The Trump-Zelensky Spat Isn’t a Warning to Israel

By: Jonathan S. Tobin

It was, as President Donald Trump said, “good television.” But the dustup at the White House last week between Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was a disaster for Ukraine. The quarrel, which was based on Zelenskyy’s clearly stated opposition to Trump’s peace initiative with Russia on any terms but those that treated the war as a straightforward act of aggression by Moscow that had to be punished rather than settled by compromise, had serious consequences.

Three days after the joint press conference, which had started amiably but at about halfway through the tense 50-minute event turned angry, the administration let it be known it was suspending military aid to Kyiv. The understanding was that the halt on shipments would remain in place until Zelenskyy backed down and gave Trump what he thought he had when he agreed to host the Ukrainian: his commitment to peace negotiations.

Given Ukraine’s dependence on the steady flow of U.S. arms and ammunition to maintain what has become a World War I-style stalemate with Russia, this is a devastating development for Zelenskyy’s government. The Ukrainian not only failed to make it up to Trump in the days after the spat but doubled down on his insistence that he had been in the right. He basked in the adulation that his defiance of Washington had gained him among Democrats and Europeans who, among other things, feted him with a private though much-publicized meeting with King Charles III of Great Britain.

But if his country is going to survive in the long run, Zelenskyy, who has spent the last three years being treated as not so much an international superstar but the second coming of Winston Churchill, will eventually have to eat crow and bow to Trump’s demands.

While the debate over blame for this turn of events is just getting started in the United States, the question now in some minds is not so much about Ukraine’s future but what this could mean for other countries dependent on U.S. support, like Israel.

The answer coming from some supporters of the Jewish state is that it was a warning to Jerusalem. The argument is that if Trump and Vance can, as the corporate liberal media has described it, mistreat a heroic independent leader like Zelenskyy, the same can happen to an Israeli prime minister. Just as important, they claim that Trump’s willingness to broker a compromise peace between Russia and Ukraine is an indication that he might betray Israel.

Reason to distrust Trump?

The allegation is that Trump’s determination to end the war with a deal that will not punish Russian President Vladimir Putin and force it to surrender any territory it took from Ukraine is not just appeasement of Moscow but giving it a victory. And if he would “reward” Putin, he could do the same with respect to Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah and other Islamist terrorist foes that seek Israel’s destruction and the genocide of its people.

As hypotheticals go, this one is breathtaking in its scope and the way it contradicts Trump’s record as president. But it makes sense not merely to the considerable portion of the American public that hates Trump and is willing to view him as another Adolf Hitler. It also fits into the worldview of many otherwise sober observers who truly believe that Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine is linked to the war that the red/green alliance of leftists and Islamists are waging on the Jewish state.

They think if Ukraine is not supported in its quest for “victory” over Russia, then Israel, too, will eventually be abandoned by the West.

But they’re wrong about that—and not just because the accepted mainstream media narrative about the White House smackdown in which Trump and Vance are the villains, and Zelenskyy their innocent though heroic victim, is deeply misleading. They’re wrong because the two conflicts are not connected or in any way analogous other than Ukraine and Israel being two countries at war and needing American support.

They’re also wrong because the underlying allegation about Trump working on behalf of Putin rather than, as he has stated, a belief that ending this war is in the best interests of the United States and the world is rooted in a discredited partisan conspiracy theory.

But most of all they’re wrong because Israel has already been subjected to similar treatment by past presidents, none of whom were named Donald Trump or matched his clear commitment to the security and rights of the Jewish state.

 

Rough treatment

Trump and Vance began to treat Zelenskyy roughly as soon as he began using the presser to debate policy positions. Zelenskyy is used to being shown extraordinary deference, as he was by the Biden administration. He is not used to sitting quietly and listening to other positions on the war different from his tough stance without challenging them. In this case, he couldn’t help himself and began to lecture Trump and Vance. They were not only unwilling to put up with that but prepared to tell Zelenskyy that he was wrong and, more to the point, that he “didn’t have the cards” in this negotiation to tell off his sole superpower ally.

It’s possible that this was, at least in part, due to the way that Democrats egged him on to challenge Trump.

Zelenskyy had demonstrated his partisan preferences during the 2024 election by appearing with Pennsylvania’s Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro at a munitions plant in what appeared to all intents and purposes a campaign appearance for Vice President Kamala Harris’s effort to defeat Trump. Though Zelenskyy and his defenders contended that it was a nonpartisan appearance, Republicans didn’t view it that way at the time or since. It had also come only days after Zelenskyy had denounced Vance as “too radical” to be vice president in an interview published in The New Yorker. In the past, Democrats have accused Netanyahu of taking sides against them, but he never did anything remotely like Zelenskyy’s brazen actions.

He also met with a group of congressional Democrats only hours before his meeting last week with Trump and Vance. Afterward, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) posted on X that they were in agreement with the Ukrainian leader in opposing Trump’s position on the talks with Moscow—something that Republicans view as an indication that Zelenskyy seems more interested in playing to those who already support him rather than on working with the administration.

Still, had he kept quiet, he would have gotten what he came to Washington to achieve. That included the signing of a minerals exploitation deal with the United States that would have given Kyiv much-needed income and also established economic ties between the two countries that might be just as, if not more valuable than, talk about security guarantees. Prior to the blow-up, Trump had also repeatedly indicated that the flow of arms to Ukraine would continue.

It was enough to convince some on the right who are gung-ho supporters of Ukraine, like Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen that Zelenskyy had committed diplomatic malpractice and needed to apologize or be replaced. For Ukraine to have lost them is an indication of just how much of a blunder Zelenskyy had committed.

 

Don’t link the two conflicts

Still, the notion that this is an object lesson for Israel is, at best, an exaggeration, and, at worst, a distortion of the truth.

The comparison between Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the Hamas-led Palestinian terror assaults on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, is superficially correct. Both were criminal invasions. But unlike Ukraine, Israel is not locked in a war with a sovereign nuclear power that once owned all of its territory. The Russian quest to return Ukraine to its former status as a vassal state of Moscow is deeply wrong since it seeks to deny its people the right to self-determination. But the long-running dispute between the two countries is nothing remotely like the antisemitic campaign to eradicate the Jewish state and, as Hamas and its allies intend, commit the genocide of its people.

Even if you deeply sympathize with the Ukrainians, as most Americans do, the two conflicts are not linked—except, that is, in the imaginations of those who have sought to merge the two causes to gain more support for the massive aid allocations of hundreds of billions of dollars to Ukraine by tying them, as Biden did, to the more popular but far smaller aid package to Israel.

As far as Israel needing to kowtow to Trump, that’s true; however, it’s also nothing new for leaders of the Jewish state.

 

Washington’s threats to Israel

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu understands that he needs to keep on Trump’s good side. That was equally true for the other presidents he has had to deal with, such as Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

American presidents have used threats of aid cutoffs or cuts before Trump got into office. It occurred when President Gerald Ford was trying to muscle Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to conform to American dictates. Even as strong a supporter of Israel as President Ronald Reagan, he suspended talks over a strategic alliance and arms sales because of Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s annexation of the Golan Heights (a stand that was eventually vindicated by Trump’s recognition of the annexation).

In just the last decade, Obama didn’t hesitate to pursue policies Israel regarded as undermining its security, if not its existence, such as his appeasement of Iran and the 2015 nuclear deal Washington made with the rogue nation. In addition to that was Obama’s demand that any peace with the Palestinians had to be based on Israeli withdrawal from the 1967 ceasefire lines. That was something that Netanyahu rejected to his face in a similarly tense White House meeting, which met with just as much if not more anger from Democrats, who insisted that the prime minister had insulted Obam then and later when he addressed Congress and urged it to reject the agreement with Tehran.

Under Biden, Netanyahu was—unlike Zelenskyy’s war effort—second-guessed with respect to Israel’s fight against Hamas. The previous administration threatened aid cutoffs if the terrorists were pursued too vigorously or into their strongholds like the ones in Rafah. On top of that, Biden slow-walked arms deliveries just as vital to Israel as Ukraine’s were to them.

Netanyahu has learned how to bite his tongue and refrain from criticizing American presidents even when warranted. He also knows that there are moments when he must speak up for the sake of his country. When he has done that, it is in the knowledge that his position is supported by most Americans. That is not the case for Zelenskyy.

 

What Israel fears

Israel needs no lessons in how to deal with a White House that is hostile or willing to blackmail Jerusalem to get its way.

But it is the height of chutzpah for Trump’s detractors to say that he might do the same to Israel since he has reversed every one of his predecessor’s anti-Israel policies—from arms deliveries to moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

Israel may fear a return to a period when America might use its leverage to harm its interests. It is not something they expect from Trump but from a future Democratic president who will be leading a party that is increasingly hostile to Israel and Zionism. If that happens, it won’t be because Trump has set a precedent to do so.

It’s true that most Democrats view the Ukrainian cause as a righteous one because they identify it with the impeachment of Trump and opposition to his foreign-policy goals. And a dwindling (as Graham’s stand shows) number of Republican congress members back Ukraine because they exaggerate the threat to Europe and the world from a Russia that is a shadow of the power it held before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Moreover, a recent poll showed that more Americans back Trump’s position on Ukraine than those who oppose it.

The war is now not so much about Ukrainian independence but ownership of the Crimea and the Donbas. And it’s far from clear that most Americans think that issue reflects a vital U.S. interest, let alone one that should require them to send more aid to Ukraine in the last three years than Israel has received in the last 40.

 

American interests

Less than two months since his inauguration, there is no way of knowing whether Trump’s second term will ultimately be thought of as a success. But if it fails, it won’t be because it was insufficiently worshipful in its attitude toward Zelenskyy or because it refused to continue sending record amounts of aid to Ukraine.

Trump’s desire to end the war in Ukraine rests on the American strategic interest in ending an unwinnable war as well as in trying to detach the Russians from the West’s true geostrategic rival in the 21st century: China. He also realizes, as some in both parties do not, that Russia is a shadow of its former self. There is an obvious need to avoid nuclear confrontations with Moscow about which Zelenskyy seems to have no fears. But that aside—and contrary to the Ukrainian’s attempt to lecture Trump and Vance—Putin’s bankrupt regime is not much of a threat to the West or the United States anymore.

The administration may be taking a transactional approach to the Russia-Ukraine war. That’s because it not unreasonably regards it as having little to do with American interests or values since both Trump and Vance are aware that Ukraine is not the Jeffersonian democracy that its supporters make it ought to be. If they view Israel differently, it is because they understand that Israel truly does share American values and its existence in the Middle East is a strategic asset in the Middle East rather than a problem that needs to be solved.

One can believe in Ukraine’s right to independence and even wish it well without succumbing to some of the myths about Zelenskyy’s historic importance or that his country’s war to return to its 2014 borders has much to do with America’s national security. Most of all, Ukraine’s supporters need to leave Israel out of this argument between Trump and Zelenskyy. The Jewish state has enough enemies in the world right now, but it can at least take comfort that the United States is firmly on its side.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.