Two major misconceptions continue to distort the conversation about the Middle East, Israel and the war in Gaza.

The first item concerns US President Donald Trump’s stance toward Israel, especially his relationship with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Commentators increasingly portray Trump as a jilted lover, scorned by Netanyahu’s supposed disloyalty.

But the reality is far more strategic than emotional. Israel continues to play a central role in the MAGA vision for the Middle East.

Understanding this requires looking past Trump’s flamboyant tour from Riyadh to Doha to Abu Dhabi, and ignoring the theatrical moments—such as his referring to Syrian leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, a former terrorist, as “an attractive young man,” or gushing that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is “someone I like very much,” while signing $142 billion in weapons sales.

Yes, Trump’s team negotiated directly with Hamas to secure the release of American hostage Edan Alexander. And yes, the United States struck a side deal with the Houthis to prevent attacks on commercial vessels in the Red Sea. But at the core of Trump’s Middle East policy remains a strategic call for Saudi Arabia and the broader Arab world to join the Abraham Accords. And those accords cannot exist without Israel.

This brings us to the second misconception steering the conversation. According to Netanyahu’s strategic doctrine, Israel’s role is to provide regional security by defeating Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. Without that, any regional architecture involving the Saudis, Emiratis, Egyptians and Jordanians risks collapse. Just last week, Israel buried Tzeela Gez, murdered on her way to the hospital to give birth, in one of more than 2,200 terror attacks against Israelis launched or thwarted between January and March alone.

In an interview on Friday with Bret Baier on Fox News, Trump renewed his praise for Netanyahu, describing him as justifiably “angry” about the Hamas massacre of Oct. 7, 2023—calling it “one of the most violent days in the history of the world”—and as someone who “fought hard and bravely.”

That’s the reality. Israeli reservists continue returning to the front, while families are once again left waiting in dreadful uncertainty. Israel stands alone, as it did when it entered Rafah, facing international condemnation driven by a tidal wave of lies about the IDF, a military that, unlike any other, goes to extraordinary lengths to minimize civilian casualties.

If Hamas were to surrender its hostages and weapons, the fighting would end. Even those who fuel antisemitism with the blood libel of “genocide” know this. As historian Robert Wistrich warned, we are seeing a grotesque inversion of morality in which “the Nazis become the Jews.”

The goal of this war is straightforward: to corner Hamas until it relinquishes its weapons and returns the hostages. What is so esoteric about that? What kind of twisted logic imagines that Israel fights for pleasure? This is a war for survival.

And yet, in the near-unanimous global condemnation of Netanyahu’s refusal to capitulate—as during the battle for Rafah—there lies an implicit endorsement of the Oct. 7 atrocities, and a disturbing societal absorption of lies about supposed Israeli war crimes.

Consider the humanitarian crisis. While international actors now work to ease conditions in Gaza, it was Hamas that made the situation catastrophic by seizing food at gunpoint. Video evidence confirms this, even as Israel is scapegoated.

Civilian casualties—still extremely low compared to other conflicts, with a one-to-one ratio of civilians to combatants—are the direct result of Hamas’s militarization of homes, schools, hospitals, children’s bedrooms, and its deliberate policy of preventing civilians from sheltering in underground tunnels.

The totalitarian indoctrination of the territory—what can only be called the “Nazification” of Gaza—has fostered support for terrorism from early childhood, turning civilians into human shields and willing accomplices. One need only recall the funeral of the Bibas family.

Israel cannot, under pain of death, allow this terror regime to survive.

This is where Trump returns to the stage. A president who navigated the Middle East in search of economic transformation that could restore American greatness, Trump still offers Israel an unprecedented opportunity to assert itself in a new regional order. But Israel cannot afford to allow its security to remain in doubt. To survive, it must fight—and make itself heard on Iran.

Talks with the Islamic Republic remain highly unstable. But Trump has repeatedly pledged that Iran will never be allowed to acquire a nuclear weapon.

As recently as Friday, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei called the US president a liar. Still, Trump—unlike the Europeans— has refrained from discussing a “Palestinian state.” He has dropped the obsession with “settlements” that former President Joe Biden clung to so dearly.

The diplomatic playing field is clear. What remains is a profound question: Can a grand Islamic coalition, alongside vast economic incentives, ever truly accept peace with the West?

That may be the defining challenge of our era.