The Guardian May 17, 2025
What Donald Trump did this week should terrify Benjamin Netanyahu. This is why

The president’s Middle East tour made one thing clear – he will betray his one-time ally in a heartbeat. He is already doing it.

It’s come to something when the Palestinians’ best hope for relief rests on a man who dreams of emptying Gaza of its people and turning the place into a beach resort. And yet the clearest, and perhaps only, way out of the current agony lies with Trump – and his growing impatience with an ever-more isolated Israel.

If this were any of Trump’s predecessors, you would be hailing the past week as confirmation of a radical, even epochal shift in U.S. foreign policy. But because it’s Trump, you can’t be sure it’s not a passing whim that will be undone in another equally drastic shift a matter of weeks, or even hours, from now.

Still, taken at face value, Trump’s tour of the past several days signifies a sharply different approach to the Middle East and especially to the country that, for decades, Washington saw as its chief ally in the region.

The most basic fact is also the most telling: the U.S. president did not even visit Israel. Opening a can of worms Never give anybody outside U.S.-Israel, Free ammunition Now, need to "Show Israel something very special.”

That could have been explained away but for what Trump said and did on his travels.