Netanyahu’s veto and the limits of American power

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Netanyahu is betting that he lacks the political will to use it. xwhatsapp-strokecopylinkgoogleAdd Al Jazeera on GoogleinfoUS President Donald Trump (R) greets Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu upon arrival at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Palm Beach, Florida, on December 29, 2025 [AFP]Donald Trump has built much of his political identity around a simple proposition: American presidents have been too cautious about using American power. Allies, adversaries and bureaucrats, he argues, have learned to ignore Washington because Washington has forgotten how to make people comply. His Gaza initiative was supposed to demonstrate the opposite. Trump would impose a framework, the parties would accept it, and the United States would finally act as the indispensable power it claims to be. Benjamin Netanyahu’s swift rejection of that framework was not merely a negotiating tactic. It amounted to a pre-emptive veto, designed to weaken the initiative before it could gain momentum. It is tempting to portray the dispute as a routine disagreement between an Israeli prime minister and a US president, but that misses the larger significance. Netanyahu’s insistence that no Israeli withdrawal can take place until Hamas is “genuinely” disarmed strikes directly at the heart of Trump’s proposal and raises a question Washington has spent decades avoiding: What happens when a superpower allows an ally to dictate the terms of its own diplomacy? Trump’s 15-point framework is based on reciprocal steps. Hamas would surrender its weapons within a transitional arrangement; an international stabilisation mechanism and a Palestinian security structure would begin taking shape; and Israeli forces would progressively withdraw as the new order became operational. Netanyahu has effectively rewritten that equation. Israel, he argues, cannot make a meaningful withdrawal until Hamas has been completely disarmed. On the surface, this sounds like an uncompromising security requirement. In practice, it creates a condition that can be endlessly postponed. Who determines what constitutes complete disarmament? Who verifies it? What happens when Israel claims that weapons remain hidden or that new threats have emerged? If the answer to each question lies with the Israeli government, withdrawal becomes contingent on a standard Israel alone can define and revise. A condition that cannot be independently measured and verified is not a security requirement; it is a political escape hatch. In Netanyahu’s hands, disarmament becomes not one component of a negotiated process, but a permanent veto over the process itself. The deeper question, therefore, is not whether Hamas should surrender its weapons. Every credible post-war proposal assumes it cannot remain an independent armed authority. The real struggle is over who controls the sequence and therefore who controls the transition. Trump’s framework requires Israel to surrender some control to an international and Palestinian transitional structure. Netanyahu’s position gives Israel control over when its military authority ends. If Israel alone determines when the threat has disappeared, Israel alone determines when the transition can begin. The result would be an open-ended Israeli security presence, dressed in the language of disarmament. The political divergence between the two men makes the confrontation sharper. Trump needs the Gaza war to end. He wants a diplomatic achievement branded as his own, proof that US power can succeed where conventional diplomacy failed. Netanyahu faces a fundamentally different calculation. For him, the war is inseparable from the definition of Israeli victory. Any arrangement that ends the fighting while leaving Hamas with residual capabilities, or transfers meaningful authority to Palestinians and international actors, could be portrayed by his right-wing allies as an abandonment of the war’s central objectives. Trump defines success transactionally; Netanyahu defines it in maximalist terms. The two men are allies, but they do not share the same endpoint, creating a collision between a president seeking an outcome and a prime minister whose political survival depends on preventing it. This is where Israeli domestic politics collide with US strategic interests. Netanyahu governs with the support of forces hostile to any arrangement that strengthens Palestinian institutions. A compromise defensible in Washington is politically dangerous for Netanyahu. And Netanyahu understands something successive Israeli governments have learned: US red lines often become negotiable when Israel pushes back hard enough. The familiar playbook is simple: stall, object, invoke security, mobilise political pressure and wait for the US president to retreat. The record is difficult to ignore. Washington provides Israel with extraordinary military, diplomatic and economic support. Yet successive administrations have repeatedly made appeals, issued warnings and complained privately, only to accommodate Israeli governments when the political cost of confrontation grew. The result is a pathology: the US bankrolls an ally that routinely defies US policy, while treating private appeals as a substitute for meaningful pressure. Netanyahu is counting on that pattern to continue. Trump promised to break this kind of political inertia. His brand rests on the idea that American power is meaningful because he is willing to use it. But Gaza is exposing the gap between rhetorical toughness and actual leverage. Confronting an adversary is one thing; confronting Israel is another. Doing so would require challenging not only Netanyahu but the domestic political infrastructure that has historically made sustained pressure on Israeli governments so difficult. The administration’s failure to match words with consequences signals to Netanyahu that defying Washington’s stated objectives carries no real cost. US passivity is not neutrality; it is an invitation to continued intransigence. Trump now faces a choice. He can modify his framework until Netanyahu accepts it, preserving the appearance of diplomatic progress while Netanyahu defines Washington’s limits. The plan would still bear his name, but its central mechanism would be stripped away. The alternative is more consequential. If Trump insists on the withdrawal mechanism at the heart of his proposal, his administration must finally confront the question it has so far avoided: What is Washington prepared to do if Israel refuses? A serious answer would require using the leverage the US already possesses: attaching conditions to military assistance, slowing weapons transfers or making clear that support cannot be automatic when Israeli policy directly obstructs a declared US objective. Without some willingness to bear the political cost, the language of US leadership becomes little more than theatre. This matters because the familiar assertion that “Israel has a right to defend itself” says almost nothing about what Gaza is supposed to become after the war. Destroying Hamas is a military objective; building a political order capable of preventing another war requires legitimacy, governance and a credible Palestinian stake. Netanyahu’s approach offers no convincing answer. If Gaza remains under indefinite Israeli military control while Palestinian institutions are weakened or excluded, the conditions that produced armed resistance will not disappear; they will evolve. That is why the dispute over sequencing is so consequential. Washington says the war must end through a transition to a new security and governing arrangement. Netanyahu says that transition cannot begin until Israel is satisfied that the threat has been eliminated. That formulation leaves Israel itself to decide when the transition can begin. That is not a genuine transition; it is a strategy of permanent postponement, one that can kill a diplomatic process while its proponents claim they have not rejected it. Trump’s political brand rests on the proposition that presidential power is meaningful when it produces results. Gaza will test that proposition in the one relationship where US presidents have historically been most reluctant to demonstrate it. The question is no longer whether Trump can extract concessions from Hamas. The harder question is whether he is willing to tell an Israeli prime minister that US policy cannot be vetoed by a foreign government, even an extraordinarily important ally. If he cannot, the lesson will be that an Israeli leader can block US diplomacy with little fear of meaningful consequences, and that a president who promised to restore US power can find that his greatest constraint is not a lack of leverage but a lack of political will to use it. Power without the willingness to exercise it is merely performance. In Gaza, that performance is increasingly being exposed. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance. 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