Perhaps for the first time, real tension between the Netanyahu government and the Trump administration exists.
Less than a month after Donald Trump’s intervention against the Iranian nuclear program illustrated the depth of the de facto U.S.-Israel alliance, the administration has reportedly become frustrated with its counterparts in Jerusalem.
Axios reporter Barak Ravid recently revealed that Trump’s aides and perhaps even Trump himself (Ravid could not confirm as much) have been aggravated by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s continued prosecution of the conflicts around Israel’s borders, particularly last week’s strikes on targets inside Syria.
One unnamed Trump official said Netanyahu’s “trigger finger is too itchy.” Another called the prime minister a “madman” who “bombs everything all the time.” A third accused the Israeli government of undermining the president’s efforts to usher the post-Assad regime in Syria in from the cold.
At issue are Israeli strikes on Syrian military targets in Southern Syria near the city of Suwayda last week, which Israel maintains were necessary to prevent the ongoing conflict between local militants, Bedouin militias, and the armed Druze factions from spiraling further. In addition, Israel conducted a showy airstrike on targets inside the Syrian capital of Damascus, including the Ministry of Defense headquarters.
Trump “was caught off guard by the bombing in Syria and also the bombing of a Catholic church in Gaza,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters on Monday. Her comments suggest that the irritation with Netanyahu inside the administration is no fiction. Indeed, if the president’s team is nervous about the consequences of Netanyahu’s actions, its members have reason to be.
Trump took a political and geostrategic risk in siding with the factions inside his administration who argued in favor of engagement with the post-Assad regime led by Ahmed al-Sharaa (formerly Abu Mohammad al-Jolani). The interim government in Damascus is hardly pro-Western. Still, it was making all the right noises about orienting itself in a more Western direction in pursuit of foreign direct investment. There was even chatter about putting Syria on a path toward normalizing relations with Israel, thereby functionally joining the Abraham Accords. Israel’s strikes on the nascent Syrian regime could derail that project.
But the Israelis have their reasons for striking Syrian targets. In the weeks leading up to Israeli intervention, conflict between Sunni Bedouin tribes and armed Druze minorities had expanded from reciprocal kidnappings to street battles. The Israeli government is determined to prevent the return of armed militants to its borders. Toward that end, it already occupies a buffer zone inside Syrian territory — a buffer zone that contains a significant number of Druze. “Israel’s own Druze community demanded that Jerusalem act to protect their brethren across the border,” the Times of Israel reported. Indeed, the members of this minority group have celebrated Israeli intervention on their behalf, even if they are not uniformly in favor of welcoming Israeli sovereignty over their community.
The new Syrian regime is determined to prevent Druze separatism from taking hold. “We affirm that protecting your rights and freedoms is among our top priorities,” Sharaa said to the Druze in a televised address last Thursday, announcing a new ceasefire between the warring parties in Southern Syria. But just like the ceasefire that had supposedly been secured last Tuesday, the latest ceasefire quickly fell apart.
Syrian military forces withdrew from Syria’s fractious Sweida province, but the Associated Press reports that “Druze militiamen” continued to launch “revenge attacks on Sunni Bedouin communities.” Nor can the Sharaa regime credibly claim that its hands are clean. According to the U.K.-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, hundreds of fighters and civilians have died in the fighting over a period of just four days. The death toll includes 86 civilians killed, according to the AP, in “field executions . . . by government forces and their allies.”
Notwithstanding the unnamed members of this administration who are forever trying to sell reporters on the notion that Trump is fed up with Bibi, the administration is clearly sympathetic to the Israeli position on most issues. But not, it seems, when it comes to the new Syria. The Israeli government regards “Syria’s new rulers as barely disguised jihadists,” as the Times of Israel put it, beyond reformation. By contrast, the Trump White House aspires to guide the nascent enterprise toward moderation.
In an interview with the AP, Trump’s ambassador to Turkey and the informal envoy to the new Syrian regime, Tom Barrack, defended Damascus’s conduct and criticized the Israeli response to the violence in Sweida. The “current government of Syria, in my opinion, has conducted themselves as best they can as a nascent government with very few resources to address the multiplicity of issues that arise in trying to bring a diverse society together,” he said. In addition, while he maintained that the U.S. would not gainsay Israeli defensive operations, the attacks “came at a very bad time.”
More interestingly, Barrack outlined what he thinks are Israel’s core strategic concerns in Syria. “Strong nation-states are a threat,” he said, “especially Arab states are viewed as a threat to Israel.” That is not Barrack’s preference. “I think all of the minority communities [in Syria] are smart enough to say, ‘We’re better off together, centralized,’” he added.
If Barrack is speaking for the administration, we can deduce that Washington’s preference is for a Syrian government with sovereignty over the whole of its territory — including areas south of Damascus that Israel regards as sensitive. It’s not clear that Jerusalem can accept that outcome. Nevertheless, the Netanyahu government has acquiesced to Washington’s request for indirect talks between Israel and Syria. Those talks will take place in Azerbaijan under Turkish mediation in the coming days.
According to Ynet, “Israel has not committed to halting its airstrikes in Syria and is demanding a demilitarized zone along the border, as well as a permanent presence in the buffer area.” It’s unlikely that the Sharaa regime could accept those terms and retain control of the country — something that Washington is unlikely to welcome given its investments in Sharaa’s regime as a moderating force. A private clash over the situation in Syria between the U.S. and the Israelis is inevitable. A more public break is less likely but not impossible.
It’s not clear how this all ends. What is clear is that there is, perhaps for the first time, real tension between the Netanyahu government and the Trump administration over conflicting — perhaps irreconcilable — national security imperatives.