هذا التقرير متاح أيضًا بـ العربية
The Middle East remains caught in a cycle of escalation that began on 7 October 2023, and the region is now approaching a critical juncture between further confrontation and possible de-escalation. At the heart of this uncertainty lies a growing divergence between the political calculations of US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The coincidence of electoral pressures in the United States and Israel adds another layer of volatility. With both leaders facing political tests that could shape their domestic futures, their calculations increasingly intersect with the trajectory of the region, from the wars in Gaza and beyond to wider questions of regional stability and US-Israel relations.
The fault line is increasingly visible: Trump has an interest in presenting diplomatic breakthroughs and greater stability in the Middle East and global energy markets, while Netanyahu faces domestic pressures tied to his governing coalition’s survival and the political consequences of the 7 October attack.
This tension raises a central question: can the pursuit of political survival and the pursuit of regional de-escalation coexist, or will their competing calculations continue to pull the Middle East in opposite directions?
Why are the midterms important?
The midterm elections in the United States will be held on Nov. 3, 2026, midway through Donald Trump’s second term. They are traditionally treated as an indirect referendum on the president’s performance, as the president’s party usually loses seats in Congress as punishment for its policies.
The upcoming US midterm elections, which will shape the second half of Trump’s term, are crucial for the audience to understand how their political engagement can influence foreign policy and domestic stability.
The moment’s sensitivity is clear in the fragility of the current Republican majority. In the House, Republicans hold an extremely slim majority, one of the narrowest in decades, meaning Democrats need only a limited net gain to retake the chamber.
In the Senate, Republicans hold a 53-47 majority over Democrats, meaning the Democratic Party would need a net gain of about four seats without losing any of its own to seize control. That gap explains why the House is seen as the chamber most likely to flip, while the Senate remains the harder prize.
Current indicators are not working in Trump’s favor. His approval rating is hovering near the lowest levels of his political career. Multiple polls in early September 2026 put his approval between 33 percent and 38 percent, with net approval in aggregated averages at roughly negative 20 points.
Even more troubling than the overall figure is the erosion of his support among independents, which has fallen to around 34 percent — below the threshold that preceded the Democratic wave that swept away dozens of seats in the 2018 midterms.
Most forecasting models suggest Democrats are strongly favored to retake the House. At the same time, the Senate battle remains tighter and more evenly balanced, though some models show growing Democratic momentum the longer the economic crisis drags on.
What the results will mean for the remainder of Trump’s term depends on two paths. If Republicans hold both chambers, Trump will enter the second half of his term with relatively free hands, able to push through his legislative agenda, cement his appointments and shield himself from congressional oversight tools.
But if he loses either chamber, the picture changes dramatically. His legislative agenda would stall, while Democrats would gain the powers of investigative committees, subpoenas, and oversight of the executive branch, and the specter of accountability could return to the forefront.
In either case, the months leading up to November are a frantic race to produce tangible achievements, especially in the Middle East, where efforts to stop the bleeding in energy prices and regional stability directly affect the audience’s interests and sense of security.
The Most Consequential Knesset Yet
When the 25th Knesset dissolved itself on July 17, 2026, and “Israel” entered an election campaign ending on Oct. 27, the matter went beyond a routine electoral milestone. This Knesset, which many expected to collapse after Oct. 7, 2023, completed its full term for the first time since 1988, becoming just one of seven out of 25 Knessets to do so.
Netanyahu managed to protect his government from early dissolution, but the harder test awaits him at the ballot box. That is why these elections are being described as the most pivotal in the “state’s” history, with Hebrew-language media even presenting them as a vote on democracy itself, since they have become a referendum on four intertwined issues that are redefining the nature of “Israel.”
The first concerns security doctrine after Oct. 7. These are the first elections to be held after that earthquake and the wars that followed in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and Iran, making them a reckoning over the government’s military and political performance. With Netanyahu blocking the formation of an official commission of inquiry, the elections have, for broad segments of the public, become an arena for holding him accountable for the collapsed security and political strategy, and for the alternative he is trying to entrench.
The second concerns the identity of the “state” and the reshaping of its institutions. Netanyahu is seeking to complete his project of expanding the executive branch’s dominance and the Zionist right’s control over the judiciary and security agencies through the “judicial reform” plan and the appointment of security chiefs based on loyalty. In this context, he appointed his military adviser Roman Gofman as head of the Mossad, and David Zini as head of the Shin Bet after dismissing his predecessor, amid objections and accusations that personal loyalty was being prioritized over professional competence.
The third issue is shielding Netanyahu from prosecution in corruption cases and from accountability for the failure of Oct. 7. The Israeli press has reported that the Shin Bet, under its new leadership, helped him avoid attending his trial hearings on the grounds of a security threat, while the agency’s former chief said that his refusal of a similar request was one of the reasons for his dismissal. In that sense, remaining prime minister has become an existential need for Netanyahu, because losing the post would leave him exposed to both the judiciary and commissions of inquiry.
The opposition, meanwhile, is waging a battle to remove him. What unites its factions is the goal of ending an era in which the “state” revolved around one man more than any shared program. Gadi Eisenkot, the former army chief and founder of the Yashar party, has emerged as Netanyahu’s main rival, ahead of Lapid, Bennett and Lieberman in most polls. His platform includes limiting the prime minister’s term in office, undermining Netanyahu’s effort to perpetuate his rule.
The fate of these issues remains tied to the electoral system and the ability to build a 61-seat coalition. Proportional representation and the 3.25 percent electoral threshold mean a small party’s stumble can be enough to overturn the balance between blocs, as happened in 2022 when Meretz and Balad fell below the threshold, helping Netanyahu’s bloc secure 64 seats and form the government.
That is why alliances are multiplying ahead of the election, with the focus on turnout among Haredim and Arabs in a nearly even race whose polls give no bloc a guaranteed ability to form a stable government. In the background looms a scenario in which Netanyahu, if he becomes convinced he will lose, resorts to postponing the election on security grounds or igniting a military round before the vote — a possibility that Avigdor Lieberman has warned about, made even more sensitive by the changes Netanyahu has made in the leadership of the security services.
Is the Middle East the deciding factor?
When James Carville, chief strategist for Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign, hung a sign at campaign headquarters reading, “It’s the economy, stupid,” he was distilling a doctrine that sees the economy as the decisive factor in American races, while foreign policy remains a secondary issue.
But that doctrine does not explain the full picture. A deeply rooted convention matches it in American political literature: The Middle East rarely wins a president an election, but it can deliver a blow to one. The two conventions complement each other: The Middle East rarely enters the ballot box as a foreign policy issue that voters care about for its own sake, but it is a major factor through its domestic cost.
This dynamic has recurred in modern American history. In the 1948 election, President Harry Truman rushed to recognize “Israel” minutes after it declared its establishment, overriding State Department warnings, in a move tied to calculations about Jewish voters and donors in pivotal states such as New York. Truman then shocked everyone by winning, despite polls confidently predicting his defeat, to the point that the erroneous headline “Dewey Defeats Truman” became an icon of that election.
In another example, the cost of the Iraqi quagmire and military casualties turned into an electoral earthquake in the 2006 midterms, when Democrats wrested both chambers of Congress from Republicans.
Ahead of the 2022 elections, the “OPEC+” alliance cut production by 2 million barrels per day despite the Biden administration’s request to delay the decision by a month, until after the vote — a clear example of producers’ awareness that the timing of a decision can matter as much as its substance, in a Saudi move aimed at delivering a political blow to the Democratic administration in the White House.
These precedents reveal a structural vulnerability in the American political system that regional capitals and energy markets have long understood: Seizing a critical electoral moment can have an impact equal to the move itself, turning the timing of any regional step into indirect pressure on the White House.
The Middle East affects American domestic politics through three main channels. The first is energy prices and inflation: disruptions to shipping or energy supplies can quickly raise costs for American households while giving the opposition political ammunition. The second is the human and financial cost of military involvement, which can revive public fears of another “forever war”. The third is ideological division within both parties — between younger progressives and the Democratic establishment, and between advocates of retrenchment and foreign-policy hawks on the Republican side.
The US-Israeli war on Iran, underway since late February 2026, has shifted the Middle East from the position of an occasional influence to a dominant factor in the electoral mood, because it has opened all three windows at once, including a sharp split within Trump’s own base, where many supporters of the “MAGA” current see the war as a retreat from his promise to stay out of foreign wars and focus on domestic affairs.
Reuters/Ipsos polls reflected this mood: support for the war ranged between 31 percent and 33 percent, compared with opposition of about 63 percent. In contrast, only 1 in 4 Americans supported the strikes that killed Iran’s supreme leader.
Underscoring the role of electoral calculations, Reuters reported on Sept. 2, 2026, citing four informed sources, that Trump’s top advisers — including Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio — are pressing to keep the war with Iran “quiet” until Election Day, shifting from military pressure to economic pressure to limit Republican losses. A White House official summed up the equation: the administration is keeping pressure on Iran, “but November is the priority.”
Yet that calm remains fragile. As Barbara Leaf noted, it cannot be described as real calm so long as the goal is to intensify economic pressure on Tehran, giving it incentives to disrupt that effort and reignite the confrontation.
This equation is even more sensitive in swing states. In Michigan, where there is a significant Arab and Muslim bloc, the position on the wars in Gaza and Iran has become a factor affecting turnout or punitive abstention within a traditionally Democratic base, and has contributed to the rise of progressive candidates.
By contrast, rising fuel prices hit working-class voters in “the Rust Belt” states such as Pennsylvania and Ohio. Republicans might have been able to capitalize on the resulting economic anger, were it not for the fact that this time the president entangled in the war is their own.
Security Consensus, Tactical Differences.
What stands out in the Israeli scene is that foreign policy issues — specifically those related to the Palestinians, Lebanon, Syria and Iran — are not what separates Netanyahu’s camp from the opposition. They are almost a matter of consensus across alignments. The real electoral battle revolves around domestic issues such as the judiciary, the Oct. 7 commission of inquiry, Haredi conscription and limiting the prime minister’s term, while differences over the Palestinian file either recede or are managed with deliberate caution.
On the issue of resettling Gaza, most parties in Netanyahu’s coalition openly support it, despite its contradiction with his government’s commitments to the United States under Trump’s plan. At the same time, Netanyahu himself rarely criticizes the idea. By contrast, most opposition parties avoid openly declaring their rejection of it, preferring silence after the Israeli mood shifted further right following Oct. 7.
As for annexing the West Bank and rejecting the establishment of a Palestinian state, there is near-total unity between the two camps, even if their methods differ. An overwhelming majority supports settlement plans and does not see a Palestinian state as a realistic option. The sole exception is the left-wing “Democrats” alliance led by Yair Golan, which opposes the plans in the West Bank and remains committed to the “two-state solution.” In any case, what has already happened on the ground in the West Bank has become difficult to reverse, even if the government changes.
The confrontation with Iran has the broadest consensus. The full spectrum of Israeli politics agrees on the need to confront Tehran, and none objected to the war launched on Feb. 28, 2026. But the opposition found an opening in the postwar phase, reading unilateral US moves — from the ceasefire, to understandings with Tehran and the blockade, to the return of fluctuating clashes — as evidence of Netanyahu’s failure to manage the Iran file, not as disagreement with him over the confrontation itself.
Against all that, Netanyahu is using even the supposed disagreement with Trump to present himself as the “master of foreign affairs and security,” capable of saying “no” to the United States and of prioritizing his own political needs over what the major ally and its administration in the White House want. But the reality suggests Trump has not decided to exert serious pressure on him, limiting himself to hinting at the possibility of “supporting a candidate in the Israeli elections,” while stressing that he still prefers not to intervene.
Between Escalation and Calm: Interests at Stake
In the end, neither man’s position on escalation or calm is determined by the region’s own calculations, but by what his interests and political future dictate. The fate of the Middle East thus becomes a variable in an electoral equation managed from Tel Aviv and Washington, with no real weight given to the positions of regional capitals.
For Netanyahu, sustaining escalation is the optimal path. It is a tool for exploiting war and bloodshed in election propaganda aimed at the desires of an extremist right-wing base that has grown more radical since Oct. 7, and a pretext for evading the reckoning over that day’s failure. As long as the guns are roaring, discussion of failure, corruption, and commissions of inquiry remains postponed, and he remains the “war leader” who is difficult to replace at its height.
Trump, by contrast, approaches the equation from two angles: searching for achievements that prove the success of his “peace council” project and confirm that he has a serious foreign policy, and trying to lower the price of a barrel of oil in a way that positively affects voters’ wallets. He understands that continuing the war keeps energy prices high and his approval ratings low, which is why his advisers are trying to cool the front until the election passes.
But his message to voters has become closer to maneuvering than to offering real solutions: from a repeated cash promise that never materialized, beginning with a “distribution” of $2,000 to Americans, then raising it to $5,000 and finally tying it to his party winning Congress, to promises of a “historic” drop in oil prices, all the way to justifying expensive fuel as a necessary price to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. All are attempts to reframe an economic cost that voters feel every day.
At the same time, Trump speaks about the war in Gaza as though it has ended and the genocide has stopped, repeating that “no one is talking about Gaza anymore.” But Gaza, and the blood of its people, like the blood of the peoples of the entire region, remains suspended on the calculations of elections and the interests of candidates.