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Netanyahu’s new government could lose a critical constituency: American conservatives
WASHINGTON (JTA) — The op-ed was typical of the Wall Street Journal’s conservative editorial page, extolling the virtues of moderation in all things.
The difference was that the author of the piece published Wednesday, Bezalel Smotrich, has a reputation for extremism, and the political landscape he was imagining is in Israel, not America.
Experts who track the U.S.-Israel relationship say the op-ed had a clear purpose: to quell the fears of American conservatives whom Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has long cultivated as allies and who may be rattled by his new extremist partners in governing Israel.
Those partners include Smotrich, the Religious Zionist bloc leader and self-described “proud homophobe” whom Israeli intelligence officials have accused of planning terrorist attacks — and who was sworn in as finance minister in Netanyahu’s new government Thursday. They also include Itamar Ben-Gvir, who has been convicted of incitement for his past support of Jewish terrorists, who will oversee Israel’s police.
The presence of Smotrich, Ben-Gvir and their parties in Netanyahu’s governing coalition has alarmed American liberals, including some in the Biden administration. But insiders say conservatives are feeling spooked, too.
“The conservative right was with [Netanyahu] and now he seems to be riding the tiger of the radical right,” said David Makovsky, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who just returned from a tour of Israel where he met with senior officials of both the outgoing and incoming governments. “And I think that is bound to alienate the very people who counted on him being risk-averse and to focus on the economy.”
In his op-ed published on Tuesday, two days before the new Israeli government was sworn in, Smotrich sought to persuade Americans that the new government is not the hotbed of ultranationalist and religious extremism it has been made out to be in the American press.
“The U.S. media has vilified me and the traditionalist bloc to which I belong since our success in Israel’s November elections,” he wrote. “They say I am a right-wing extremist and that our bloc will usher in a ‘halachic state’ in which Jewish law governs. In reality, we seek to strengthen every citizen’s freedoms and the country’s democratic institutions, bringing Israel more closely in line with the liberal American model.”
The op-ed is at odds with the stated aims of the coalition agreements; whereas Smotrich says there will be no legal changes to disputed areas in the West Bank, the agreements include a pledge to annex areas at an unspecified time, and to legalize outposts deemed illegal even under Israeli law. He says changes to religious practice will not involve coercion, but the agreement allows businesses to decline service “because of a religious belief,” which a member of his party has anticipated could extend to declining service to LGBTQ people.
Netanyahu has alienated the American left with his relentless attacks on its preference for a two-state outcome to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which he perceives as dangerous and naive. (He also differs from them on how to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.) He has instead cultivated a base on the right through close ties with the Republican Party and among evangelicals, made possible in part because he has long espoused the values traditional conservatives hold dear, including free markets and a united robust Western stance against extremism and terrorism.
But his alliance with Smotrich and others perceived as theocratic extremists may be a bridge too far even for Netanyahu’s conservative friends, who champion democratic values overseas, said Dov Zakheim, a veteran defense official in multiple Republican administrations.
“Traditional conservatives are much closer to the Bushes, and Jim Baker and those sorts of folks,” he said, referring to the two former presidents and the secretary of state under the late George H. W. Bush.
Jonathan Schanzer, a vice president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said the op-ed was likely written at Netanyahu’s behest with those conservatives in mind.
“The Wall Street Journal piece was designed to appeal to traditional conservatives,” he said. “It was designed to send a message to the American public writ large that the way in which Smotrich and perhaps [Itamar] Ben Gvir have been described is based on past utterances and not necessarily their forward-looking policies.”
The immediate predicate for the op-ed, insiders say, was likely a New York Times editorial on Dec. 17 that called the incoming government “a significant threat to the future of Israel” because of the extremist positions Smotrich and other partners have embraced, including the annexation of the West Bank, restrictions on non-Orthodox and non-Jewish citizens, diminishing the independence of the courts, reforming the Law of Return that would render ineligible huge chunks of Diaspora Jewry, and anti-LGBTQ measures.
Smotrich in his op-ed casts the changes not as radical departures from democratic norms but as tweaks that would align Israel more with U.S. values. He said he would pursue a “broad free-market policy” as finance minister. He likened religious reforms to the Supreme Court decision that allowed Christian service providers to decline work from LGBTQ couples.
“For example, arranging for a minuscule number of sex-separated beaches, as we propose, scarcely limits the choices of the majority of Israelis who prefer mixed beaches,” Smotrich wrote. “It simply offers an option to others.”
In the West Bank, Smotrich said, his finance ministry would promote the building of infrastructure and employment which would benefit Israeli Jewish settlers and Palestinians alike. “This doesn’t entail changing the political or legal status of the area.”
Such salves contradict the stated aims of the new government’s coalition agreement, Anshel Pfeffer, a Netanyahu biographer and analyst for Haaretz said in a Twitter thread picking apart Smotrich’s op-ed.
“Smotrich says his policy doesn’t mean changing the political or legal status of the occupied territories while annexation actually appears in the coalition agreement and his plans certainly change the legal status of the settlements,” Pfeffer said.
Danielle Pletka, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said foreign media alarm at the composition of the incoming government was premature.
“I suspect that the vast mass of people will maintain the support that they have for Israel because it hasn’t got anything to do with the passing of one government to another and has everything to do with the principle that Israel is a pro-American democracy in a region that’s pretty important,” she said.
That said, Pletka said, the changes in policy embraced by Smotrich and his cohort could alienate Americans should they become policy.
“I think a lot of things can change if the rhetoric from Netanyahu’s government becomes policy, but right now, it’s rhetoric,” she said. “What you tend to see in normal governments is that they need to make a series of compromises between rhetoric that plays to their base and governance.”
Pletka said Netanyahuu’s stated ambition to expand the 2020 Abraham Accords to peace with Saudi Arabia would likely inhibit plans by Smotrich to annex the West Bank. In the summer of 2020, the last time Netanyahu planned annexation, the United Arab Emirates, one of the four Arab Parties to the Abraham Accords, threatened to pull out unless Netanyahu pulled back — which he did.
“It’s not just the relationship with the United States,” she said. “This might alienate their new friends in the Gulf, which, at the end of the day, may actually have more serious consequences.”
Netanyahu has repeatedly sought to relay the impression that he will keep his coalition partners on a short leash.
“They’re joining me, I’m not joining them,” he said earlier this month. “I’ll have two hands firmly on the steering wheel. I won’t let anybody do anything to LGBT [people] or to deny our Arab citizens their rights or anything like that.”
Zakheim said that Netanyahu, who is Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, from 1996 to 1999 and then from 2009 to 2021, has proven chops at steering rangy coalitions — but there are two key differences now.
Netanyahu wants his coalition partners to pass a law that would effectively end his trial for criminal fraud, and so they exercise unprecedented leverage over him. Additionally, Netanyahu in the past has faced the greatest pressure from haredi Orthodox parties, who are susceptible to suasion by funding their impoverished sector. That’s not true of his new ideologically driven partners.
“If you look at his past governments, he has really never been forced into real policy decisions by those to the right of him,” Zekheim said. “Now he’s got a problem because these 15 or so seats of those to his right are interested in policy, not just in money.”
Makovsky said Netanyahu appears to be leaving behind a conservatism that was sympathetic to the outlook of its American counterpart.
“His success has been that he’s a stabilizer. He’s risk-averse. He’s focused on the prosperity of the country, with high-tech success. He’s the one to be seen as the tenacious guardian against Iranian nuclear influence,” he said. “And those are things people could relate to. Now, it just seems like he’s just throwing the playbook out the window.”
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Lebanon Heads to Historic Israel Talks as Hezbollah Strikes Continue
Smoke rises after an Israeli strike, amid escalating hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah, as the US-Israeli conflict with Iran continues, in southern Lebanon, March 24, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Stringer
Lebanon‘s President Joseph Aoun has called for historic direct talks with longtime foe Israel since war erupted a month ago – a month in which Israel‘s military has waged an escalating campaign against the Iran-backed Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah.
Now that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has answered the call to talk peace, Lebanon is in its weakest position to deliver it, experts said.
Hezbollah, which is locked in clashes with Israeli troops in south Lebanon, is opposed to direct negotiations – throwing into question whether it would abide by any ceasefire agreed by the state.
“The talks that will take place between Lebanon and Israel are frankly pointless, because those conducting them in the name of Lebanon have no leverage to negotiate,” a Lebanese official close to the group told Reuters on condition of anonymity.
MORE THAN 300 KILLED IN DAY OF STRIKES
Israel intensified air attacks on Lebanon after Hezbollah fired missiles into Israel on March 2, three days into the US-Israeli war on Iran. It has since widened a ground offensive.
Shi’ite Muslims, the community from which Hezbollah draws its support and which has borne the brunt of Israel‘s strikes, have told Reuters they have little faith in a state they see as failing to defend them.
Netanyahu’s instructions to his cabinet to prepare for direct talks came a day after Israeli strikes across Lebanon killed more than 300 people, one of the bloodiest days for Lebanon since its civil war ended in 1990.
Israeli bombardment has destroyed public infrastructure across southern Lebanon and killed several Lebanese state security forces on Friday.
STATE’S STANDING DETERIORATES
Many Lebanese, including two officials who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity, said they saw Netanyahu’s belated acceptance of talks as a fig leaf, aimed at generating goodwill in Washington as the US begins talks with Iran this weekend, while ultimately keeping the war in Lebanon going.
“Just because Israel agreed to negotiate with us doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy. The problem is that we don’t have any other option,” said Nabil Boumonsef, deputy editor-in-chief of Lebanon‘s Annahar newspaper.
Lebanon‘s state has historically been weak, hamstrung by corruption, a sectarian power-sharing system that is frequently deadlocked, and cycles of internal fighting and wars between Hezbollah and Israel.
Lebanese have repeated the refrain of “there is no state” for decades, but recent crises have degraded the government’s standing even further.
Lebanon‘s financial system collapsed in 2019 and a 2020 chemical explosion at the Beirut port killed more than 200 people. No one has been held to account for either.
In September 2024, an Arab Barometer survey found that 76% of Lebanese had no trust at all in their government.
The following month, Israel sent troops into Lebanon and escalated its bombing campaign after a year of exchanging fire with Hezbollah. More than 3,700 people were killed in Lebanon.
A HOUSE DIVIDED
Even after a US-brokered ceasefire in November 2024, Israel kept troops in Lebanon and continued its strikes against what it said was Hezbollah terrorist infrastructure. Those who returned to demolished southern Lebanese towns spent their own savings to rebuild their houses without state help.
Thousands more who could not return home said their own government was at fault for failing to secure Israel‘s withdrawal through diplomacy.
The US and Israel, meanwhile, blamed the Lebanese state and army for failing to fulfil a promise under the 2024 ceasefire deal to fully strip Hezbollah of its arsenal.
Lebanese officials said disarming Hezbollah by force would trigger civil strife and talks to convince the group to abandon its weapons were failing as Israel still occupied Lebanese land.
After Hezbollah entered the regional war on March 2, Lebanon outlawed its military activities. But the army did not stop the group’s missile launches, with officials again citing the risk of internal conflict.
Netanyahu has said talks would focus on Hezbollah’s disarmament and a historic peace agreement between Israel and Lebanon, who have technically been at war since Israel‘s founding in 1948.
But both are hard to imagine after such a deadly week.
Lebanon was heading into talks as a house divided, said Michael Young of the Carnegie Endowment’s Middle East Center.
Disarming Hezbollah “means entering into a confrontation with the entire Shi’ite community, which will not accept Hezbollah’s disarmament because they feel they are surrounded by enemies,” he said.
“We’re weak because we’re unclear on the terms of reference of negotiations, divided over the question of negotiations, because our demands will be rejected and because we cannot do what we need to do to secure an Israeli withdrawal.”
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Trump’s Peace Board Faces Cash Crunch, Stalling Gaza Plan, Sources Say
USPresident Donald Trump, Indonesia’s President Prabowo Subianto, Albania’s Prime Minister Edi Rama, Saudi Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, Cabinet Member, and Climate Envoy Adel Al-Jubeir, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, and Jordan’s Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi attend the inaugural Board of Peace meeting at the US Institute of Peace in Washington, DC, US, Feb. 19, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
Donald Trump’s Board of Peace has received only a tiny fraction of the $17 billion pledged for Gaza, preventing the US president from pushing ahead with his plan for the shattered Palestinian enclave’s future, sources told Reuters.
Ten days before US-Israeli attacks on Iran plunged the region into war, Trump hosted a conference in Washington that saw Gulf Arab states pledge billions for the governance and reconstruction of Gaza after a two-year pulverization by Israel.
The plan envisages large-scale rebuilding of the coastal enclave after the disarmament of Palestinian terrorist group Hamas – whose attacks on Israel triggered the assault on Gaza – and the withdrawal of Israeli troops.
The funding pledges were also meant to pay for the activities of a nascent National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG), a US-backed group of Palestinian technocrats intended to assume control of Gaza from Hamas.
‘NO MONEY CURRENTLY AVAILABLE’
One of the sources, a person with direct knowledge of the peace board‘s operations, said that out of ten countries who pledged funds, only three – the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, and the US itself – had contributed funding.
The source said funding so far was under $1 billion but did not give more details. The Iran war “has affected everything,” exacerbating previous funding difficulties, the source said.
NCAG could not enter Gaza due to both funding and security issues, the source added. Even after a ceasefire was agreed last October, Israeli attacks have killed at least 700 people in Gaza according to Hamas-controlled health officials there, while terrorist attacks have killed four soldiers according to Israel.
The second source, a Palestinian official familiar with the matter, said the board informed Hamas and other Palestinian factions that NCAG is unable to enter Gaza right now due to a lack of funding.
“No money is currently available,” the official cited board envoy Nickolay Mladenovas as informing Palestinian groups.
Hamas has repeatedly said it is ready to hand over governance to NCAG, led by Ali Shaath, a former deputy minister with the Palestinian Authority, which currently exercises limited self-rule in parts of the West Bank.
Shaath’s committee is meant to assume control of Gaza‘s ministries and run its police force.
He and his 14 committee members have been cloistered in a hotel in Cairo under supervision by American and Egyptian handlers, said a diplomatic source.
Representatives for the Board of Peace and NCAG did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Rehabilitation of Gaza, where four-fifths of buildings were destroyed in two years of Israeli bombardments, has been projected by global institutions to cost around $70 billion.
The stuttering plan for Gaza‘s future echoes other ambitious initiatives by Trump, who has sought to project himself as the world’s peacemaker but has struggled to end the Ukraine war as he said he would and is seeing this week’s truce with Iran come under immediate severe strain.
DISARMAMENT TALKS
Egypt, which has been hosting the disarmament talks, invited Hamas for more meetings on Saturday, according to a source in the Islamist group.
The ceasefire halted full-blown war but left Israeli troops in control of a depopulated zone comprising well over half of Gaza, with Hamas in power in a narrow coastal strip.
Trump’s board has been leading negotiations with Hamas and other Palestinian factions on disarmament. Israel says Hamas must lay down arms before it pulls troops out of Gaza; Hamas says it will not comply without guarantees of Israel’s withdrawal and a halt to firing in Gaza.
The diplomatic source familiar with the disarmament talks said they remained in deadlock and feared Israel was looking for an excuse to relaunch a full-scale offensive on Gaza.
Israeli military officials have said they are preparing for a swift return to full-scale war if Hamas does not lay down its weapons.
The Gaza war began with Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel that killed 1,200 people.
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Iran Demands Lebanon Ceasefire, Unfreezing of Assets Before Peace Talks
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi speaks during a press conference following talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Moscow, Russia, Dec. 17, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ramil Sitdikov/Pool
Iran said on Friday that blocked Iranian assets must be released and that a ceasefire must take hold in Lebanon before peace talks can proceed, throwing last-minute doubt over negotiations scheduled for Saturday in Pakistan.
Iran‘s parliament speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf said on X that the two measures had been previously agreed with the US and warned that negotiations would not start until they are fulfilled.
His post was echoed by Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi, who also called for the Israeli airstrikes on Lebanon to stop. Both Qalibaf and Araqchi are expected to be at the talks, Pakistani sources said.
There was no immediate comment from the White House.
US President Donald Trump told the New York Post earlier on Friday that US warships were being reloaded “with the best ammunition to resume strikes on Iran if peace talks in Pakistan fail.”
“We’re going to find out in about 24 hours. We’re going to know soon,” Trump said in a phone interview when asked if he thought the talks would be successful.
Vice President JD Vance, who will lead the US delegation to the talks, said he expected a positive outcome as he headed to Pakistan. But “if they’re going to try to play us, then they’re going to find the negotiating team is not that receptive,” he added.
Iran has been unable to obtain tens of billions of dollars of its assets in foreign banks, mainly from exports of oil and gas, due to US sanctions on its banking and energy sectors.
TENUOUS TRUCE
Trump announced a two-week ceasefire in the six-week war on Tuesday, just hours before a deadline after which he had threatened to destroy Iran‘s bridges, power plants, and other infrastructure. However, the truce is tenuous with Israel’s continuing campaign against the Iran-backed terrorist group Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Iranian regime’s ongoing closure of the Strait of Hormuz proving key sticking points for both sides.
The ceasefire has halted the campaign of US and Israeli airstrikes on Iran. But it has so far done nothing to end the blockade of the strait, which has caused a major disruption to global energy supplies, or to calm a parallel war waged by Israel against Iran‘s Hezbollah allies in Lebanon.
Iran was doing a “very poor job” of letting oil through the strait, Trump said in a social media post. He also warned Tehran against trying to collect fees from ships crossing it. “That is not the agreement we have!”
Israel and Washington have said the campaign against terrorist group Hezbollah in Lebanon is not part of the agreed ceasefire.
Israeli forces launched the biggest attack of the war hours after the ceasefire was announced, killing more than 300 Lebanese in surprise strikes, Lebanese authorities said.
Israeli strikes continued across southern Lebanon on Friday, with more than a dozen people reported killed in various towns. One strike on a government building in the southern city of Nabatieh killed 13 members of Lebanon‘s state security forces, Lebanon‘s President Joseph Aoun said in a statement.
Lebanese authorities say at least 1,830 people have been killed in Israeli strikes since March 2.
IRANIAN HARDLINE
The hardline taken by Iran‘s leaders ahead of the negotiations followed a defiant message from its new Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei on Thursday.
Khamenei, yet to be seen in public since taking over from his father who was killed on the war’s first day, said Iran would demand compensation for all wartime damage.
“We will certainly not leave unpunished the criminal aggressors who attacked our country,” he said.
Although Trump has declared victory, the war did not fully achieve the aims he set out at the start: to deprive Iran of the ability to strike its neighbors, dismantle its nuclear program, and make it easier for its people to overthrow their government.
Iran still possesses missiles and drones capable of hitting its neighbors and a stockpile of more than 400 kg (900 pounds) of uranium enriched near the level needed to make a bomb. Kuwait’s army said on Friday that, despite the ceasefire, an Iranian attack targeted several vital National Guard facilities, wounding a number of personnel and causing significant material damage.
Iran’s clerical rulers, who faced a popular uprising just months ago, withstood the US-Israeli onslaught with no sign of organized opposition. Earlier this year, however, the regime crushed nationwide anti-government protests by killing and imprisoning tens of thousands of people.
Tehran’s agenda at the talks now includes demands for major new concessions, including the end of sanctions that crippled its economy for years, and acknowledgment of its authority over the strait, where it aims to collect transit fees and control access in what would amount to a huge shift in regional power.
As has been the case throughout the war, Iran‘s own ships were sailing through the strait unimpeded on Friday, while those of other countries remained hemmed inside.
Among the handful of vessels to cross on Friday was an Iranian supertanker capable of carrying 2 million barrels of crude. Before the war, 140 ships would cross in a typical day, including tankers carrying 20 million barrels.
The disruption to energy supplies has fed inflation and slowed the global economy, with an impact expected to last for months even if negotiators succeed in reopening the strait.
US monthly inflation data released on Friday, the first to show the impact of the war, showed consumer prices rose by 0.9% in March, the fastest rate since the mid-2022 inflation shock that eroded support for Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden.