The Trump Effect in Israel | Foreign Affairs

When U.S. President Donald Trump visited Israel in October 2025, he was greeted by the Israeli public and the country’s political leaders as a savior, having brokered a deal to end the war in Gaza. When Trump delivered a speech to the Knesset, his almost-royal reception by members of parliament screened alongside dramatic footage of the release of the remaining living Israeli hostages on TV channels across the country.

Trump’s ability to break through the deadlock that has defined Israeli politics for decades stems from his high standing among Jewish Israelis. By forcing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to accept a fully realized 20-step road map for peace he did not produce, Trump has mobilized Israeli public opinion across partisan lines in favor of negotiation with the Palestinians.** We co-direct the Peace Index, a survey that, since 1994, has regularly polled Israeli attitudes toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the chance for its resolution. In November last year, we **conducted a survey of Israelis’ views of Trump’s plan and found that Jewish Israelis, particularly those on the political right and center, were more willing to consider peace negotiations when they were told such negotiations bore Trump’s imprimatur.

The implications of this “Trump effect” are far-ranging. Trump has already defied virtually every assumption scholars and policymakers** held about Israeli public opinion and the traditional roles of international mediators. **Now, he has a chance to defy history by winning a lasting peace in the Middle East—but only if Washington can harness his influence to push the parties to follow through on the plan.

VOTER’S BLOCK

The failure of the Israeli political imagination regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been two decades in the making. The violent collapse of the peace process in the first decade of the twenty-first century, Hamas’s takeover of the Gaza Strip in 2007, repeated wars in Gaza, and the deliberate obstruction of diplomacy by both sides produced a generation of Israelis that internalized conflict with the Palestinians as a chronic condition, rather than a solvable dispute. No Israeli leader is more responsible for this inertia than Netanyahu. Netanyahu has spent his career attempting to manage, rather than resolve, the conflict with the Palestinians.

The October 7, 2023, attack on Israel exposed this strategy’s failure. Israelis found themselves vulnerable,** with no vision for how to bring the conflict to an end and no leadership capable of articulating a coherent alternative to the status quo or mobilizing the public for anything but war. The joint Palestinian-Israeli Pulse poll, which we conducted **with the opinion researchers Khalil Shikaki and Dahlia Scheindlin in July 2024, illustrated the depth of political fatalism in the aftermath of the attacks. Just 31 percent of Jewish Israelis agreed that there is a diplomatic way out of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through a political agreement; 63 percent believed that there is a military way out of the conflict through defeating the Palestinians using force. Ninety percent expressed mistrust toward Palestinians, and more than 70 percent believed the conflict was inherently zero-sum.

And yet the Israeli public also dislikes the status quo. Public opinion polls consistently show that a majority of Jewish Israelis acknowledge the conflict’s costs: in our latest Peace Index poll from November 2025, 60 percent of respondents opposed the perpetuation of the existing situation, and almost 80 percent said that continuing conflict with the Palestinians harms Israel. At the same time, Israelis do not agree on an alternative. Shortly after October 7, 2023, Peace Index polls showed that public support for negotiating with the Palestinian Authority collapsed to a record-low 25 percent, and support for the two-state solution has dipped as low as 20 percent (in March of last year). But right-wing solutions are no more popular. Forcible annexation of Palestinian territories or Jewish resettlement of Gaza have little appeal beyond the right; Peace Index surveys of Jewish Israelis show that support for either policy stands between just 30 and 40 percent and comes strictly from right-wing voters.

The ground would appear fertile for a bold Israeli leader to chart a different path forward. Yet Netanyahu’s ideological commitment to “mowing the grass,” or managing the conflict with periodic military action without solving it, combined with his deepening legal jeopardy and his dependence on ultranationalist coalition partners, leaves him with neither the political space nor the strategic incentive to pursue diplomacy. A weak and fractured opposition, meanwhile, evades the issue out of fear of appearing too soft to swing voters.

Israelis and their leaders remain trapped in a vicious cycle of deep fear, frustration, and indifference, unable to summon the creativity needed to break out of it. Israelis overwhelmingly reject the status quo because it feels untenable, mistrust negotiating with Palestinians because doing so seems dangerous, and oppose the annexation of the Palestinian territories because it would leave Israel isolated internationally. They know the house is burning but cannot agree on an exit.

IN DON WE TRUST

This psychological and political stalemate is precisely the sort of situation that requires an external personality to unlock it. Enter Trump. Israelis believe he is fearless, forceful, has an unconditional commitment to Israel, and routinely confronts Israel’s liberal critics. Since his first term, for instance, Trump has proved his commitment to Israel by reversing long-standing U.S. constraints on Israeli territorial aspirations, including by moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem and recognizing Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights. These attributes resonate deeply with constituencies that normally reject negotiations outright.

Trump entered cease-fire negotiations with a level of popularity in Jewish Israeli society unprecedented among recent U.S. presidents.** **According to Pew’s 2024 U.S Global Image survey, 73 percent of Jewish Israelis expressed confidence in Trump, with positive views peaking at 93 percent among self-defined right-wingers, who now constitute over 60 percent of the Jewish public. By contrast, polls by the Israel Democracy Institute in 2021 and 2016, respectively, showed that only 30 percent of Jewish Israelis believed Biden prioritized Israel’s security and a mere 25 percent thought President Barack Obama was friendly to Israel during his tenure in office. In both cases, right-wing respondents were particularly hostile.

This high level of trust in Trump allowed the president to present Netanyahu with a ready-made plan outlining the creation of a technocratic transitional government in Gaza, the eventual disarmament of Hamas, the deployment of an international stabilization force, the reconstruction of Gaza, and the eventual transfer of civilian administration to a reformed Palestinian Authority. In particular, the confidence and trust he enjoys among right-wing Israelis—Netanyahu’s electoral base—limit the prime minister’s ability to push back, as he did against prior U.S. administrations, and make Trump’s plan more palatable.

MAVERICK DIPLOMACY

Unlike Biden or Obama or, indeed, any other past U.S. president,** **Trump does not operate within the traditional paradigms of international mediation, which assume that meaningful change must ultimately originate from within the conflicting parties themselves, through either bottom-up social processes or top-down transformations driven by visionary leaders. According to these dominant approaches, third parties cannot be the primary drivers of change. They should be facilitators that create favorable conditions or help the sides get to a “yes,” but they cannot dictate the terms of the “yes” for them. In presenting the plan to Netanyahu and forcing his hand, Trump has made it very difficult for an embattled prime minister beholden to an unwieldy coalition to turn against a foreign leader popular among Israelis and not bound by the constraints of domestic politics.

Nor does Trump operate within the historical norms of U.S. mediation in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For decades, Washington attempted to coax Israelis and Palestinians into direct talks, applying calibrated pressure and providing incentives to each side’s leaders to engage in negotiations. This was the modus operandi that led Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush to convene the Camp David summit in 2000 and the Annapolis summit in 2007, respectively, and that led Obama to send Senator George Mitchell as his special envoy to the Middle East in 2009. Their efforts brought Israeli and Palestinian leaders to the table but rarely shifted Jewish Israeli public opinion—and almost never mobilized the hawkish and religious sectors that form the backbone of Israel’s right-wing politics.

Trump’s willingness to defy diplomatic norms seems to have created a psychological shortcut for Israelis who ordinarily distrust negotiation. Many appear to view the 20-point plan as “Trump’s plan,” and therefore as a guarantee of security, stability, and enforceability.** **That would explain why Israelis who reject diplomacy in abstract terms, especially after October 7, become more open to it when Trump’s name is attached. In our recent Peace Index poll, conducted one month after Trump’s plan was announced in October 2025, baseline Jewish Israeli support for peace negotiations with the Palestinian Authority remained low at 30 percent. But when respondents were presented with the option of fully implementing “Trump’s plan,” support for negotiations increased to 45 percent, back to its prewar levels. Among self-described moderate right-wing and strict right-wing voters, long considered the immovable core of Israeli opposition to negotiation, support grew by 20 percentage points and 14 percentage points, respectively.

SEIZE THE DAY

The convergence of Israeli despair, political paralysis, and Trump’s savior appeal creates a rare opportunity for the United States, as well as for Israelis and Palestinians. Israelis want to change the status quo but do not currently trust their political leaders to do so. They do, however, trust Trump to do it for them. In this sense, Trump is Israel’s best hope for** overcoming the country’s missing strategic doctrine, eroding democratic foundations, and failed political leadership. The task for U.S. **policymakers is now to build a diplomatic architecture around this reality.

To translate the Trump effect into a pathway to peace, the administration must** **fully implement the 20-point plan and use it as a springboard to create a broader regional consensus that defines a clear endgame to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. This requires a clear and detailed settlement that addresses all contentious issues—including Israeli settlements in the West Bank, the status of East Jerusalem, and reforming the Palestinian Authority—and provides strong security guarantees. It is important that such a framework should be presented as Trump’s peace plan, and the United States—as well as regional actors trusted by Palestinians—must be directly involved with its implementation. Israeli leaders will comply only if they believe such a framework is both enforceable and politically survivable.

Even with unparalleled support among Israelis, Trump will nevertheless run up against the recalcitrance that has bedeviled promising negotiations of the past. Mobilizing the support of right-wingers for later phases of the plan and establishing a new governing authority in Gaza will require Trump to stay on the same track. He should rhetorically embrace Israel and Netanyahu in an unequivocal way while forcing the Israeli government to accept and comply with his policy.

Israelis want to change the status quo but do not trust their political leaders to do so.

The administration will also be working against the clock. If Trump loses interest, decides to pursue secondary political grudges, as he has most recently against Israeli President Isaac Herzog for his refusal to pardon Netanyahu in his corruption trial, or gets distracted by other foreign policy priorities, Israelis will most likely revert to grudging support for the status quo or may entertain calls** **for unilateral annexation of the Palestinian territories. Trump’s successor, whether Republican or Democrat, is unlikely to hold similar leverage over Israeli leadership and public opinion.

Washington, then, must not drag its feet. It is imperative that Trump advance as many permanent steps as possible while he remains in office. At a minimum, by the end of his tenure, in 2029, his administration must have established a viable Palestinian governing body in Gaza, ensured the territory’s security, and begun economic redevelopment initiatives. It must have safeguarded the security and independence of such a Palestinian entity from sabotage by both internal challengers, such as Hamas, and external Israeli interference, with U.S. and regional forces on the ground if necessary. And its efforts must go beyond Gaza. Trump should use his popularity to force Israel to halt the ongoing annexation of territories and violence against Palestinian communities in the West Bank. The 20-point plan is unlikely to be fulfilled in its entirety by the end of Trump’s term, and the president’s successor will not have the benefit of Trump’s singular leeway among the Jewish Israeli public. But if Trump makes enough progress over the next three years, the plan may generate enough momentum to survive beyond 2029. If the administration capitalizes on this moment, the Trump effect could in fact outlast Trump himself.

These are achievable aims. Trump has long claimed that he alone can resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and bring stability to the Middle East. Hyperbolic as these pronouncements may have seemed, his influence over the Israeli public makes him uniquely qualified to make good on his promises. Whether Trump will succeed where other leaders have consistently failed now depends on whether he can wield that influence productively.

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