WASHINGTON — It was their seventh meeting since January 2025, a frequency that would suggest intimacy. But when Benjamin Netanyahu left the White House on Wednesday, he did so having failed to secure the one thing he flew 5,700 miles to obtain: Donald Trump’s commitment to bomb Iran.
Instead, the president posted on Truth Social that he had “insisted” negotiations continue, a diplomatic leash that has left Israeli officials openly disappointed and the region bracing for what happens when Trump’s patience—or Netanyahu’s—finally expires .
The meeting was never really about Iran, though. Not entirely. It was about whether the most powerful lobbying apparatus in American politics can still bend a president to its will. And the early returns suggest that even AIPAC’s $100 million war chest may be hitting the limits of its return on investment.
The Lobby, the Primary, and the Own-Goal
While Netanyahu sat in the Oval Office, his allies back home were still digesting a political disaster in New Jersey. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee had poured $2.3 million into defeating Tom Malinowski, a mainstream Democrat whose only sin was suggesting that U.S. aid to Israel might, in some cases, warrant “case-by-case” conditions .
The strategy was vintage AIPAC: carpet-bomb a moderate with negative ads about immigration, not Israel, obscuring the fingerprints while preserving the group’s bipartisan facade. It worked against Jamaal Bowman. It worked against Cori Bush. This time, it backfired so spectacularly that centrist Democrats are now calling it “one of the greatest own-goals in American political history” .
Malinowski lost. But he didn’t lose to AIPAC’s preferred candidate. He lost to Analilia Mejia, a Bernie Sanders progressive who believes Israel is committing genocide and refuses AIPAC-funded trips to the Holy Land . The group spent millions to nudge the party rightward and inadvertently launched a left-wing firebrand who now leads by 500 votes.
“They are a right-wing organization that undermines democracy,” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrote on X, capturing a sentiment once confined to the Squad but now muttered by New Democrat Coalition chairs .
This is the backdrop against which Netanyahu operates. The iron grip AIPAC once held on Congress—the capacity to make support for Israel a third rail of American politics—is rusting. Younger voters despise the Gaza campaign. Democratic candidates are increasingly comfortable running against AIPAC endorsements. And the group’s strategy of punishing dissent has, in New Jersey, merely radicalized the opposition .
The Elephant in the Oval Office
But AIPAC is only the visible instrument of Israel’s influence. The deeper corruption of the American political class on this issue is quieter, more structural, and far harder to primary out of existence.
It resides in the evangelical movement, which the Jordan Times aptly described as the “elephant in the room” during Wednesday’s meeting . Trump’s secretaries of State and Defense are both deeply enmeshed with Christian Zionist networks that view Israeli sovereignty not as a diplomatic alliance but as eschatological prerequisite. These are not donors who condition support on human rights reports. They condition support on the pace of West Bank annexation.
Netanyahu knows this. Which is why, having failed to pull Trump toward war, Israeli officials are signaling they may instead extract “concessions” on the very settlements the State Department nominally opposes . If the administration greenlights direct land purchases by Israeli settlers—overturning decades of policy—it will happen quietly, without a press release, tucked inside a Truth Social post about “tremendous progress in Gaza.”
This is the corruption that never shows up on a campaign finance disclosure. It is the replacement of strategic interests with theological imperatives. It is the normalization of a foreign prime minister treating the White House as a branch of his domestic re-election campaign.
War by Other Means
Which brings us back to Iran, and to the military drills Israel is conducting in Eilat, simulating missile barrages over Ben Gurion Airport . Netanyahu presented Trump with classified intelligence purporting to show Tehran racing toward breakout capability. He argued that diplomacy is a stalling tactic .
Trump was unmoved. His envoy, Steve Witkoff, favors talks. Jared Kushner, still a whisper in the West Wing, leans caution. The president wants a win he can brand like the Abraham Accords—not a war that bleeds into the midterms .
But here is the danger: Trump has not closed the door. He has merely delayed. He told Netanyahu that if negotiations fail, “we will just have to see what the outcome will be,” and invoked “Midnight Hammer”—his code name for last June’s strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities—as a reminder of what American force looks like .
For Netanyahu, that is not a rejection. It is an invitation to sabotage.
The Israelis have three scenarios, per regional security officials: a favorable nuclear deal Trump accepts; a U.S.-led war if talks collapse; or a unilateral Israeli strike that Washington joins once it succeeds . The third is the Netanyahu playbook—present the president with a fait accompli and dare him to abandon an ally mid-combat.
What MAGA Wants
Trump’s base is not, by and large, composed of neoconservatives yearning to democratize Tehran. It is composed of voters who liked the maximum-pressure campaign and believe, correctly, that the Biden years enriched the Islamic Republic through sanction relief.
But they also elected Trump to end wars, not start them. And they have no appetite for underwriting indefinite occupation.
The emerging bargain is visible in Netanyahu’s other agenda item: F-35 sales to Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Israel is lobbying furiously to preserve its qualitative military edge, even as Trump eyes regional normalization deals . For the president, arms sales are currency. For Netanyahu, they are existential.
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One of them will blink. History suggests it will not be the man with 77 million voters behind him.
The Verdict
The seventh meeting produced no breakthrough because no breakthrough is possible until Trump decides whether the diplomatic track is theater or substance. Netanyahu left Washington with his principles endorsed and his demands deferred.
What he did not leave with is any indication that American policy will subordinate itself to Israeli timetables. And in that small space—the gap between what Netanyahu wanted and what Trump offered—lies the unraveling of a half-century of special relationship.
The lobbying machine still spends. The evangelicals still pray. But the president, for now, is listening to his envoys rather than his allies. For Netanyahu, accustomed to prime ministers who pre-cleared airstrikes with Washington before briefing their own cabinets, this is terra incognita.
He will be back. The question is whether, on the eighth visit, he arrives to discuss a deal—or to coordinate the war he could not sell this week.