Netanyahu is finally getting his White House meeting. He may not like what comes with it.
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/07/27/netanyahu-white-house-visit-trump-iran-war-01012362
Netanyahu is finally getting his White House meeting. He may not like what comes with it.
The Israeli prime minister had been hoping for a sit-down with Trump for months — and getting one may not improve straining ties.
07/27/2026 05:00 AM EDT
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is expected at the White House this week at a moment of significant tension between the longtime allies — after months of waiting for an invitation to come.
Netanyahu has not been to the White House since the war began and has been angling for an invitation since at least April, two people familiar with the matter said, granted anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy. The funeral of close Netanyahu confidant Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) provided an opening, though negotiations over the visit were only just finalized.
“At first there was no meeting. They arranged it in the last couple of days,” one of the people familiar with the matter said Friday, adding that Netanyahu is eager to consult with President Donald Trump about the escalation with Iran as well as the U.S. nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia.
Israel was the first to publicly confirm the Tuesday meeting; Trump acknowledged the visit in a rambling speech at the White House correspondents dinner late Friday. The White House did not respond to requests for comment about why the invitation took so long or what the pair will discuss
Netanyahu’s office stressed that the two leaders have met multiple times since Trump returned to office.
“Few allies have met so often and few alliances have achieved more in such short a time,” the prime minister’s office said in the statement. “President Trump and the prime minister will discuss the defining issues of our time and how to leverage our great alliance to win the war and forge lasting peace.” His office didn’t respond to questions about Netanyahu’s efforts to secure the meeting or why it took so long.
The tension between the two leaders is particularly notable because the Trump administration is currently waging the aggressive military campaign against Iran that Netanyahu has been pushing for. For much of the past two weeks, the U.S. had been launching daily strikes against Iran, though the administration said it paused those strikes over the weekend.
Netanyahu, who helped convince Trump to launch the initial attacks against Iran in February, could bear the blame if this latest campaign doesn’t bring Iran back to the negotiating table or restore passage for ships through the Strait of Hormuz.
Trump and Netanyahu last met face to face in February, in the lead-up to the war, which Trump at the time predicted would last four to five weeks. That was nearly five months ago.
A June memorandum of understanding between Washington and Tehran collapsed a month later, while Trump’s aims have shifted along the way: He first said he wanted regime change in addition to preventing Iran from rebuilding its nuclear program. But after the standoff over control of the Strait of Hormuz reignited the fighting, much of the focus has shifted to reopening the vital waterway.
With the goals unclear and unachieved, Trump’s MAGA base is souring on the war, especially as the American death toll ticks higher. After two U.S. troops were killed in an Iranian strike in Jordan earlier this month, Marjorie Taylor Greene — the former Georgia lawmaker and one-time Trump loyalist turned critic — lashed out on X: “Their deaths fuel your bloodlust for a senseless war,” she said.
Trump’s own staff are growing frustrated by the long odds of ending the fighting, and Trump has had harsh words for Netanyahu as the war has dragged on.
At the G7 summit in France, Trump called the Israeli leader “crazy” and used an expletive to describe his judgment, even as he insisted “without me, there would be no Israel.”
U.S. and Israeli goals in the war have increasingly diverged. While Israel has wanted to keep fighting, Trump, until recently, has been more optimistic about diplomacy.
“A lot of the policy decisions the Trump administration has made lately are not necessarily in Israel’s interest,” said Dana Stroul, the top civilian in the Pentagon working on Middle East issues during the Biden administration, now at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
She pointed to several moves the U.S. has made that have unsettled Israel, including agreeing to sell F-35s to Turkey, striking a civilian nuclear energy agreement with Saudi Arabia that lacks certain oversight mechanisms, pressing Israel to withdraw from Lebanon without assurances that the Hezbollah militant group has been dismantled, and pursuing a Syria policy Israel views warily given the orientation of the new government in Damascus.
The visit comes just as the U.S. has telegraphed it is preparing for a significant escalation in Iran, surging carrier strike groups to the region, urging Americans to leave more than a dozen nearby countries and weighing a resumption of major joint combat operations with Israel.
But the Trump administration appears to still see its attacks as a way to return to negotiations. “We’re going to knock out all their bridges unless they get to the table and negotiate,” Trump told Fox News earlier this month.
While Netanyahu needs the meeting with Trump to shore up relations with Israel’s most important ally, the meeting itself could come at a cost to the embattled prime minister, who is up for reelection in October.
Trump will likely have requests for Israel to agree to American policies it has so far resisted — in Lebanon, Gaza and elsewhere in the region, said Elisa Ewers, who served in senior Middle East roles across the federal government and on the Hill.
“Bibi takes a risk coming to the White House. He might get pressed by President Trump with an ask, rather than the other way around,” said Ewers, now a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
She added: “The White House visit in itself is his get.”
Alex Gangitano contributed to this report.
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