The Leverage Gap: Why U.S. Pressure Works on Gaza but Not on West Bank Annexation

Donald Trump has demonstrated, twice and publicly, that he can make Israel change course. In late June, his administration vetoed a renewed Israeli military offensive in Gaza that would have derailed his "Board of Peace" diplomatic initiative ^[1]. Days later, he pressured Benjamin Netanyahu into approving pilot withdrawals from southern Lebanon, calling the Israeli prime minister "crazy" and asserting that "Netanyahu knows who the boss is" ^[2]. The friction was real enough that Netanyahu felt compelled to push back publicly, insisting that Israel stands for its own interests ^[3]. So the leverage exists, and the president is willing to spend it — when Israeli military action collides with his diplomatic agenda. What has never received the same treatment is the other project proceeding in parallel, at a pace that international observers are now calling de facto annexation. The contrast is not subtle. On May 22, nine Western nations — the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Norway, and the Netherlands — jointly condemned Israeli settlements as illegal and warned businesses against touching settlement tenders, specifically naming "annexation and forcible displacement." The United States was not among them ^[4]. On June 9, six of those nations imposed coordinated sanctions on Israeli settlers and settlement entities, with France barring Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich from its territory. The United States was absent again ^[5]. The most consequential bilateral actor in Israel's economy and security sat out both the condemnation and the penalty. What Smotrich is doing with the space that creates is no longer incremental. His office has approved more than 100 new settlements, tens of thousands of housing units, and at least 160 new farms, with a separate plan allocating $350 million for 61 new West Bank settlement sites explicitly timed before Israeli national elections in late 2026 ^[6]. Netanyahu's cabinet has approved 13 new settlements in the central West Bank, targeting strategic Route 60 corridors and the Jordan Valley ^[7]. Settler groups have presented Netanyahu's ministers with a plan to seize 100 sites in Area A — the territory under full Palestinian Authority control under the Oslo II agreement, meaning the last zones of Palestinian civil authority ^[8]. A Peace Now and Kerem Navot report documents the cumulative result: 185 new outposts, over 40,000 housing units, 223 kilometers of new roads, and 118 expelled Palestinian communities between 2023 and 2025 ^[9].

$350M allocated for 61 new settlement sites before late-2026 elections — Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich's office is timing settlement construction to create facts on the ground before national elections ^[6].

Trump stated in September 2025 that he would not allow Israel to annex the West Bank, and his administration has been "less critical of settlement growth" than of military operations. The verbal objection has produced no material constraint. Palestinian officials have explicitly called for U.S. intervention to stop the construction ^[10]. Netanyahu did block a Knesset bill to repeal the Oslo Accords that would have expanded settlements into Areas A and B — but his Cabinet Secretary noted the bill "required coordination and cooperation with the United States," meaning the constraint was procedural, not punitive, and it did not touch the expansion already underway ^[11]. The reason the constraint never escalates beyond the procedural lies in what is happening to the leverage tools themselves. The House has proposed Section 224 of the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act to merge the U.S. and Israeli military-industrial complexes — joint research and development, co-production, and data fusion across AI, quantum, cyber, and autonomous systems. The provision is co-sponsored by Republican Mike Rogers and senior Democrat Adam Smith, aligning with Netanyahu's declared goal of moving Israel "from aid recipient to partner" and ending its reliance on U.S. military aid within a decade ^[12]. If military aid becomes a permanent defense partnership, the last mechanism for conditioning U.S. support on Israeli behavior evaporates. Congress passed a separate mandate deepening U.S.-Israel military synchronization even as the Pentagon and Defense Intelligence Agency raised Israel's spying threat to its highest level — the intelligence community treating Israel as a security risk while the legislature binds the two militaries tighter ^[13]. NDAA Section 224 At the same time, the one serious legislative attempt to impose a material consequence was killed in committee. The House Rules Committee canceled a vote on a bipartisan amendment — sponsored by Republican Thomas Massie and Democrat Ro Khanna, backed by Casar, Omar, and Ocasio-Cortez — that would have cut the $3.3 billion in annual U.S. military aid to Israel. Senior Democrats Greg Meeks and Adam Smith opposed it. Even this amendment, the most aggressive Democratic effort to date, targeted Gaza war crimes, not West Bank annexation ^[14]. The constituency for conditioning U.S. support exists. It cannot get a floor vote, and when it tried, it aimed at the wrong target. That constituency is growing. AP-NORC polling shows 58% of Democrats now believe U.S. support for Israel is excessive, up from 45% in early 2024, while 68% of Republican primary voters say the U.S. should mostly or completely side with Israel ^[15]. A Quinnipiac survey in June found 48% of all American voters saying the U.S. is too supportive of Israel — the highest since tracking began in 2017 — with 66% of Democrats and 55% of independents saying support is excessive, while 69% of Republicans call it "about right" ^[16]. A YouGov survey found 62% of Republicans view U.S. and Israeli strategic interests as aligned, against 29% of Democrats ^[17]. The split is institutionalizing in primaries. Pro-Israel incumbents like Dan Goldman and Diana DeGette have lost Democratic primaries. The American Priorities super PAC spent $5.6 million backing candidates critical of Israel and AIPAC, winning races for democratic socialists in New York, Colorado, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. AIPAC's affiliated United Democracy Project spent $34 million this cycle pushing back. Both sides are now treating the Israel question as a primary-election battlefield ^[18][19]. But that battlefield is producing political energy, not policy. The Democratic departure from the pro-Israel consensus is real and accelerating, yet it runs into a structural wall: Democrats do not control the levers of U.S. foreign policy or the congressional machinery to force a vote, and the Republican party that does control them is moving in the opposite direction — dismantling the leverage infrastructure, not deploying it. The pattern's specific shape is what makes it enabling. The penalty's infrastructure is held by the party that will not use it on annexation and is actively converting it into something that cannot be used. Its constituency is in the party that cannot get a vote. Smotrich has read the gap accurately. He dismissed international sanctions and ICC arrest warrants as a "clumsy attempt to force upon us a policy of security suicide" and declared a "settlement revolution" extending from the West Bank to the Negev and Galilee ^[20]. Israeli ministers announced settlement expansion into Lebanon and Palestinian displacement from Gaza and the West Bank while U.S.-sponsored Lebanon negotiations were underway in Washington — and faced no pushback ^[21]. Smotrich has leveraged Netanyahu's political weakness to propose annexation of 82% of the West Bank, while a former army chief alleged that Netanyahu "surrendered political decision-making to Trump" ^[22]. The far-right is using the U.S. president's dominance over Israeli decision-making as cover for the one thing he has shown no inclination to stop. The nine nations that condemned the settlements and the six that sanctioned the settlers have no seat in the U.S. Congress. The American opposition that agrees with them has no gavel. And the NDAA provision that would make the leverage question moot has bipartisan establishment support — meaning the dismantling is not even contested along the same partisan line as the annexation itself. The gap is widening on both sides: the tools are being retired faster than the constituency can mobilize to use them, and the man expanding settlements knows it.