This Editor’s Note was sent out earlier Wednesday in ToI’s weekly update email to members of the Times of Israel Community. To receive these Editor’s Notes as they’re released, join the ToI Community here.

On his first trip to our immediate neighborhood as US president, in June 2009, Barack Obama flew to Cairo and delivered an outreach speech to the Muslim world in which he related to Israel largely in the context of the Holocaust and made no mention of sovereign Jewish history in the Holy Land. He flew home without so much as a stopover in Israel, the United States’ one and only democratic, ultra-dependable ally in this part of the world.

By contrast, Donald Trump, in his first visit anywhere overseas as president, spent two days in Israel in May 2017, stood with his head bowed at the Western Wall and highlighted what he said was his “privilege” to address the people of Israel in the ancient city of Jerusalem. “I make this promise to you,” he declared in the final public event of his visit, at the Israel Museum, “my administration will always stand with Israel.”

“Iran’s leaders routinely call for Israel’s destruction,” Trump noted bitterly in that same speech, and then departed from the prepared text on the teleprompters to vow: “Not with Donald J Trump, believe me!” His audience, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, stood and cheered. “Thank you,” he said three times, as the applause went on and on. And when it had finally faded, he waved out a hand and said, with a smile, “I like you too.” The room filled with a warm, appreciative rumble of laughter.

Flash forward eight years, Trump is back in the White House and is about to make his first trip to the region since reelection. As in 2017, he will be going to Saudi Arabia. Unlike in 2017, he said on Tuesday that he would not be visiting Israel this time.

He may yet change his mind. The “very, very big announcement” he is teasing ahead of his departure could remake any understanding of what he is planning and doing in this region. But for Israel, from a president with a proven first-term record of dramatic pro-Israel action — recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and moving the US embassy here, brokering the Abraham Accords, and withdrawing from the Obama-led, terribly flawed 2015 JCPOA agreement on Iran’s nuclear program — the words and deeds in these first 100-plus days are increasingly worrying.

Without informing Israel in advance, he opened direct talks with Hamas, via an emissary, Adam Boehler, who plainly did not recognize Hamas’s eliminate-Israel raison d’être, overseen by his most important foreign policy envoy, Steve Witkoff, who also thinks Hamas is not “ideologically intractable.”

Springing the news on Netanyahu just before

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