
Amos Ben-Gershom (GPO) / Handout/Anadolu via Getty Images
Israeli right still hopeful about Trump presidency despite ‘terrible’ cease-fire deal
Many hope Netanyahu received promises from Trump for the future, such as support for attack on Iran, peace with the Saudis
When President Donald Trump won the election in November, much of the Israeli right celebrated.
“This is time for total victory … I have no doubt the president of the United States will see eye to eye with us,” then-National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said on the Knesset stage. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich declared 2025 “the year of sovereignty in Judea and Samaria,” the biblical name used by Israel for the West Bank.
Yinon Magal, a pro-Netanyahu TV and radio news talk show host with a large social media following, put on a Trump hat during his TV show and said a blessing for the president-elect, adding, “Your success should bring success to the Jewish people.”
Since Israel and Hamas reached a cease-fire and hostage-release agreement last week, with significant pressure from the incoming administration, the Israeli right’s take on Trump has been much less ecstatic. In the wake of the agreement, a new narrative has taken hold: that Trump will give Israel something else in return for the deal it made.
Over the weekend, Ben-Gvir resigned and pulled his party out of the governing coalition in protest of the deal whereby, in its first phase, the IDF began withdrawing from Gazan population centers and about 1,000 Palestinian security prisoners were set to be released in exchange for 33 hostages over six weeks. Smotrich voted against the deal and has threatened to quit the coalition if the war in Gaza does not resume after the first phase of hostage releases.
Ohad Tal, a lawmaker in Smotrich’s party, took his opposition to the deal to Mar-a-Lago last week, where he spoke at a Jerusalem Prayer Breakfast event with Trump’s nominee for ambassador to Israel, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, present. Tal called on Trump “not to support a deal that will leave the evil of Hamas in power, not to support a deal that will leave the vast majority of the hostages [in Gaza]. We want to see everybody home.” Tal declined to comment further.

Other prominent right-wing figures in Israel have been much more staid in their assessments of what a second Trump term will be like, since the president and his Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, pushed Israel to accept the Biden administration’s cease-fire plan that much of the Israeli right views as dangerous.
Magal told Jewish Insider that he “supported Trump very much and did a lot so that [Israeli-Americans] with the right to vote would vote for him. I hope that he won’t disappoint us.”
“I think that Trump’s heart is in the right place, and the people around him have their hearts and heads in the right place,” he said. “I understand that his interests do not always totally overlap with Israel’s … I understand that he wanted an immediate win.”
Magal expressed hope that Trump “will support Israel in achieving the war’s objectives — eliminating Hamas and allowing all the hostages to come back — and to destroy the Iranian nuclear project and maybe even topple the regime there.”
The time to assess Trump’s intentions will be at the end of the six-week initial stage of the hostage deal, Magal said: “Will Trump allow Israel to return to fight the war and achieve its objectives? He wanted a win when he entered office, we understand. The test will be after the 42 days.”

Dor Harlap, a Likud activist and chairman of Zionist Horizon, a young leadership program, told JI, “We are disappointed that Trump pressured us to free murderous terrorists. We are disappointed that our closest ally would pressure us to do something so terrible.”
Harlap argued that seeing terrorists who killed scores of Israelis be released is “hard for all Zionists, on a rational level,” and not only the right.
“The fact that the agreement offered to us is the same as the one [then-President Joe] Biden offered in May … shows that Trump isn’t pressuring us for our own good,” he added. “Are you our partner, or do you just want a victory photo?”
Harlap said he received “clear hints” from Likud lawmakers in recent days that Netanyahu received “significant promises” from Trump relating to peace treaties with more countries in the Middle East and arms deliveries after the first six weeks of the deal.
“If we get something in the future that I don’t know about now, fine. But it has to have significant value,” he said. “He did amazing things in his first term … for our future in the Land of Israel, and I hope that is the case now and the hostage deal is an anomaly.”
The weekend magazine of right-wing religious-Zionist newspaper Makor Rishon, owned by Dr. Miriam Adelson, wrote on its cover that “the incoming American president promised hell for Hamas, but made Israel surrender first.”
The leading column, by Haggai Segal, father of one of Israel’s most prominent journalists, Amit Segal, carried the headline “Trump’s deal” and was illustrated with a cartoon of Netanyahu bent into the shape of the ribbons calling for the hostages’ return, implying that he folded.
Segal — who in the 1980s served time in prison for a terrorism conviction and has since been a journalist in several mainstream and right-wing publications — wrote: “What Biden could not do, with all of his pressure, Trump did in the end … Witkoff showed little interest in Israel’s interests in his visit to Israel last week. Trump wants a deal now, and the prime minister preferred to satisfy him instead of insisting. This time, as well, he explains the surrender with the Iranian excuse: If Trump gets what he wants with the hostages, maybe he will give a green light to attack the Iranian nuclear [program] soon.”
Ariel Kahana, the newly minted White House correspondent for Israel Hayom, Israel’s freely distributed and most-read newspaper — also owned by Adelson — penned a Wall Street Journal op-ed calling the agreement “a deal with the devil,” reflecting his analysis on the matter in Hebrew.
Kahana wrote that “a better deal was available and could have been reached had Jerusalem and Mar-a-Lago waited a few days. President-elect Trump’s demand for a final agreement before his Jan. 20 inauguration pressured Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to accept the current framework.”
“Many Israelis hoped that Mr. Trump would stop the madness and give Mr. Netanyahu the green light to crush Hamas once and for all,” Kahana concluded. “Instead, Mr. Trump pushed Mr. Netanyahu to accept a deal with the devil. The Israeli prime minister should never have done it.”
Days later, however, Kahana shifted the blame away from Trump. He posted a clip from Fox News about “the high price that Israel is paying for the deal,” and asserted that “if Netanyahu opposed and said to Trump ‘this is a deal that endangers Israel’s security,’ the [American] public would understand it … Don’t complain about Trump or his envoy, but rather to Netanyahu alone, who once again made a deal with the devil. If he wanted to, he could have avoided it.”
Others on the right fixated on reports in Hebrew media that Adelson pushed Trump toward a deal. Israeli-American writer Caroline Glick advanced a theory that Trump pushed the deal because Adelson asked him to, in order to weaken Netanyahu politically and lead to his ouster.
“Miriam Adelson pressured Trump to bend to force [sic] Netanyahu to agree to a deal or to ruin his relations with the incoming president in advance [of his return to office],” Glick wrote in Hebrew in a now-deleted post on X.