Netanyahu visits Trump again amid Gaza offensive

BarcelonaIsraeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meets with Donald Trump for the second time on Monday. while intensifying the offensive against Gaza. When Netanyahu visited Trump in February (he was the first foreign leader to be received at the White House during the Republican's second term), his administration was in intensive care. Its far-right allies, who promote a messianic version of the Hebrew state incompatible with democracy, had abandoned it for having agreed to the truce with Hamas. Furthermore, the ultra-Orthodox parties were up in arms against plans to eliminate their exemption from military service. It was far from clear whether Netanyahu would be able to stay in power, and this visit became a lifeline. Trump, who had sponsored the truce and had boasted about his return to the White House, gave him the green light to break the ceasefire, replenished Israeli arsenals, and made it clear, with the Amnesty International video—of the two of them swimming in a hotel pool in the Gaza Strip.

When Netanyahu returned to Israel, he made the point: if you bring me down, we'll have to call elections and lose this golden opportunity to make Trump's plan for Gaza a reality. The longest-serving prime minister in Israel's history survived again, he managed to the approval of the budget in the Parliament and consolidated his blog, despite the fact that protests in solidarity with the Israeli hostages held in Gaza continued in the streets, accusing him of leading them to certain death.

Now Netanyahu returns to the White House, on an impromptu visit this week while on an official trip to Hungary, where his ally Viktor Orbán has bypassed the obligation to detain him so that the International Criminal Court can try him for war crimes. He is cornered again, this time for judicial rather than political reasons. The police and judicial scandals involving his closest advisors continue to grow. The most heartbreaking aspect is what the Israeli press has dubbed Qatargate, in which three members of the prime minister's press team are accused of receiving bribes from Doha to give Qatar a positive image and wage a media campaign against Egypt. These bribes continued with the Gaza war, in which both Qatar and Egypt acted as mediators.

Netanyahu has reacted violently to the investigations: he has dismissed Ronen Bar, the head of the Shin Bet, the domestic intelligence services, and has begun the process of dismissing the attorney general, Gali Baharav-Miara, who was in charge of the judicial procedure, while accelerating the reform of the justice system to politically control the appointment. The nervousness in the prime minister's office has reached such a point that he called the investigated advisors "hostages," a slap in the face to the families of the 59 Israelis kidnapped in Gaza for 18 months.

'Bibileaks' and tariffs

The other scandal dogging Netanyahu dates back to the fall of 2024 and is known as Bibileaks, or the Bibi leaks, as the prime minister is popularly known. Two members of his office's press team, two defense officials, and a reservist are in pretrial detention accused of having spread false information to foreign media outlets—the German tabloid Picture and the British Jewish Chronicle– according to which the then Hamas leader, Yahya Sinwar, was trying to flee Gaza with the hostages for the Philadelphia Corridor, on the border with EgyptNetanyahu relied on these reports to justify why Israeli troops could not withdraw from the corridor, torpedoing the months-long truce with Hamas. The leak came shortly after six Israeli hostages were killed in a failed rescue attempt, and the British publication eventually withdrew it due to its lack of credibility.

In both cases, in addition to the officials' actions being illegal, Israel's national security was compromised for the benefit of Netanyahu's political survival. If some of those now indicted decide to incriminate him, Netanyahu himself could find himself charged.

Another issue on the table will be the tariffs that Trump has also imposed on his ally. Israel hoped to escape the trade war as the United States' preferred partner, and to make things easier for Trump, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich announced before the deadline that Israel was eliminating all import duties on American products.

While awaiting the joint press conference between the two leaders, Netanyahu has a new opportunity to set the domestic political (and judicial) agenda if Trump throws him another lifeline. It won't be too difficult for the American—who sanctioned the International Criminal Court prosecutor for issuing the arrest warrant against Netanyahu—to back the Israeli president against the judicial system that defies him. What is unclear, for now, is what Trump will ask in return.