J. D. Vance’s visit to Israel this week hit all of the usual beats, at least at first. The vice president met with Israeli politicians and the families of released hostages. He trumpeted the U.S.-Israel alliance and advocated for the continued implementation of President Donald Trump’s Gaza agreement. Everything went according to script—until Vance torched his hosts on the way out.
Before boarding Air Force Two, the vice president was asked by a reporter about a vote that had been held the day before in Israel’s Parliament. Hard-right lawmakers from Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition had advanced a measure calling for Israeli annexation of the occupied West Bank, which Palestinians claim for their future state. The measure was a farce—it did not change Israel’s policy on the ground, and half of the Knesset’s members did not even participate in the vote. But the legislation was a symbolic slap in the face to the president of the United States. Last month, Trump’s Arab allies had made clear that annexation would risk unraveling the Abraham Accords, and so the president had promised in the Oval Office that “I will not allow Israel to annex the West Bank.” The message, it seemed, had not gotten through.
Asked about the Knesset vote on the tarmac, Vance acknowledged that it was symbolic, but he was not amused. “If it was a political stunt, it was a very stupid political stunt, and I personally take some insult to it,” he said. “The policy of the Trump administration is that the West Bank will not be annexed by Israel. That will continue to be our policy.” That same day, Time published an interview with Trump in which the president was asked about annexation. “It won’t happen, because I gave my word to the Arab countries,” he replied. “Israel would lose all of its support from the United States if that happened.” Netanyahu didn’t take long to shift into damage-control mode. He put out a statement that falsely attributed the parliamentary vote to the opposition, and pledged that his party, Likud, would not advance the legislation.
This dustup will not harm the U.S.-Israel relationship in the near term, but it portends more consequential conflict to come. That’s because the Israeli hard right—a crucial and dominant component of Netanyahu’s coalition—is at war with Trump’s regional agenda, and its aspirations are incommensurate with the president’s ambitions. Previously, the Trump administration was divided between accordists, including the envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, who were more aligned with the Gulf states, and annexationists, such as Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, who were more sympathetic to the Israeli right. But in recent weeks, the president has made his decision: The accordists have won in a rout, and that outcome has implications well beyond the West Bank.
Simply put, the president wants more diplomatic deals and more countries to enter the Abraham Accords, not more wars and more land grabs. In his Time interview, Trump claimed that Saudi Arabia—whose crown prince will reportedly visit the White House next month—would normalize relations with Israel by the end of the year. But Saudi Arabia has demanded a path to Palestinian statehood, however limited, as its condition for such a move—and, as Wednesday’s annexation vote showed, the Israeli settler right will do all it can to block this.
“If Saudi Arabia tells us ‘normalization in exchange for a Palestinian state,’ friends, no thank you,” Bezalel Smotrich, Netanyahu’s far-right finance minister, said at a conference yesterday. “Keep riding camels in the desert in Saudi Arabia.” The remark, which Smotrich was later forced to walk back, was almost certainly not an accident. Its casual racism can be construed as an act of sabotage—an effort to derail the Middle East–normalization train.
Smotrich and his anti-Arab allies—such as his fellow lawmaker Limor Son Har-Melech, who boycotted Trump’s victory speech in the Knesset—likely see the president’s agenda as an existential threat to their project. That’s because it is. The more political and economic influence the Gulf states have over Trump and Israel, the more demands they will be able to make of both. Heading off formal annexation of the West Bank is the first ask, but it won’t be the last. Ultimately, the far right’s program of unfettered settler expansion and violenceunending war and eventual settlement in Gaza, and no negotiations with the Palestinian Authority is irreconcilable with a more regionally integrated Israel and an expanded Abraham Accords.
In practice, this means that as long as Israel’s settler right holds power over Netanyahu, it will continue to threaten the Trump administration’s agenda. This dynamic may be more of a problem for Netanyahu than for Trump, however. Polls show that most Israelis, unlike Netanyahu’s unpopular minoritarian coalitionsupport Trump’s goals. One September survey found that 72 percent of Israelis believe that preserving the Abraham Accords and deepening regional alliances with moderate Arab countries is in Israel’s “supreme interest.” Another survey in August found that 73 percent of Israelis would support a normalization deal that includes recognizing a Palestinian state.
Trump is astronomically popular in Israel today following his Gaza deal, far more so than Netanyahu himself. Should the president publicly make the case for his plans, he will be pushing on an open door—and might even push Netanyahu and Israel’s far right out of it.
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