The Shift: Israeli tech leaders want to make a deal with Trump

💸 Checkbook Diplomacy

A couple of newsletters ago, I wrote about Israel supporters becoming increasingly worried that Gulf money could be eclipsing the country’s lobbying power.

In that installment, I quoted a social media post from Middle East analyst Mouin Rabbani.

“Israel and its lobby, which went all-in for Trump during the 2024 U.S. presidential election campaign, are experiencing a severe case of buyer’s remorse,” he wrote. “They seem to have genuinely believed that during Trump’s first few months in office Washington would not only continue to provide unlimited support for Israel’s genocidal campaign in the Gaza Strip and further increase weapons deliveries to Israel, but would also endorse Israeli annexation of the West Bank, obliterate the Houthis in Yemen on Israel’s behalf, engineer Saudi-Israeli normalization in a manner that renders the Palestinians irrelevant, and take the lead in a joint US-Israeli war against Iran.”

Trump has certainly delivered on some of those things, but Israel’s inability to get a clean sweep has produced discernible anxieties.

In the same newsletter, I quoted Jewish Insider‘s Gabby Deutch, who wrote that Trump’s recent trip to moneyed Middle Eastern countries was “generating a quiet panic of sorts among members of the pro-Israel and Jewish communal establishment.”

This week, Deutch has a very interesting article about the Israeli tech leaders trying to compete with the “checkbook diplomacy” of places like Saudi Arabia.

These guys provide Jewish Insider with some amazing quotes.

“Founders are Israel’s best ambassadors. They travel more than diplomats, pitch to the world’s biggest investors and solve real-world problems that transcend borders,” says Jon Medved, CEO of the venture investing platform OurCrowd. “Do they have a responsibility to engage in economic diplomacy? I think they already do, whether they realize it or not.”

“We’re not going to do zero taxes like Dubai, but we need to be attracting more capital here by making our regulatory environment much simpler and lowering our capital gains taxes to be competitive with the United States so that we can bring capital formation vehicles like hedge funds to Israel,” Michael Eisenberg, co-founder of the VC firm Aleph, explains.

Avner Golov, who worked in the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office until 2023, told Deutch that he envisions a signing ceremony in the White House Rose Garden securing a “formal strategic partnership between Israel and America.”

This idea is stupid enough for Trump to embrace, but it’s going to take a lot more than economic collaboration for Israel’s reputation to gain ground within the United States.

📉 Israel’s declining support

Poll after poll shows us that support for the country is declining and that Trump’s war on the student movement is only making Israel less popular.

We are beginning to see some of this sentiment trickle into U.S. politics. The GOP recently had to pull an anti-BDS bill from the docket after resistance to the effort quickly mounted. Not long ago, that kind of legislation would have been a slam dunk. In less than a month, New Yorkers will head to the polls to elect a new mayor. The only person within striking distance of Andrew Cuomo in that race is Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani, who openly backs the BDS movement and sponsored legislation that would prohibit local charities from funding illegal settlements in the West Bank.

What kind of chance would a BDS supporter have had in a NYC mayoral race 10 years ago? What about 5 years ago?

Cuomo has warned that electing a democratic socialist could hurt the Democratic Party’s relationship to Israel.

“You have a schism in the Democratic Party right now, and this election is in many ways a litmus test of that,” he told an interviewer.

“I don’t consider them Democrats, I consider them socialists,” he continued, referring to DSA. “They support BDS, they pledge never to visit Israel. That’s not what I believe is the fundamental relationship between Israel and the Democratic Party. As a Democrat, I think it’s synonymous that you support Israel.”

The Jewish Insider piece does quote one pro-Israel voice who’s skeptical of the business leaders’ efforts: former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Tom Nides.

“If we’re going to make sure, ‘Hey, don’t forget about us,’ it’s not about money,” Nides told Deutch. “It’s about morality and humanity and the purpose of Israel on the world stage.”

This week, Israel bombed a school where Palestinians were sheltering, killing at least 36 people, including 18 children. Video of the aftermath showed 7-year-old Ward al-Sheikh Khalil walking through the building while it burned, narrowly escaping a harrowing death.

“When we pulled her out, she was in shock, silent, trembling, unable to comprehend what had just happened,” explained one of the paramedics who rescued her. “We couldn’t bring ourselves to tell her that her entire family was killed in the bombing.”

It’s clear why some Israel supporters prefer trying the business route, as opposed to the “morality and humanity” one.

🇮🇱 Trump and Netanyahu

A recent Newsweek article insists that Trump’s relationship with Netanyahu is worsening.

The reasons are precisely what you’d imagine them to be: the Trump team cutting Israel out of a number of recent agreements and seemingly shrugging off Netanyahu’s advice on Iran.

“While the broader U.S.-Israel alliance remains strategically robust, the relationship between Trump and Netanyahu has frayed significantly,” explains the article.

Assuming this is true for the sake of argument, it’s unclear whether it will have any discernible impact on the genocide in Gaza.

Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff recently insisted that Israel is ready to back a temporary ceasefire, but we’ve heard such things before. We have also seen a ceasefire, which was predictably blown up by the Netanyahu government with the full support of the United States.

In a Haaretz column, Amir Tibon addresses the core of this dynamic. He points to Trump’s recent comments about wanting the war to end quickly, which generated a good amount of optimistic commentary about how the bloodshed could be nearing an end.

While Trump publicly declares that the war must end and Palestinians need aid, the cycle has remained fairly consistent. Hamas says it will release the remaining Israelis if the bombing stops and Bibi actually commits to the ceasefire. Netanyahu demands a complete and total surrender from Hamas.

It’s worth pointing out that Israel believes there are 40,000 Hamas fighters left. That’s the same amount that they thought existed on October 7.

Tibon draws a direct line between Trump and his predecessor.

“This was exactly the dynamic under Biden, and throughout the year 2024, the former president’s team gave full backing to Netanyahu in public, while criticizing his stance in private conversations and background briefings to the media,” he writes. “Now, it seems that the Trump team is falling into the same trap, putting all its weight behind Netanyahu’s demand to reach a partial, temporary cease-fire and hostage deal, instead of pushing for a quick deal to save all the hostages and end the war.”

“The only way this nightmare will reach a turning point is if Trump and Witkoff will decide to no longer allow Netanyahu and his confidant Ron Dermer to set the terms of the negotiations,” he continues. “When that happens, a fast deal to end the war, bring back all the hostages, replace Hamas with a different Palestinian government and foster a new era of normalization agreements between Israel and important Arab countries will become possible. But for now, we are stuck in the same loop we all already lived through in 2024 under Biden.”

Another round of this loop just occurred. Hamas thought they had secured a 70-day ceasefire through their negotiations with Trump officials. Israel publicly killed it, and then Witkoff claimed that it was Hamas’s fault that it fell apart.

And the genocide continues.