If anything can be sudden after 584 days, the release by Hamas on Monday of the last living Israeli-American hostage Edan Alexander was indeed an unexpected and wonderful surprise.
It was also a reflection of President Donald Trump’s declared “America First” outlook — or, in this case, “American First.” Unwilling to wait any longer for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s reliance on military pressure to yield even a mini-new deal with Hamas, the president tasked his envoys with securing Alexander’s freedom. Israel was only officially updated on Sunday, when it was a fait accompli.
For the families of hostages without American or other second citizenship, delight in the return of another hostage was tempered by the heightened concern that their own government is less obsessed than the leader of the free world with liberating their loved ones from the daily life-threatening peril of Hamas captivity.
“My Matan, a citizen who is unwell and who was abducted from his bed, is being held together with Edan Alexander,” Einav Zangauker, the most relentless public critic of the prime minister among the parents of hostages, posted on social media on Monday morning. “The two of them are in one dark tunnel, without other hostages. If Matan is left behind alone in the tunnel, Netanyahu has decided to murder my son,” she charged. “Instead of freeing all the hostages, he is becoming my private angel of death.”
But while the release of the New Jersey-raised 21-year-old was plainly an instance of American First, the US president and his officials indicated that it is not a case of American Only.
Trump pledged late on Sunday to seek the return of “all living hostages and remains to their loved ones.” His hostage envoy, Adam Boehler, flying to Israel together with Edan’s mother Yael on Monday, took to their plane’s PA to vouchsafe that Trump “told me to go get back every hostage, every Israeli,” and “he wasn’t kidding.”
Where the president does appear at odds with Netanyahu, however, is over the cabinet-approved imminent intense escalation of the fighting in Gaza, and the Israeli coalition’s determination not to end the war.
His special envoy Steve Witkoff was quoted recently telling families of hostages that the US did not see where further progress could be made militarily, and that it “wants to return the hostages, but Israel is not ready to end the war.”
Whatever the veracity of that report, Trump made clear on Sunday that he regards Alexander’s release as “hopefully… the first of those final steps necessary to end this brutal conflict,” and he did not cite the imperative to destroy Hamas as a condition for the war to end.
US Ambassador Mike Huckebee, similarly celebrating Alexander’s release, also said on Monday evening that he hoped it “marks the beginning of the end to this terrible war.” While Huckabee stressed that “Hamas alone is responsible for the continued death and suffering,” he, too, did not specify that Hamas would have to be destroyed for the fighting to conclude.
At the joint press conference with Netanyahu in February where Trump announced his radical idea of turning Gaza into “the Riviera of the Middle East,” the president did state that he had discussed with Netanyahu “how we can work together to ensure Hamas is eliminated.”
But since then, Netanyahu elected not to proceed to the second and third phases of the hostage-ceasefire deal that Witkoff finalized in Doha in January, and last week set out his plans for “an intensified operation in Gaza” that, he made clear, would not end anytime soon.
And while the prime minister spoke of retaining captured territory until all the declared goals of the war were attained, a stance not entirely contradicting Trump’s Gaza vision, his far-right coalition partner, Bezalel Smotrich, went considerably further. Smotrich declared that Israel was “finally going to occupy the Gaza Strip” and asserted that once the new offensive began, there would be “no retreat from the territories we have conquered, not even in exchange for hostages.”
Given that Smotrich, along with fellow far-right coalition party leader Itamar Ben Gvir, had insisted on a return to the war, rather than continuing to the second phase of the January deal, Trump and his officials might reasonably have concluded that it is Smotrich, rather than Netanyahu, who is determining Israeli government policy, and that it is not to their liking.
In October, at the height of the US presidential election campaign, Trump’s running mate, now Vice President JD Vance, warned resonantly that “America’s interest is sometimes going to be distinct” from Israel’s. He was speaking not in the context of Gaza, but of Iran: “Sometimes we’re going to have overlapping interests, and sometimes we’re going to have distinct interests,” Vance repeated. “And our interest very much is in not going to war with Iran.”
For all the protestations from both sides that ties between the two leaderships are “excellent,” daylight would seem to be visible as regards the prosecution of the war against Hamas, especially given Smotrich’s declared annexationist and resettlement ambitions. In addition, there was acute discomfort that Trump reached a truce deal with the Houthis, without warning Israel, a fairly staggering two days after the Yemeni terrorists had hit the grounds of Ben Gurion Airport, sending most foreign airlines fleeing, yet to return. And Trump has declared definitively that a deal with Iran “is going to happen” — echoing Vance’s October mindset and despite Netanyahu’s concern over the terms.
The extraction of Edan Alexander from the vicious clutches of Hamas emphatically serves both American and Israeli interests. But as Vance predicted, those interests are not always going to overlap. And they evidently don’t entirely align over Gaza, or the Houthis, or, most worryingly, over Iran — not for a president declaredly intent on ending wars, dealing with an Israeli government, dominated by far-right expansionists, that isn’t.