Describing Benjamin Netanyahu as “the most American politician in the world outside the United States”—the Israeli prime minister spent part of his childhood and early career in the U.S.—Seth Mandel explores where his grasp of America has succeeded and where it has failed to influence administration policy, and where Barack Obama has similarly failed vis-à-vis Israel:

No Israeli—no foreign leader, for that matter—knows America the way Bibi does. But by definition, any American president has a better feel for the U.S. electorate and a superior understanding of the minutiae of political operation than virtually anyone else save his living predecessors.

Netanyahu’s repeated attempts to find leverage against President Obama were understandable but in retrospect doomed to failure, as we saw in his effort to run rings around Obama on the Iran deal—specifically by addressing a joint session of Congress. . . . That Netanyahu was right on the merits doesn’t mean he was right on the optics. . . . . .

Barack Obama, [for his part], unnecessarily put Netanyahu in impossible situations with his own coalition, for example by demanding an unprecedented settlement freeze that forbade building for “natural growth” and in Jerusalem. And Obama refused to put pressure on Mahmoud Abbas to stop the officially sanctioned incitement that led to terror sprees and disempowered both leaders by making them subservient to events.

While conventional wisdom in the Western press believes that the war with Hamas has left Jerusalem more isolated and scuttled chances of expanding the Abraham Accords, Gabriel Scheinmann points to a very different reality. He begins with Iran’s massive drone and missile attack on Israel last month, and the coalition that helped defend against it:

America’s Arab allies had, in various ways, provided intelligence and allowed U.S. and Israeli planes to operate in their airspace. Jordan, which has been vociferously attacking Israel’s conduct in Gaza for months, even publicly acknowledged that it shot down incoming Iranian projectiles. When the chips were down, the Arab coalition held and made clear where they stood in the broader Iranian war on Israel.

The successful batting away of the Iranian air assault also engendered awe in Israel’s air-defense capabilities, which have performed marvelously throughout the war. . . . Israel’s response to the Iranian night of missiles should give further courage to Saudi Arabia to codify its alignment. Israel . . . telegraphed clearly to Tehran that it could hit precise targets without its aircraft being endangered and that the threshold of a direct Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear or other sites had been breached.

The entire episode demonstrated that Israel can both hit Iranian sites and defend against an Iranian response. At a time when the United States is focused on de-escalation and restraint, Riyadh could see quite clearly that only Israel has both the capability and the will to deal with the Iranian threat.

It is impossible to know whether the renewed U.S.-Saudi-Israel negotiations will lead to a normalization deal in the immediate months ahead. . . . Regardless of the status of this deal, [however], or how difficult the war in Gaza may appear, America’s Arab allies have now become Israel’s.