The meeting with no cameras in the US: Yaakov Katz on whether Israel still has a seat at the table

ByJERUSALEM POST PODCASTSJULY 30, 2026 13:23Watch this episode without interruptions.Listen wherever you get your podcasts.Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has now met Donald Trump eight times, more than any other foreign leader since Trump returned to office. This one looked nothing like the others.No welcome at the South Portico, no embrace for the photographers, no press in the room, no one-on-one. An hour and change, then it was over. Both governments put out the same two words: productive and positive.On this week's episode of theDeep Dive podcast, host Jacob Laznik asks Yaakov Katz, Senior Fellow at the JPPI, author and former editor-in-chief of the Post, what that identical language is covering for, and Katz's answer is blunt.The fact that the positivity had to be stressed tells you what Israeli officials were braced for. Netanyahu avoided the Zelensky treatment. He also got nothing he came for.That leads somewhere less comfortable. Lebanon's president got the South Portico welcome. Iraq's prime minister got the Oval Office with cameras inside, and there is a coalition forming against Iran that Israel has not been invited to join, and Katz argues the exclusion is deliberate.Laznik offers the counterargument you hear in Jerusalem right now: America is hitting our enemy, Iran is firing at the Gulf instead of at us, so why complain? Katz calls that short-term thinking, and explains what Israel gave up to get here.The hardest stretch is about honesty at home. Katz walks through the leaked footage of Senator Lindsey Graham, including Graham's claim that Witkoff and Kushner are the wrong people to be negotiating the Middle East, and the New Yorker piece in which former Biden officials say they were played.Katz asks the question Israelis have three months to answer without a commission of inquiry: Netanyahu called the 12 Day War a victory for generations, so what changed eight months later that required doing it again? Generations, as he notes, is usually longer than that.Follow us on Google