Several observers of the Middle East have suggested that President Donald Trump’s “transactional” instincts could impel him to push for a wider Palestinian-Israeli deal, one that might be cemented by diplomatic relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. The rush to credit Trump with playing a decisive role in pushing Hamas and Israel to secure the January 19 cease fire underscores this belief. Indeed, this writer found during a December trip to Israel and Palestinian East Jerusalem with Georgetown University colleagues that, desperate for even a faint sign of progress, some Israeli security experts –and many Palestinian activists—are looking to the new president to take steps that Joe Biden could not or would not venture.
Enabling Netanyahu
The idea that Trump’s threat that “there will be all hell to pay in the Middle East” absent a Gaza truce, signals a serious intent to pursue a wider Middle East peace initiative is fanciful. The statements of both Israeli leaders and Trump administration officials belie such expectations. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared before the proverbial ink had dried that this is a “temporary ceasefire,” and asserted that if Hamas violates the second stage of the agreement, Israel would resume military operations with even greater force. For its part, the Trump White House has reassured the prime minister of its support. The president himself has already removed the sanctions that the Biden administration had imposed on several Israeli terrorist settlers in the occupied West Bank. And during her January 21 nomination hearing to become US ambassador to the United Nations, former Republican New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik reiterated her conviction that God gave Judea and Samaria to the Jewish people.
Trump’s advisors, and perhaps the president himself, may come to regret enabling Netanyahu’s evasive tactics.
Of course, the administration might assert that this is Stefanik’s personal belief. But West Bank settlers will surely see her statement as a sign of US support. That they attacked Palestinian civilians in three villages just two days before Stefanik’s testimony displays the settlers’ resolve to sustain an annexationist agenda and the violence behind it. Although Otzma Yehudit Party’s Itamar Ben-Gvir and his two colleagues have quit the Israeli governing coalition—insisting, as he put it, that “there’s no good deal with the devil”—for now Netanyahu’s government retains a smaller majority in the Knesset, thus ensuring his survival for another day. Underscoring the prime minister’s tactical maneuvering, Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Saar has reiterated that Trump did not force Israel to accept the ceasefire and that in fact the two countries are in full agreement on the terms of the arrangement. With Trump busy issuing executive orders, and with the first exchange of three Israeli hostages and 90 imprisoned Palestinians completed, the ceasefire is likely to hold for 60 days that constitute the first phase. But as Hamas and Israel move toward the second phase, Netanyahu’s promise that the military will strike again with even greater force is not a bluff.
Trump’s advisors, and perhaps the president himself, may come to regret enabling Netanyahu’s evasive tactics. But Trump cannot in fact afford to echo Biden’s mistakes. On the contrary, he needs a bigger “win” on the Middle East front and has in fact promised it. Thus, at some point Trump will have to make a decision: either pursue an Israeli-Saudi deal by getting Israel’s elected leaders to offer real concessions to the Palestinians (a clear Saudi demand) or continue to signal that the White House (and not just Stefanik) accepts the dangerous West Bank status quo and might even swallow a formal Israeli annexation of more Palestinian lands there. Such a step will wreck any hope of a deal with Riyadh.
Israel Boxes Itself In
The other major problem facing the White House is that Israel is in no position to translate the unexpected wins it scored in its Fall military campaign against Hezbollah and Iran into sustainable diplomatic and political gains. The surprise fall of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad has transformed the regional equation. But as several security experts who met with our group reiterated, Netanyahu’s Gaza onslaught and his government’s efforts to expand control over the West Bank have closed the space for Israel to make a credible opening to the Palestinians and to Riyadh. Israel may thus have snatched defeat from the jaws of a potential victory. At this point, any Israeli leader who backs away from the annexationist project might suffer former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s fate, when he was assassinated by an Israeli rightwing extremist in 1995. In short, Israel’s leaders have constructed their own trap by ceding power to Jewish nationalist true believers.
However threatening the messianic hard right may be to Israel’s own security, there is some good news: as two leading writers for Haaretz noted during our meetings that opinion polls taken over the last few months indicate that something like 55 percent of Israelis would consider giving up some West Bank territories for a wider regional agreement. This is remarkable given the enduring trauma of October 7, 2023, and the widespread belief that the Hamas attack posed an existential threat to Israel. Indeed, given Israel’s enormous military power, this dire perception seems fanciful. Still, as Haaretz’s Amos Harel observed to our group, had Iran and Hezbollah been in on the October 7 attack—and even more so, had they chosen to support it—“Hezbollah forces might have made it to Haifa.” Watching extended evening reports of the fate of the hostages, not to mention videos of the horrors of the massacres, many Israelis prefer to ignore the images that the rest of the world has watched of the slaughter in Gaza. More than a year after October 7, even progressive Israelis fear that Israel’s enemies will never stop seeking the country’s destruction. This fear has frozen Israel’s capacity to think strategically.
And yet it can be argued that the very perception that Hamas’s “al-Aqsa Flood” may have flowed like a torrent into the very heart of Israel highlights one vital and even existential reality, namely, that Israel’s security ultimately depends not on force alone, but rather on a regional and global equation that only some weeks ago seemed hard to imagine. It is more than ironic that in Saudi Arabia, a ruling family whose legitimacy once rested on its alliance with conservative clerics, has broken or substantially frayed these ties under de facto ruler Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. In contrast, Israel’s government is now bound to messianic religious leaders who reject a modern view of the country’s diplomatic relations in favor of what is supposedly ‘God’s word.’ This paradox may be partly explained by the fact that Israel is still a very imperfect democracy maintaining an apartheid system in the West Bank, while Saudi Arabia is ruled by one man.
Israel’s security ultimately depends not on force alone, but rather on a regional and global equation that only some weeks ago seemed hard to imagine.
But the reality is that Israelis gather on the beaches and in the cafes of Haifa and Tel Aviv just a few miles from the West Bank “security wall,” and secularists Israelis can live in relative peace and security, even as the occasional Houthi missile lands close by (as they did twice while this writer visited Tel Aviv). Thus, they have little incentive to go to the streets to push for a Palestinian-Israeli peace process even as they demand that Netanyahu accept a permanent ceasefire that will bring all the hostages home. A generation of high tech, globalized, smart and resourceful Israelis seems resigned to a future that is still defined by the still burning ordeal of October 7, 2023.
Intolerable Palestinian Conditions
Meanwhile, the situation in the West Bank and East Jerusalem grows more desperate by the day. As a Palestinian activist noted to our group, a new generation of Palestinian youth is transforming parts of the West Bank into a new version of Gaza. Our guide, who hates Hamas but is no friend of the Palestinian Authority, decried this development as we walked through Silwan, a Palestinian neighborhood facing West to the OId City of Jerusalem and the Noble Sanctuary/Temple Mount. In that hapless and impoverished community, Israelis are buying up homes and festooning them with flags and cameras, thus increasing the pressure on Palestinians to emigrate. Backed by Israel’s even more draconian policies of expelling Palestinian families from their homes, this demographic project is funded by NGOs with money from the Unites States, , among other countries.
Another Palestinian activist who has been fostering dialogue (and singing) between young Palestinians from the West Bank and Israelis noted to this writer that one casualty of the apartheid wall is that young Palestinians have grown up with an image of Israel that is totally devoid of reality. They have never seen the Mediterranean Sea and know little to nothing of the language, culture, institutions, politics, schools, playgrounds, music, industries, agriculture, food, hospitals, markets, and national myths that collectively define the complex identities of Israeli citizens. Cut off and desperate, these Palestinian youth can only imagine that Israel is an invented colonialist entity that will one day implode.
Who can blame them given their hopeless lives in the West Bank and Gaza (a land largely leveled to the ground), and the relentless violence and humiliation which they have suffered. Inevitably, what is unfolding in the occupied Palestinian territories feeds the illusion that everything from the river to the sea is occupied by a fake people which has no right to national self-determination under any and all circumstances. Thus, Israel’s annexationist project is propelling a growing crisis of legitimacy that provides no path forward for either Israelis or Palestinians.
Trump Will Not Save Israel or the Palestinians
The hope that the Trump administration might help Israel’s leaders see a future divested of this nightmare is a pipe dream. Many bemoan the Biden administration’s failure to prevent more than a year of carnage in Gaza and the expanding violence on the West Bank. But the alacrity with some opinion columnists have praised Trump for doing what Biden would not or could not do seems premature, unjustified, and even a little unseemly.
And yet this posture underscores the new spirit in Washington. To Trump’s delight, it is a spirit seeking to secure his favor, or to indulge Trump’s desire to be at the center of a historical transformation the chances for which have been reduced to near zero by Israel’s leaders and by the folly of successive US administrations. The second Trump White House may prove no exception. As the politics of Lebanon and Syria transform in ways that are hard to predict and yet offer real hope—and as these same dynamics induce a struggle in Iran between hardliners seeking to hang on to power and reformists striving to reshape Iranian foreign and domestic policy—it is entirely possible that the window of opportunity that has opened up to create a different regional order will firmly shut in the coming months.
The views expressed in this publication are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the position of Arab Center Washington DC, its staff, or its Board of Directors.
Featured image credit: Flickr/The White House
