The key issue on which Netanyahu and Trump appear to agree is on annexing the bulk of the West Bank territories categorised in the Oslo accords as Area C, the backbone of any future Palestinian state.
Before the September election, Netanyahu announced plans to annex the Jordan Valley, the West Bank's vast agricultural basin presumably with Trump's blessing.
Pompeo offered his apparent backing in November by claiming that Israeli settlements in the West Bank were not necessarily "inconsistent with international law".
With that as a cue, Netanyahu's government convened a panel this month to draft an official proposal to annex the Jordan Valley.
Naftali Bennett, the defence minister and a settler leader, revealed last week that Israel was creating seven new "nature reserves" on Palestinian land. Another 12 existing Israeli-seized sites are to be expanded.
Israel would annex Area C "within a short time", Bennett added.
On Saturday, he also ordered the army to bar from the West Bank prominent Israeli left-wing activists who demonstrate alongside Palestinians against land thefts by the settlers and the army. He equated these non-violent protesters with extremist settler groups that have assaulted Palestinians and torched their olive groves and homes.
Referring to the International Criminal Court in the Hague, the Palestinian foreign ministry warned that establishment of the nature reserves would "speed up [Bennett's] appearance before the ICC as a war criminal."
Nonetheless, the settler right is growing ever bolder on the annexation issue as evidenced by Israel's increasingly fraught ties with neighbouring Jordan.
King Abullah II recently declared relations with Israel at an "all-time low". Meanwhile, Ephraim Halevy, a former head of Israel's Mossad spy agency, blamed Israel for showing "contempt towards Jordan" and creating a crisis that jeopardised the two countries' 1994 peace treaty, a legacy of the Oslo peace process.
If Israel annexes large swaths of the West Bank, stymying Palestinian statehood, that could unleash waves of unrest among the kingdom's majority population Palestinians made refugees by Israel during the 1948 and 1967 wars.
It could also provoke a mass exodus of West Bank Palestinians into Jordan. Senior Jordanian officials recently told a former Israeli journalist, Ori Nir, that they viewed annexation as an "existential threat" to their country.
In November the Jordanian military conducted a drill against an invasion on its western flank from Israel's direction that included the mock blowing up of bridges over the River Jordan.
The Israeli right would be only too delighted to see Abdullah in trouble. It has long harboured a dream of engineering the destruction of Hashemite rule as a way to transform Jordan, instead of the occupied territories, into the locus of a Palestinian state.
According to Israeli analysts, the right perceives itself as at a historic crossroads.
It can annex most of the West Bank and impose an unmistakeable apartheid rule over a restless, rebellious Palestinian population. Or it can realise its Greater Israel ambitions by helping to topple the Hashemite kingdom and encourage the West Bank's Palestinians to disperse into Jordan.
All Israeli rightwingers need is a nod of approval from the White House. With Netanyahu desperate to pull a rabbit out of his hat, and with an obliging patron installed in Washington, there is reason enough for them to believe that the stars may finally be aligned.
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