Is Trump selling out Israel? No, because Israel is not for sale.
With or without the United States as a key partner, Israel will be just fine.
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By all appearances, Donald Trump is busy auditioning for the role of Middle East Real Estate Agent-in-Chief.
Before even boarding Air Force One for his latest whirlwind tour of oil-rich handshakes and ceremonial sword dances, the former president signed a “truce” with the Yemen-based terror group the Houthis — just 48 hours after they struck Israel’s main international vessel, Ben Gurion Airport, with a ballistic missile. That attack caused foreign airlines to flee Israel’s skies. No condemnation. No solidarity. Just silence and signatures.
Then came the true pageantry. In Riyadh, Trump pledged arms deals with Saudi Arabia to the tune of $142 billion, an astronomical package that could tilt the military balance of the region. He reassured the Saudis that their entry into the Abraham Accords could come “in their own time,” and he seemed to treat Israel as a background player in a theater the Israelis helped build.
On Sunday, the curtain lifted again — this time in Qatar — where Trump proudly accepted a $400 million jet “GIFT, FREE OF CHARGE,” in his own caps-locked words. Though not so free: In return the Qataris received from Trump $243 billion in economic deals, a $1.2 trillion commitment for mutual investment, and a civil nuclear conversation that sent chills down the spines of Israeli security officials.
Israeli Opposition Leader Yair Lapid warned that such a nuclear program would spark a Middle East arms race. Others in Jerusalem are openly wondering whether Trump is mad at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for pushing too hard on Iran, or simply no longer sees Israel as central to America’s strategy.
So, is Trump selling out Israel?
Let’s answer the question with the clarity it deserves: He can’t. Because Israel isn’t for sale.
Israel’s security has never been based on the goodwill of any one U.S. president, Democrat or Republican. Its survival isn’t built on diplomatic overtures, foreign handouts, or arms deals brokered in marble halls. Israel exists because it earned the right to exist, every single day, for 77 years. It remains strong not because of what others give it, but because of what it creates.
Let the autocrats sign their blank checks. Let Qatar throw around billions and buy Boeing aircraft like they’re toys. Let the Saudis play footsie with civil nuclear ambitions under the guise of “peaceful energy.” None of them can replicate what Israel has: brains, creativity, and a national obsession with survival.
Those aren’t assets you can wire transfer.
Israel remains one of the strongest countries in the world, pound-for-pound, not just with high-end technology, but with the capacity to innovate under fire, think under pressure, and improvise when the odds are stacked. It’s why such a tiny country can take on multiple fronts at once. It’s why Israeli-made Iron Dome intercepts missiles with split-second precision, while the rest of the region is still figuring out how to aim.
And let’s recall that, before Israel developed Iron Dome, the United States tried to pitch us on a laser-based missile defense system. Washington swore it would be the answer to our Hamas rockets problem. So Israeli engineers flew to the U.S. to see it. They ran the numbers, tested the system — and quickly realized it didn’t work. It was little more than a concept in search of functionality.
So Israel did what it always does when the world offers false promises: It built its own solution. And now, the world studies our system.
American presidents may talk a big game, but the reality is that they come and go. Some are deeply supportive. Some are transactional. Others, like what we may be seeing now, try to play both sides, hoping money will buy peace, while ignoring the genocidal theology of the Islamic Republic of Iran, or the double game played by Qatar, or the hypocritical posturing by Saudi Arabia about “Palestinian rights” while they deny human rights to their own people.
But Israel? Israel persists.
For all the talk of “balancing interests,” no Gulf regime is sending its brightest engineers to Stanford University. No autocracy is launching med-tech startups, winning Nobel Prizes, or training the West in cybersecurity. Israel is the linchpin. The firewall. The only country between the Mediterranean and the Khyber Pass where innovation isn’t just a buzzword, but a ceaseless reality.
Hence, Israel isn’t a liability to the West. It’s the last insurance policy the West has.
And Arab regimes know this all too well. Behind all the palace handshakes and public neutrality, they are making a cold, clear calculation: Don’t push Israel too far.
They’ve seen what happens when others do, like the pathetic fate suffered by Hamas leadership — assassinated across Gaza, Lebanon, and even safehouses in Tehran — after October 7th. They watched as Israeli intelligence dismantled entire terror networks, drone by drone, block by block. They took note when senior Hezbollah commanders suddenly found themselves airborne without boarding a plane.
And they remember May 2024, when Iran’s president and foreign minister died in a mysterious helicopter crash — just months after Israel had openly vowed to retaliate for a deadly Iranian proxy attack. Israel never claimed responsibility. It didn’t need to. The message was clear: No one is untouchable.
The Gulf states aren’t fools, at least not completely. They may pontificate in public, but in private, they admire what Israel can do and fear what it might do next. Their investments in American military hardware might buy them security on paper, but Israel has what no Arab regime has managed to build: an ecosystem of self-reliant, high-speed, precision defense with one of the world’s most feared intelligence communities backing it.
In a region of shifting sands, Israel is a mountain.
What Trump may not realize — and what many in the West forget — is that Israel is not the client in some grand imperial transaction. It is not some banana republic waiting for its next foreign benefactor. It is not Saudi Arabia, with oil barrels for leverage. It is not Qatar, playing all sides with billions in bribes.
It is a nation of Jews who crawled out of the ashes of Nazi concentration camps, trekked across deserts, fought off invasions, revived a dead language, built world-class universities, spawned countless innovations, created a cybersecurity powerhouse, and sent satellites into space.
The Jewish story is not one of victimhood. It is one of return, survival, reinvention. Trump doesn’t understand that because he doesn’t have to. His country was handed to him. Ours was earned — millimeter by millimeter, war by war, prayer by prayer. And because it was earned, it cannot be sold.
That kind of independence terrifies despots. It confuses bureaucrats. And apparently, it doesn’t factor into the spreadsheets of a businessman president who sees everything in terms of deal value. But history isn’t written by dealmakers. It’s written by those who endure.
Let the world play its power games. Let Trump chase his Saudi love affair and tweet about free jets. Let the analysts warn of Israel’s growing isolation, its declining leverage, its so-called “lack of options.”
They’ve been warning since 1948.
In the end, Israel doesn’t need America to survive. It chooses alliance. It chooses friendship. But let’s not forget: Israel’s first main ally wasn’t the United States; it was France (which provided the Dimona reactor and the political support that helped Israel punch far above its weight in the 1956 Sinai Campaign).
Now, the Israeli-French relationship is a husk of its former self. French President Emmanuel Macron has openly taken sides not with the democracy defending itself from terror, but with the very jihadists who would burn it all down. Under his leadership, France has voted for UN resolutions that erase Jewish history from Jerusalem, condemned Israel for defending its citizens, and whitewashed Hamas atrocities as “proportional responses” to “occupation.”
This is the same Macron who lectures Israel about human rights while France itself battles Islamist riots in its suburbs, who offers shelter to Hamas propagandists in the name of “free speech,” and who bows to the mob in the streets of Paris, waving Hezbollah flags under the Arc de Triomphe.
So if France was once our ally and now calls for our restraint as missiles rain down on Israeli kindergartens, what makes anyone think America is a permanent guarantee?
This is not cynicism. It’s clarity.
So, if America’s partnership disappears tomorrow, Israel will adapt. Because, when your founding story begins with a people nobody wanted, in a land nobody helped you reclaim, you learn quickly: You are your own best ally.
The world turns. Interests shift. Presidents change. One day you are essential; the next, expendable in the hands of Washington dealmakers, or in the pockets of Gulf royals, or in the cowardice of European diplomats. And certainly not in the court of global public opinion, which loves Jews only when they are dead or powerless.
Israel is not a client state. It is not a vassal. And it is not for sale. It is a sovereign miracle, built by a people who have endured Pharaohs, emperors, inquisitors, sultans, czars, and genocidal maniacs with PhDs. The Jewish People outlasted all of them. We don’t measure our survival in four-year election cycles or Truth Social trends. We measure it in generations.
And generation after generation, we rebuild.
So let Trump do his dance. Let the Europeans speak their double-tongued peace. Let the oil regimes build golden towers on top of the rubble of their civil societies. Let them all imagine that Israel can be pressured, isolated, or sold off like a pawn on their regional chessboard.
Let them imagine it.
But they would do well to remember: This pawn moves like a queen.
Well said. The USA has had many fine accomplishments in its History. However, the Amercans have been & seemingly still are, in many respects arrogant, rude and aborbed in self-aggrandizement...taking credit for achievements that fall short of hitting the mark. Sometimes building up Strong walls....then breaking them down, tempering trustworthiness. There are many examples in their History.
Their current President seems not to understand or even thinks- that his bullish manner of doing business that worked for him in his personal business endeavours are not suited or acceptable on the world are dubious, seemingly treachorous promises to be believed and yet, can be seen right through. (What is worse is when he makes comments that place his level of intelligence, or remarks that demonstrate a profound lack of General knowledge..even tactless“ asking whose even heard of a country called 'Lesotho' - is there such a place? “ How shunned does that make the people of Lesotho feel, even a trading partner! That is a stupid thing to say, and it is not the only time!
It is like any individual who has to
make it in this world, to survie, yes, even to take the help when and where it is offered and seemingly a trustworthy source. But when it has
outlived its use...through principles being compromised, to be able to move on independently, backing
ones self with little need for outside
appproval is the compelling alternative.
(I am a peace loving man..who is not? Who?) I often wondered, for a long time in the past, what would Israels options to action be, when that plethora of tunnels under the Palestinians, exploded to life(& death! ) & began attacking Israel?
Part of me hoped I would have lived out my full life without having to hear of it. ...because there would
mass slaughter of innocents - where the civilians had failed to take responsibility for protecting their own safety- rendered themselves
powerless (by being convinced of their legitamacy & apparent anti Israel patriotic needs) to safeguard themselves from an obvious retaliation...is that also suffered from a form of self-aggrandizement only to be struck horribly into reality.
Simplistically...and for example, had there been miaryd of bomb shelters
developed for rescuers to access?
My Uncle, who was an infantryman, bag piper and medic & ultimately a prisoner of war, needless to say(but I shall anyway! ) in a Scottish Regiment during World War 2 - he said in war, where you wanted to or not it came down to a matter of 'Kill or Be Killed`. That is what you do for
the survival of the species..a nation (in this instance regardless of the approval or judgement of others - the outside world). Carry on Little Israel. You are great..in many things(some portrayed in your article here)
Great in courage, in fortitude and with ingenuity. Here I am compelled to add, just as a thought as carried down to me by my own mother- that Desperation is the Mother of Invention. Not a helpless desperation but one where you have come to realize that you are on your own and must come up with a way to overcome anything that is thrown at you..that lives depend on it(look at your Dome! ) and to know because past experience, that your inherant ingenuity wont fail you..yet again!
May the Lord continue to be with you and to Bless you.
Israel should always its strategic and tactical independence even and especially if Washington disagrees