This is especially true on a highly emotive and political issue like Israel, where candidates can get carried away and tend to promise more than they can and may want to deliver. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, after all, both promised to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, and they ultimately decided it wasn’t worth the risk. And even in Trumpland, that walkback is occurring: In a recent interview with the Israeli newspaper Hayom—his first as president—Trump sounded like any of his predecessors: dodging the embassy issue and criticizing settlements as not good for peace. [...]
Other, more sober voices are also being heard— Jordan’s King Abdullah, who wasn’t scheduled to meet with the president but did before the settlements statement was issued, may have weighed in on the Jerusalem issue. Trump and his team have also held a series of calls with Gulf leaders who probably delivered the same message. We don’t know what role, if any, Secretaries of Defense and State James Mattis and Rex Tillerson have played. But in the case of Mattis, who has strongly opposed the settlements enterprise—even opining that it could lead to apartheid—we can expect red, not green lights on early moves that are gratuitously “pro-Israeli.” And as an oilman with long experience in the Gulf and Saudi Arabia, Tillerson is also likely to urge restraint when it comes to adopting positions that might undermine U.S. equities with key Arab states. [...]
Netanyahu fears not a hollowed out and discredited Labor Party or some popular ex-general, but an emboldened and empowered Israeli right. To guard his right flank, in 2015 he assembled the most right-wing coalition in Israel’s history. In so doing, he solved a short-term political problem and created a governing problem: Far from leading it, let alone dictating to it, the prime minister finds himself at times a veritable hostage, the most moderate member of his own Likud Party and vulnerable to a challenge from the right. His current nemesis is Naftali Bennett, the education minister and leader of Jewish Home, an avowedly pro-settler party that rejects a two-state solution. Bennett, a charismatic tech executive who once served as Netanyahu’s chief of staff, aspires to lead the Israeli right, if not the country itself. And given the unpredictability of coalition politics, Netanyahu’s strategy has never been to confront the opposition’s hardline pro-settlement policies but to try to delay, coopt or simply endorse them.
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