Trump and Netanyahu started the war together. Only one is determined to keep fighting

April 14, 2026 — 5:00am

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Benjamin Netanyahu was Donald Trump’s only ally in starting the war on Iran. He will be important to ending it, too.

Trump’s critics portray him as a captive of Netanyahu’s war fever. This suspicion was fed by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio. At the outset, he said that “we knew that there was going to be an Israeli action” against Iran, “with or without American support”.

Israel’s attack would have provoked an Iranian retaliation against US assets in the region, he said. So, the US had to attack Iran preemptively.

Some of Trump’s most vociferous MAGA cheerleaders have excoriated him for being a tool of Israel. “The Israelis have him in a hammerlock,” said Tucker Carlson.

Trump contradicted Rubio. The chain of cause-and-effect ran in the opposite direction, said the president: “If anything, I might have forced Israel’s hand. But Israel was ready and we were ready.”

But Trump critics will not be persuaded. Israeli Opposition Leader Yair Lapid makes the same claim: That Netanyahu “dragged us – and pushed the US – into war”.

Reporting by The New York Times last week has given new impetus to this accusation.

In the White House situation room on February 11, “Netanyahu made a hard sell, suggesting that Iran was ripe for regime change and expressing the belief that a joint US-Israeli mission could finally bring an end to the Islamic Republic,” write Jonathan Swan, formerly a political reporter for the Herald, and Maggie Haberman.

Among Netanyahu’s claims was that the Tehran regime would be too weak to close the Strait of Hormuz, one of the greatest misjudgments of the war.

The American president did not interrogate Netanyahu’s presentation, according to the NYT account. He agreed on the spot. “Sounds good to me, Mr Trump told the prime minister.”

Trump’s critics take this reporting to be confirmation that the president is a captive of Netanyahu’s. But this overlooks a key fact. The Israeli prime minister could only have been invited to make his case to the group in the situation room if Trump were already well disposed to the idea.

Israel’s ambassador to the US, Yechiel Leiter, on the weekend rejected the idea that Trump had to be dragged into the war: “We’ve been in lockstep from the beginning in the planning and the implementation, and we’re going to end this thing together as well.”

Historians will flesh out exactly how the US went to war. For now, Leiter’s statement seems most likely. As Swan and Haberman themselves write: “Mr Trump’s hawkish thinking aligned with Mr Netanyahu’s over many months, more so than even some of the president’s key advisers recognised.”

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So if the war was conceived and launched jointly with Israel, how will Israel influence its end? The war has been immensely popular among Israelis. It not only killed Iran’s supreme leader, it smashed much of Iran’s military and economic infrastructure.

But Netanyahu is under immense pressure to continue. Lapid last week damned Netanyahu for failing to deliver a decisive victory against Iran: “Three years after October 7, Hamas rules Gaza, Hezbollah rules Lebanon, and instead of an 86-year-old Khamenei ruling Iran, a 56-year-old Khamenei rules Iran.” The people want Iran to be removed as a threat altogether.

So Trump’s announcement last week of a two-week ceasefire with Iran – a ceasefire which binds Israel’s hands as well as America’s – is highly unpopular in Israel. A poll by the Institute for National Security Studies found that 61 per cent of Israelis oppose it.

Lapid again: “Israel had no influence whatsoever” over the ceasefire, he said. “At the moment of truth, the Israeli government was demoted from the status of a strategic ally to the level of a demolition contractor.”

Israeli military success, he said, was betrayed by political ineptitude. The veteran Israeli political commentator Ehud Yaari of Channel 12 says this line resonates widely: “You hear people say all the time, ‘what’s missing is the final diplomatic act to get agreement on Iran’s nuclear program’.”

Yaari says that Israel faces two key problems with Iran. One is that enriched uranium, an estimated 440 kilograms, suitable for nuclear bomb-making, remains buried under rubble in Iranian facilities. The other is that thousands of Iranian missiles remain intact, similarly buried under rubble yet eventually retrievable, in Iran’s so-called “missile cities”.

“As long as these problems are on the table, the work is not finished,” Yaari tells me.

Then there is Israel’s second front. Because Hezbollah chose the opportunity of the Iran war to fire missiles at Israel, Netanyahu took the opportunity to launch a major retaliation against Hezbollah, an Iranian proxy based in Lebanon.

Iran says Israel must cease its war on Hezbollah as a condition of any peace agreement that Tehran reaches with the US. Trump has sought to address this concern, at least in part. He phoned Netanyahu last week to ask Israel to scale back its assault on Hezbollah.

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The Israeli prime minister, instead, defied Trump by intensifying his missile barrages into Lebanon. But, today, as a result of US demands, representatives of Israel and Lebanon are due to meet in Washington to negotiate a peace agreement. It’s the first such effort between the two since 1983.

And while Lebanon suffers from Israel’s war on Hezbollah, it has limited control over the terrorist militia, a parasite on its Lebanese host.

“Hezbollah,” says Yaari, “is shooting missiles into northern Israel like crazy. People are going to their shelters seven, eight, nine times a day. So I don’t think Hezbollah is going to have a ceasefire with Israel in this situation.”

Nor would Israeli public opinion tolerate it. Seven out of 10 in the INSS survey say Israel should prosecute the war on Hezbollah regardless of any negotiations imposed by the US.

Like Trump, Netanyahu finds himself riding a tiger in Iran that he dare not dismount. Unlike Trump, the Israeli prime minister is straddling a second tiger at the same time, the one in Lebanon. If anything, he has even greater incentive to keep fighting for longer.

Trump is under pressure to end the war as soon as possible, well before the US midterm elections in November; Netanyahu is under pressure to inflict as much damage on Israel’s enemies as possible before his elections due by late October.

Their close partnership is going to be tested.

Peter Hartcher is international editor.

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© The Sydney Morning Herald