The Mar-a-Lago hotel/club/private residence is preparing, for the second day in a row, to attract all the attention of geopolitical experts with the visit of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The President of the United States, host in Palm Beach (Florida), where he is spending his Christmas vacation, is expected to receive him at 1 p.m. (East Coast time, six more in the Spanish peninsula) as he received him on Sunday – in another confusion, usual in Europe, between public and private – to the Ukrainian Volodímir Zelenski.
Netanyahu enters the scene with the man he defined three months ago as “the best friend Israel has had in the White House” with the mission to prove whether he follows him and with four objectives, according to information leaked before the meeting. I want permission to bomb Iran again if Tehran continues to build missiles. He is seeking permission to remain in the area of Syria that Israel has occupied militarily since last year. It aspires to maintain things as they are, without further phase, in Gaza, with Israeli control of most of the fringe based on daily attacks on the Palestinian dead. He intends to impose the disarmament of the weakened Hezbollah throughout Lebanon.
This meeting, the fifth face-to-face between the two leaders in 2025, took place on the same day that Hamas confirmed the death of its spokesperson, Abu Obeida, last August, and with Trump’s impatience with the peace plan for Gaza, which he imposed on the United States last October, and which has not just passed its second phase. With the inconvenience, too, of Casa Blanca with its Israeli actions in Lebanon and Syria.
Netanyahu — who spoke by phone from Florida on Sunday with Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, young in Trump’s orbit — needs a conquest at Mar-a-Lago as a homecoming for him as he moves forward with his criminal trial on corruption and fraud charges and continues arrests of his base so he can achieve the annexation of the West Bank, which Trump warned you would be a problem. Furthermore, surveys indicate that as things change, he will lose the 2026 elections after three decades of unavoidable presence in his country’s politics.
Trump wants to announce progress in Gaza as soon as possible, before the end of the next 20 years, the first year since his return to Casa Blanca. During the campaign with which he secured his place to return to power, the candidate then promised that he would be able to end this war on his first day in the Despacho Oval, and, although he did not keep this promise, he likes to assume that he had achieved “peace in the Middle East” for the first time, he is wont to exaggerate, “in thousands of years”.
This second phase involves a response to the Israeli invasion and the creation of a technocratic Palestinian government. All this, with the competition of an international control body and the deployment of an international force yet to be defined. Netanyahu wants things to continue as they are, with Israeli control of 58% of Franja, and the rest in the hands of Hamas, in calamitous conditions that have been made worse this month by flooding.
While Iran, the United States supported Israel in June with the so-called “12 Day War,” which culminated in an attack by Washington on three uranium production and storage bases, dealing a blow to the Ayatollahs’ regime’s nuclear program. Trump presented the operation as an unprecedented military success and the definitive solution to a problem Netanyahu is unwilling to resolve. This aspires to dismantle Tehran’s ballistic missile development program, taking advantage of the weakness of its enemy: reinforced by sanctions, with less and less support in the region and in a context of phenomenal economic crisis.
Complete annihilation
Trump’s decision to collaborate on these projects on the ground would constitute a violation of international law; This also amounts to admitting that in June I exaggerated by asserting on several occasions that the military operation launched by Washington had resulted in the “complete annihilation” of the Iranian nuclear program.
The Republican also meets with Netanyahu at a delicate time internally. Your unconditional support for Israel has opened a breach in the MAGA movement (Make America Great Again), the base of its most fierce followers. On the one hand, with presenter Tucker Carlson or conspirator Candace Owens at the helm, it still questions the financing of Israel’s brutal war in Gaza, but difficult to justify to young people, including conservatives, who access the atrocities of the conflict live and without filters through social networks. On the other hand, they still consider that siding with Israel will help the West in its so-called civilizing crusade against radical Islam.
The President of the United States has profited greatly from his rise to the idea that gave rise to his slogan America first (United States first). He promised that if he returned to the White House, foreign wars would be the same as those of the past, although for now, a year later, the international scene (from Ukraine to Venezuela) had absorbed much of his attention. This is how these days were demonstrated once again at Mar-a-Lago, and summed up on Sunday in a tweet from MAGA MP Marjorie Taylor Greene: “Today, Zelenski. Mañana, Netanyahu. Can we focus on the United States?”
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