Netanyahu banks on Trump plan to drive up pro-settler votes

With Israel's prime minister eager to court the votes of the country's influential West Bank settlers, President Donald Trump's Mideast plan seemed to be the key to ramping up their support ahead of critical elections next week.

The plan envisions Israel's eventual annexation of its scores of West Bank settlements a longtime settler dream. But in the weeks since it was unveiled, Benjamin Netanyahu has stumbled over his promises to quickly carry out the annexation, sparking an outcry from settler leaders and threatening any goodwill he hoped to gain from the plan.

"If there is something that undermines the stability of the campaign in Netanyahu's eyes, it is attacks from the right," the columnist Mati Tuchfeld wrote in the pro-Netanyahu daily Israel Hayom. "It is not only the fate of Judea and Samaria that is on the line. His political fate is as well." Judea and Samaria is the biblical name for the West Bank.

Israel heads to the polls for the third time in less than a year on March 1. The previous two rounds ended in deadlock, with neither Netanyahu nor his challenger Benny Gantz able to secure a 61-seat parliamentary majority. Pre-election polls show a similar impasse emerging from the next vote.

Facing a corruption trial two weeks after the election, Netanyahu is desperate to remain prime minister, a position he can use to rally public support as he fights the charges.

In a bid to move the needle in his favor, Netanyahu has spent the final weeks of the campaign handing out political gifts to different constituents. The Trump plan has been the centerpiece of that strategy.

The plan, announced at the White House in late January with much fanfare, sides with Israel on most of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict's main sticking...