As U.S. President Donald Trump jetted from one sprawling palace to another, embracing Arab leaders and heralding a new Middle East this week, many in Israel worried that the best partner they’ve ever had in the White House had lost interest.
For decades, Israel has leveraged its special relationship with the United States to serve as a gatekeeper to Washington. From the Camp David Treaty with Egypt to the Abraham Accords brokered by Trump in his first term, Arab states seeking U.S. favor usually had to first make nice with Israel. And rarely did their interests prevail if they clashed with Israel’s.
But on Wednesday, to Israel’s dismay, Saudi Arabia and Turkey brokered a historic meeting between Trump and Syria’s new president, and Trump portrayed his decision to lift sanctions on Damascus as a favor to his host, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Israel, which still views Syria as a security threat and had urged Trump to keep the sanctions in place, was ignored, as it apparently was on a number of recent U.S. initiatives in the region, from the ongoing talks with Iran to the ceasefire with Yemen’s Houthi rebels. Asked Friday if he knew Israel opposes U.S. recognition of Syria’s new government, Trump replied: “I don’t know, I didn’t ask them about that.”
“This week there was a party in the Middle East — a grand ball full of colorful costumes, money and gold changing hands — and we found ourselves playing the role of Cinderella before the transformation,” columnist Sima Kadmon wrote in Israel’s Yediot Ahronot daily.
“The fairy godmother we thought we had flew off to Saudi Arabia and Qatar.”
Israel sidelined
Table of Contents
Trump skipped Israel on his first major foreign tour, which instead took him to Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.
Israel was also left out of a deal with Hamas to free an American hostage from Gaza, where Israel is trying to destroy the militant group. Trump reached a separate truce with Yemen’s Houthi rebels that has allowed them to train their fire on Israel, and is holding talks with Iran on its nuclear program that could bring about another deal that Israel rejects.
There have been no open clashes between Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, both of whom say relations have never been better. Trump has yet to scold Israel, at least in public, as former President Joe Biden occasionally did, over civilian deaths in the Gaza Strip.
But compared to Trump’s first term, when he upended decades of U.S. foreign policy to lend unprecedented support to Israel, something has changed.
A focus on quick wins
This time around, Trump seems to be hunting for quick wins — big investment deals to boost the American economy and diplomatic agreements like the India-Pakistan ceasefire and the release of hostages.
In that respect, Netanyahu has little to offer.
Israel’s 19-month military campaign in Gaza has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians and reduced entire towns to rubble but has yet to achieve either of Netanyahu’s war aims — the defeat of Hamas and the return of all the hostages taken in the Oct. 7, 2023, attack that ignited the war.
Netanyahu has refused to end the war in exchange for the release of the remaining hostages, or to accept a pathway to Palestinian statehood — key Saudi demands for the kind of historic normalization accord that Trump has long sought.
“Trump has given Israel many opportunities, and ammunition prohibited by the Biden administration, to end the war in Gaza. This is what Trump wants,” said Eytan Gilboa, an expert on U.S.-Israeli relations at Israel’s Bar-Ilan and Reichman universities. Instead, the war is intensifying.
“Netanyahu is coming closer to the status of a loser in Trump’s eyes,” Gilboa said.
Trump denies rift and few expect pressure over Gaza
Trump has downplayed any rift, telling reporters on the tour that his relationships with regional leaders are “good for Israel.”
The irony is that Israel is being excluded from a regional realignment that it largely created, by inflicting punishing losses on Iran and its allies after the Oct. 7 attack. Its thrashing of Hezbollah in Lebanon hastened the downfall of Syrian President Bashar Assad, and Iran may be more open to concessions on its nuclear program after a wave of Israeli retaliatory strikes last year.
Michael Oren, a historian and former Israeli ambassador to the U.S., said there is at least one precedent for Trump’s approach.
“It’s going to drive the people in Washington crazy, but it most closely resembles the Obama administration,” he said.
On Barack Obama’s first visit as president to the Middle East, he too skipped Israel. Oren, a critic of that administration who was Israel’s envoy to the U.S. at the time, said Obama repeatedly violated an unspoken rule of U.S.-Israeli relations — that there be no surprises. That led to public spats with Netanyahu, especially around the 2015 Iranian nuclear deal.
Few expect a repeat under Trump — or that he will publicly press Israel to wind down the war in Gaza, despite the humanitarian catastrophe unleashed by its war and blockade.
Trump has said the days of the United States giving “lectures” to Middle Eastern countries are over — that decades of American intervention have done more harm than good.
And the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the last place any American president would look for a quick win.
“He’s not looking for a fight with Israel,” Oren said. “He wants to end the war, but the war can end in different ways.”
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Follow AP’s war coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/israel-hamas-war
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Overall Structure and Purpose
The provided HTML snippet appears to be a piece of a larger article or news page. It likely aims to:
- Display an image: Show a photograph along with a caption.
- Provide responsive image loading: Offer diffrent image sizes and formats (WebP and standard) depending on screen size and browser capabilities for optimal performance.
- Include a caption: Describe the image and its context.
- Provide interactivity (possibly): The
data-openoverlay=""suggests that clicking the image might open an overlay with more details or a larger view.
Key Elements Explained
data-openoverlay="" This attribute indicates an action/overlay that will open when the image is clicked.
: This creates an anchor point within the page. It allows you to directly link to this specific image using href="#image-ce0000".
data-crop="imgEn-medium-nocrop": This attribute might be used by JavaScript or CSS to manage the cropping of the image.
media="(min-width: ...)": A media query that determines when this source will be used. The browser selects the first
type="image/webp": Specifies that the image is in WebP format (a modern image format that often provides better compression then JPEG). Browsers that don’t support WebP will skip this
width and height: specifies the native width and height of the image.
srcset="...": This is the most important attribute. It provides a comma-separated list of image URLs along with their pixel densities (e.g., 1x for normal resolution, 2x for high-DPI/Retina displays).The browser will choose the most appropriate image from this list based on the user’s screen resolution and pixel density.
alt="...": A textual description of the image for accessibility (screen readers, SEO, etc.). Crucially, always provide a descriptive alt attribute!
loading="lazy": this attribute enables lazy loading. The image won’t be loaded until it’s about to come into view,improving initial page load performance.
src="...": the URL of the image.
: This is a template element. It’s not rendered directly on the page. It likely holds the HTML for the overlay or popup that appears when the image is clicked. JavaScript code would take the content from this template and insert it into the DOM when needed.
Example explanation
Let’s break down a single srcset attribute offers two image resolutions:
https://dims.apnews.com/...800x533!... 1x: A WebP image that’s 800 pixels wide and 533 pixels high (for normal resolution screens).
https://dims.apnews.com/...1600x1066!... 2x: A WebP image that’s 1600 pixels wide and 1066 pixels high (for high-DPI/Retina screens).
Best Practices and Considerations
alt Attribute: Always provide a meaningful alt attribute for accessibility.
Image Optimization: Optimize images before including them in your HTML. Use tools to compress them without sacrificing too much quality.
WebP Format: use WebP whenever possible.It generally provides better compression than JPEG, leading to smaller file sizes and faster loading times.
Lazy Loading: Use loading="lazy" on images to improve initial page load performance,especially on pages with many images.
Consistent Naming Conventions: Use consistent class names and IDs for easier maintenance and styling.
Testing: Thoroughly test your responsive images on different devices and browsers to ensure they load correctly and look good.
* Consider a CDN (Content Delivery Network): For high-traffic websites, using a CDN to serve images can significantly improve performance by caching images on servers around the world.
this HTML snippet demonstrates a robust approach to displaying images responsively, providing different versions for various screen sizes and resolutions. It also includes accessibility features and potential interactivity.
