WASHINGTON – When Benjamin Netanyahu met with Donald Trump in February, the Israeli prime minister’s first meeting with the president in his second term, he made clear that he hoped the days of “daylight” between the two countries were gone.

”When Israel and the United States don’t work together, that creates problems,” Netanyahu said then. ”When the other side sees daylight between us — and occasionally, in the last few years, to put it mildly, they saw daylight – then it’s more difficult.”

The dig was at President Joe Biden and the differences the Democrat and Netanyahu had over Israel’s conduct of its war with Hamas in Gaza.

Trump and his deputies have since then expressed their frustrations with Israel in language far more blunt and excoriating than Biden ever deployed. They have also put their finger on the scale in shaping Israeli leaders’ actions and words more than Biden ever tried to.

“Frankly, it’s baffling to me that somehow he continues to get away with it,” said Halie Soifer, the CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America.

Soifer noted that there was barely any pushback when Trump took actions that undermined Israel, including brokering a separate deal with the Houthi militia in Yemen that allowed it to continue attacking Israeli ships while allowing American ships to pass, and visiting Qatar, a backer of Hamas, but not Israel during a Middle East tour earlier this year.

She said what was striking about Trump’s actions were not necessarily the results, but the underlying assumption that he must be obeyed.

“He has actually pushed Netanyahu quite a bit and used a pretty sharp language in the process, which is not entirely a bad thing, but some of the extent to which he has either threatened or has threatened, I would say, is language that would be wholly unacceptable if it were a Democrat in any circumstance,” she said.

She offered an example: “He was emphatic in saying that Israel should not be annexing the West Bank. Now, it’s not that I disagree with that position, but he said Israel would lose ‘all support from the United States’ if it happened.”

Indeed, Netanyahu and his supporters have waged rebellions, and won concessions, over far less significant incursions against his authority. Yet the prime minister, who just over a year ago was deploying social media videos and a speech to Congress to criticize Biden, has been silent in the face of the blunt and at times vulgar broadsides he has endured from Trump and top deputies — and effusive in his continued praise of Trump.

Pro-Israel conservatives who were critical of how the Biden administration treated Israel say the difference is in how Trump’s tough love does not stint on the “love” component: Netanyahu is able to take the criticism because he knows it comes wrapped around goodies.

The United States in June joined Israel in its short war against Iran, the first such offensive U.S. role in an Israeli military action in the history of relations between the countries. Biden had provided Israel with logistical support in scuffles with Iran triggered by Israel’s war with Hamas, a terrorist organization that has for decades been allied with Iran, but did not directly involve the U.S. military.

“The amount of credit that this administration now has with the Israeli government is enormous,” said Jonathan Schanzer, the vice president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “It’s amazing what happens when you bomb the Iranian nuclear program, how much goodwill that buys you.”

Michael Makovsky, president of the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, a group that advocates for a robust U.S.-Israel military alliance, said Republicans are more likely to extract concessions from Israel because they have become the repository of support for Israel in the United States as Democrats have become increasingly disillusioned with the country.

“It makes it harder for Netanyahu to [buck] any pro-Israel Republican president, but especially Trump, who obviously would certainly hold it against him,” he said.

Vice President JD Vance, speaking to college students this week, further underscored the conundrum facing Netanyahu and pro-Israel voices when he emphasized that he did not see U.S. support for Israel as sacrosanct — and noted that Trump makes up his own mind when it comes to Israel.

“When people say that Israel is somehow manipulating or controlling the president of the United States, they’re not manipulating or controlling this president of the United States,” he said.

Joel Rubin, a former deputy assistant secretary of state in the Obama administration, said Netanyahu was in a bind because Republicans in Congress who in any other circumstance would confront a president who criticized Israel were afraid of Trump.

“They’re willing to fall in line if that’s what he wants,” Rubin said. “They may try to do their work [lobbying for Israel] behind the scenes.”

Democrats, having fallen out with Netanyahu because of tensions during the Obama and Biden presidencies, are not going to step into that breach, said Rubin, who was the Jewish outreach official during the 2020 presidential campaign of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, a strident Israel critic.

“Do Democrats want to take issue with that, that Trump is acting like he’s the prime minister of Israel, or do they kind of agree with some of that he’s doing?” he said.

It was during the June Iran war that Trump told the press outside the White House that Israel and Iran “don’t know what the f— they’re doing.” Last week alone, Vice President JD Vance called the Knesset “stupid” for voting to annex the West Bank, and Steve Witkoff, Trump’s top Middle East envoy, said the administration felt “betrayed” by Israel’s strike on Hamas targets in Qatar.

The remark evinced barely a whimper from Israel, a stark contrast with the weeks of agonizing that eventuated when an anonymous Obama White House official in 2014 called Netanyahu “chickens–t” for dithering on peace and on how best to confront Iran. The ensuing diplomatic turmoil culminated in an apology to Netanyahu from the White House and from then-Secretary of State John Kerry.

Trump famously not only does not do apologies, he has a track record of sacking anyone who works for him who does. He also doesn’t have to: Netanyahu is rolling with the punches, as long as they’re coming from Trump and co. Greeting Vance last week, Netanyahu said that the Israel-U.S. alliance has been “second to none” in Trump’s second term.

In fact, when apologies are forthcoming in the U.S.-Israeli relationship, they are from the Israeli side. In a White House meeting last month, Trump made a show of getting Netanyahu to apologize to Qatar’s prime minister for the strike.

Netanyahu’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, groveled in a televised apology for having advised Saudi Arabia to “keep riding camels in the desert” if the kingdom conditions a peace deal on a path to Palestinian statehood. The remarks infuriated the Trump administration, which is trying to bring the Saudis into the Abraham Accords, the normalization deals Trump brokered in 2020 at the end of his first term.

Netanyahu scrambled to tamp down the significance of the Knesset vote during Vance’s visit that called for the annexation of the West Bank, after Vance called the vote “a very stupid political stunt, and I personally take some insult to it.”

The vote, Netanyahu said, was “a deliberate political provocation by the opposition to sow discord during Vice President JD Vance’s visit to Israel.”

It was a striking contrast with the last time the Israeli right wing thumbed its nose at a visiting prime minister, when Biden visited Israel in 2010 to emphasize the U.S.-Israel friendship – and Israel announced plans to build in a disputed portion of Jerusalem.

Biden and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton rebuked Netanyahu – but in private, not on the Ben Gurion Airport tarmac, as Vance did. And Netanyahu deployed his diplomats and pro-Israel advocates in the United States to complain that the American reaction was over the top.

Trump gets a pass because he is family, especially now that he brokered the release of the last 20 living hostages held by Hamas, said Schanzer.

“When you have a close relationship with a friend and you’re able to take you know, as the Brits say, take the piss, you can take shots at somebody who you love and know and trust,” he said. Trump has the bandwidth with Israelis because he was able to bring home the hostages, Schanzer said.

“The Israeli right and the Israeli left cannot agree on the color of hummus right now, but they all agree that Donald Trump has done enormous good for the country,” he said. “The hostage families adore Trump and Witkoff and Kushner.”

Biden believed he had a close relationship with Israel and was in fact reluctant to press Israel hard as it retaliated against Hamas for its Oct. 7, 2023, massacre of close to 1,200 people in Israel, the event that triggered the war. The president came under fire from Democrats for not doing enough to leverage U.S. aid to contain Israel.

Makovsky of JINSA said Trump consistently couples the constraints he imposes on Israel with warnings that he is ready to unleash Israeli power if its enemies do not stand back.

“One of the most important things he said here is that if Hamas doesn’t agree to this agreement or abide by it, he will back Israel to do whatever they need to do,” Makovsky said, referring to the ceasefire Trump brokered in the Gaza war.

To the degree that Netanyahu has expressed unhappiness with tensions between Israel and the faction in the Trump administration led by Vance that seeks to roll back U.S. military alliances, including with Israel, it has been through leaks.

The Israeli satirical program “Eretz Nehederet” has noticed the difference in Netanyahu’s approaches to Biden and Trump and last week depicted Netanyahu as a supplicant to Trump, who was portrayed as a Roman emperor. “Donald Trump is emperor!” Netanyahu dances and sings in the sketch. “If you want an apology to [Qatar] you got it!”

Advocacy for “no daylight” between Israel and the United States stretches back decades and became an issue in Obama’s first year in office, when Jewish leaders pleaded with the new president to sustain the practice of keeping criticisms private.

The Republican Jewish Coalition’s Jewish community campaign on Trump’s behalf last year highlighted the phrase. The RJC did not return a request for comment for this story.

Some pro-Israel conservatives are wary of what they see as Republican distancing from Israel, although they are careful not to blame Trump. Mark Levin, the Jewish Fox News pundit, last month blasted White House insiders who criticized Netanyahu for tangling with movement conservatives like Tucker Carlson who are critical of Israel.

“They’re undermining the president,” Levin said of the officials leaking their criticisms of Netanyahu to the press. “They’re pushing a propaganda campaign. Not a word from the insiders about a single terrorist group or terrorist country. Just Israel and Netanyahu. This is a scandal.”

Yet daylight keeps creeping into the relationship – and some of its exponents are Jewish conservatives who have until now been among Israel’s most strident defenders.

Figures like Yoram Hazony, the Israeli-American philosopher who is close to Vance, do not criticize Netanyahu, but they are unabashed in criticizing Israeli lawmakers for endangering emerging ties between Israel and Arab nations.

“President Trump, VP Vance, and Netanyahu himself, are completely justified in thinking this behavior in the Israeli parliament is irresponsible, insulting, and tiresome — and in saying so in strong terms so the Saudis don’t just announce that the deal is off and walk away,” Hazony said last week. 

Joel Pollak, a senior editor at the Trump-supporting Breitbart news, said in an op-ed that Trump’s role was to protect Netanyahu as the Israeli prime minister struggled to contain the far right.

“If Israel cannot stop its fanatics — some of whom regard the Israeli state as illegitimate — it will not survive,” Pollak wrote. “Yet Israeli leaders, including Netanyahu, have struggled to rein in that fringe — especially because the existential threat posed by terrorism made internal law enforcement politically fraught.”

Trump, Pollak said, is “making clear that there will be a high diplomatic cost for yielding to the fringe.”

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Police in Ann Arbor, Michigan, are searching for a man who trespassed the grounds of the Jewish Resource Center, which serves University of Michigan students, and kicked its door while howling antisemitic statements.

“F—k Israel, f—k the Jewish people,” the man — whom multiple reports describe as white, “college-age,” and possibly named “Jake” or “Jay” — screamed before running away. He did not damage the property, and he may have been accompanied by as many as two other people, one of whom him shouted “no!” when he ran up to the building.

“My immediate reaction is a little bit not surprised, which is crazy” University of Michigan student Meyer Cusnir told a local CBS affiliate when asked about the incident. “We should be surprised at this. Antisemitism should not be normalized. When you hear words like ‘eff’ Israel and then ‘eff’ Jews, my reaction just validates a lot of feelings on campus that anti-Israel is just leading to antisemitism.”

Ann Arbor police offered an unspecified cash reward to anyone who comes forward with information which leads to the suspect’s capture.

The University of Michigan has seen a lion’s share of antisemitic incidents in recent years.

In 2022, during observance of the Jewish New Year, Students Allied for Freedom and Equality (SAFE), an anti-Israel group, erected an “apartheid wall” on campus and led an anti-Israel protest in front of it. Some University of Michigan students approached the protesters and urged them to become fully apprised of the complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, The Michigan Daily reported at the time. Standing atop a nearby structure, they made a “thumbs-down” gesture when they perceived the protesters’ remarks as offensive or lacking nuance.

SAFE was one of many anti-Zionist student groups which commandeered school property during the conclusion of the 2023-2024 academic school year and refused to surrender it unless the university agreed to boycott and divest from Israel. Nearly a month passed before the university cleared the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” erected on the occupied school grounds, during which both students and non-students destroyed school property, disrupted university business, and amassed outside the homes of school officials.

In 2024, the “Shut It Down” (SID) party, which captured control of the student government, led a failed and unpopular campaign of intimidation to freeze funding for student clubs until school officials enacted a boycott of Israel — resulting in the removal of its leader, Alifa Chowdhury, from office. Chowdhury had faced three charges in total: incitement to violence, defamation, and dereliction of duty, the last of which she was found guilty of on Dec. 23, according to a statement issued by the Central Student Judiciary (CSJ). Her vice president, Elias Atkinson, was convicted of the same offense.

Amid SID’s campaign, a Jewish student was assault in a “Nazi like” attack allegedly carried out by six people near campus. According to the Ann Arbor Police Department, the beating occurred when the group accosted the 19-year-old victim, whose name has not been released, and demanded to know whether he was Jewish. The young man said that he was, after which the suspects slammed him on the concrete, according to police. They then kicked and spit on him before leaving.

The University of Michigan is not the only campus which saw an antisemitic incident over the past week.

At Ohio State University, an unknown person or group tacked neo-Nazi posters across the campus which warned, “We are everywhere.” The outrage was first reported by StopAntisemitism, a Jewish civil rights advocacy group which tracks antisemitism across the US.

Incidents of campus antisemitism continue to rise around the world, as revealed in a new monthly report published by the Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM) civil rights organization.

Published by the group’s Antisemitism Research Center (ARC), the report said CAM recorded 53 antisemitic incidents on college campuses in the month of September, a 178 percent increase over the previous month, when 19 were recorded despite students not being present on campus during the summer holiday.

“This surge reflects the resumption of the academic year and the persistent problem of antisemitism at colleges and university,” the report said. “In France, students at Sorbonne University in Paris discussed a targeted shooting attack against Jewish students at the school. In Argentina, students at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba seized control of parts of the campus, protesting Israel’s ‘genocide’ of the Palestinians.”

The report added that the US saw 38 campus antisemitism incidents in September, several of which The Algemeiner reported.

In upstate New York, for example, law enforcement agencies filed hate crime charges against two Syracuse University students who they say forcefully gained entry into a Jewish fraternity’s off-campus house during Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and heaved a bag of pork at a wall, causing its contents to splatter across the floor.

In Hanover, New Hampshire, an unknown person or group graffitied a swastika, the symbol of the Nazi Party, outside the dormitory of a Jewish student at Dartmouth College.

In Manhattan, New York, an unknown person graffitied antisemitic messages inside the Weinstein residence hall at New York University, prompting school president Linda Mills to issue a statement condemning antisemitism and imploring students to uphold the institution’s values.

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.

Anti-Israel extremists enrolled in higher education institutions in the New England region “convicted” a consortium of college officials of aiding the Israeli war effort in Gaza in a mock trial convened by a group which calls itself the Western Massachusetts People’s Tribunal (WMPL), an episode which showcased the far left’s use of theater as a mode of political agitation.

The WMPL is reportedly a composite of anti-Zionist groups drawn from the University of Massachusetts (UMass), Smith College, and Hampshire College. They include Students for Justice in Palestine, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), and the Radical STEM Bloc. The groups held the ritualistic condemnation of their colleges outside the UMass Student Union building on Tuesday.

As reported by the Massachusetts Daily Collegian, “The audience served as the jury and found the defense guilty in all six cases. Unlike a traditional court, verdicts were based on a majority vote. All were unanimous except for one ‘not guilty’ vote in the Trustees of Smith College case.”

A protest followed the trial, with the students stalking the campus while chanting “no justice, no peace” and “you can’t hide, you’re supporting genocide.” Later, they recited a summary of the charges of which the schools were convicted near the chancellor’s office, to which they marched to deliver the verdict to a group of officials who left their offices to meet them.

The anti-Zionist student movement kept a busy schedule throughout the month of October.

At Pomona College in California, an unknown group issued a disturbing open letter which claimed credit for storming a Jewish event held to commemorate the lives of the children, women, and men murdered by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, or subsequently in captivity in Gaza — a harrowing incident in which security failed to deter the intruders and protect those gathered inside the venue.

As previously reported by The Algemeiner, footage of the incident from earlier this month showed the group, whose members concealed their faces with keffiyeh scarves, attempting to raid the room while screaming expletives and pro-Hamas slogans. They ultimately failed due to the prompt response of the Claremont Colleges Jewish chaplain and other attendees who formed a barrier in front of the door to repel them, a defense they mounted on their own as campus security personnel did nothing to stop the disturbance.

“Satan dared not look us in the eyes,” said the note, which the group released on social media, while attacking event guests and Oct. 7 survivor Yoni Viloga. “Immediately, zionists [sic] swarmed us, put their hands on us, shoved us, while Viloga retreated like he did on October 7th, 2023.”

Appearing to threaten murder, the group added, “We let that coward know he and his fascists settler ideology are not welcome here nor anywhere. zionism is a death cult that must be dealt with accordingly [sic].”

Earlier this month, National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP), a primary organ of the student anti-Zionist movement in the US, appeared to call for executing Muslim “collaborators” working with Israel in retaliation for the death of Palestinian influencer Saleh Al-Jafarawi during a conflict between the Hamas terrorist group and a rival clan, Doghmush, in Gaza City.

“Saleh’s martyrdom is a testament to the fact that the fight against Zionism in all its manifestations — from the [Israel Defense Forces] to its collaborators — must continue,” the group said in a statement posted on social media. “In the face of hundreds of thousands of martyred Palestinians these past two years alone, collaborators and informants maintain their spineless disposition as objects of Zionist influence against their own people.”

The statement went on to volley a series of unfounded charges alleging that anti-Hamas forces are “exploiting Gaza’s youth for money” and pilfering “desperately needed aid to the killing of their own people in service of Zionism.” NSJP concluded, “Death to the occupation. Death to Zionism. Death to all collaborators.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.