the ballot box in the election expected later this year, and pulled the messaging accordingly.
The retreat marks a remarkable reversal. For years, Netanyahu’s rapport with Trump was treated as one of his signature electoral assets, proof to Israeli voters that the long-serving premier alone could manage the relationship with Israel’s indispensable ally. Now that same closeness is being shelved as a vulnerability, a casualty of both an unpopular deal and a president who has spent recent weeks publicly savaging the man he once stood beside at Mar-a-Lago.
Trump’s criticism has grown caustic and personal. In an interview last week he confirmed having called Netanyahu “[expletive] crazy” during a phone call, and told Axios that he had informed the Israeli leader he has “no [expletive] judgment,” a rebuke tied to an Israeli airstrike on Beirut that Trump complained had jeopardized his Iran agreement. At the Group of Seven summit on Tuesday, Trump declared that Israel would not exist without him, faulted its prolonged campaign against Hezbollah, and floated the idea that Syria, not Israel, should deal with the group in Lebanon.
The Iran deal sits at the center of Likud’s recalculation. Signed electronically this week and set for formal signing in Switzerland on Friday, the memorandum opens a 60-day nuclear negotiating window, reopens the Strait of Hormuz, and, by Iranian accounts, eases sanctions and frees frozen assets, terms Israeli officials and opposition leaders alike have condemned as leaving Tehran’s nuclear and missile capabilities largely intact. Israel was reportedly kept out of the loop as the deal came together, amid American concerns the details would leak. For Netanyahu to campaign on his Trump ties while Trump hands Iran a deal Israelis distrust would be to advertise his proximity to the very outcome voters resent.
The election must be held by October 27, and while the date has not been officially set, Likud confirmed last week that Netanyahu will run, declaring that he will compete – and win. Trump himself has muddied even that, musing in a recent interview that it is an open question whether Netanyahu will seek another term. Polling has been grim: a survey by the Israel Democracy Institute conducted in late May and early June found that 61 percent of Israelis, and 57 percent of Jewish Israelis, do not think Netanyahu should run at all.
Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving leader and in power almost continuously since 2009, faces an election shaping up as a referendum on his judgment, from the failures that preceded October 7 to his handling of the war’s end. He had hoped the Trump relationship would be part of his answer. His own party has now realized it is part of the problem.
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