NPR’s Leila Fadel speaks with former peace negotiator and advisor to the Israeli government Daniel Levy about takeaways from President Trump’s meeting with Israel’s prime minister.
Transcript
LEILA FADEL, HOST:
For more on the strained relationship between President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, we’re joined by Daniel Levy. He served as an Israeli peace negotiator and was a senior adviser in the government of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. He is now president of the U.S. Middle East Project and a longtime critic of Netanyahu. Good morning, Daniel, and welcome back to the program.
DANIEL LEVY: Thank you. Good morning, Leila.
FADEL: Netanyahu called this meeting with Trump excellent, but we don’t know much about what actually happened. The pair did not appear publicly together. There was no press allowed, no joint statement. What do you make of how muted the whole thing was?
LEVY: Well, what we know is that after meeting seven times in the first 13 months face-to-face of the Trump second term, since they’ve been in this war together five months, Netanyahu could not get a face-to-face meeting with the president. Senator Lindsey Graham passes – huge friend of Israel, Netanyahu. Netanyahu had to be at that funeral, and he had to guarantee he got the meeting. That would have looked – either nonattendance or nonmeeting in the context of an Israeli election would have been very bad for Netanyahu. So he gets this meeting.
We know that the optics of this having looked like a war encouraged, delivered by Israel, fought for Israel, which hasn’t gone well for the U.S. We knew that didn’t look good for the president, the debate, confrontation raging inside MAGA between Israel first and America First. And yet Prime Minister Netanyahu will have gone into that room with trepidation, but with significant confidence that even though Trump can see me coming this time and knows what I’m trying to do, I’m still really good at it. And even if I can’t get him to do my bidding immediately…
FADEL: Yeah.
LEVY: …Maybe I sow the seeds for something 20, 30 days from now, where I’ve got the massive escalation in that war that I want.
FADEL: So what is it that Netanyahu came to accomplish in this meeting with Trump?
LEVY: Leila, I think, first of all, he needs to send the domestic political signal about 90 days out from a hard election for Netanyahu. Things are good. I am still the guy who is uniquely placed in the U.S. to get them to do our bidding as Israel. He needs to send that signal. Primarily, right now, that boils down to another roll of the dice on the Iran escalation front.
I’m sure Netanyahu still hopes that, despite all the evidence to the contrary, he can get some kind of big bang, state regime collapse. Can he pull America into going for that? He also wants to send other signals. Look, despite everything you’re being told, and it is unprecedented what’s going on in the U.S. vis-a-vis Israel, what the polling tells us, what the positionality in both parties.
FADEL: In the sense that there’s a negative view of Israel, according to the polling, among the majority of U.S. adults.
LEVY: Exactly. So Netanyahu wants to send the message that although that is the case, look at what we still do. We still have carte blanche in Gaza, in Lebanon. There are these tiny pilot programs. There’d be an insult in any other setting except for U.S.-Israeli exceptionalism. I’ve got free rein to do what I want in the West Bank, at the Al-Aqsa compound in Jerusalem.
Look, when they did a deal with Saudi Arabia on civil nuclear energy, they still tried to insert normalization with Israel into the equation. So I still know, also with the International Criminal Court, how to get these guys to make American interests subservient to Israeli interests. He would have wanted to set up the next phase of that. We’ll see how it plays out for him, but that’s what he’s been going for.
FADEL: You know, right before the meeting, Trump had some critical words for Netanyahu, kind of saying, yeah, I heard he wants to try to keep the U.S. in this war. I mean, is a split coming between these two leaders?
LEVY: Well, Netanyahu will at least hope that he can defer that until after the Israeli election – give himself a shot at still being in power. And let’s acknowledge, Leila, that we are used to the frustrations expressed by American presidents. We had it with Biden. We had it with other people. The question is, does that ever translate into a real shift in policy, the military support, the weaponry, the diplomatic, economic, political support that the U.S. gives to Israel?
We’re not really seeing a shift in that, and the big one now is in the context of the Iran war, Netanyahu is saying, listen, if you do attrition, that’s great. Do it without us. If you want to do escalation, we’re in for that. You do it with us. But can he still get America to be in a place where it doesn’t stop first, and it continues to undermine its own interests globally by doing stuff for Israel?
FADEL: Daniel Levy is the president of the U.S. Middle East Project. Thank you for your time and your insights.
LEVY: Thank you, Leila.
Copyright © 2026 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
Accuracy and availability of NPR transcripts may vary. Transcript text may be revised to correct errors or match updates to audio. Audio on npr.org may be edited after its original broadcast or publication. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.