Netanyahu gambles on Trump
Credit: Haaretz
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At first glance, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu could not have a better friend in the White House.
In his first two months in office, President Donald J. Trump authorised US$11 billion in arms sales, signed a swath of executive orders to crack down on criticism of Israel, put universities and student protesters in his crosshairs, and legitimised ethnic cleansing.
Even so, Mr. Trump’s four years in office may not be honeymoon years for US-Israeli relations.
Potential trouble is already on the horizon, not just because Mr. Trump is unpredictable but also because of geopolitics and the increased prominence of isolationists and conspiracy theorists in Mr. Trump’s world.
“Here is some safe logic: never overestimate Trump's commitment to anything,” said political consultant and commentator Dahlia Scheindlin.
The Arab world’s adoption of a US$53 billion Gaza reconstruction plan, coupled with the prospect of up to $1 trillion in Saudi investments in the United States in the next four years and the kingdom’s enhanced status as a Ukraine war mediator, persuaded Mr. Trump to back off his controversial Gaza plan.
Mr. Trump sparked Israeli ultranationalists’ wildest dreams. The president called for US ownership of Gaza, the resettlement of the Strip’s 2.3 million residents elsewhere, and turning the territory into a high-end beachfront real estate development.
Encouraged by Mr. Trump’s aides, Secretary of State Marc Rubio and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, Arab states adopted a counterproposal at a March 4 summit in Cairo. The proposal calls for reconstruction without moving the population out of Gaza.
Mr. Witkoff is discussing the proposal with Arab foreign ministers despite the administration initially dismissing the plan because it “does not address the reality that Gaza is currently uninhabitable.”
This week, Mr. Trump appeared to back away from his proposal, telling reporters, “Nobody is expelling any Palestinians” from Gaza.
The message went into one Israeli ultranationalist ear and out the other.
Israel Hayom, Israel’s most widely distributed newspaper, owned by hardline Trump mega-donor Miriam Adelson, reported that Defence Minister Israel Katz had created a system to process 2,500 Gazan departees a day. Officials said this weekend’s Cabinet meeting may discuss the program.
At its peril, Israel could be getting ahead of the game by ignoring the message embedded in Mr. Trump’s plan, even if he backs away from its key elements.
“Netanyahu went to Washington with Gaza in his pocket but returned without it after Trump announced that the *US* would own Gaza. In other words, Trump wants future negotiations over Gaza to go through Trump, *not* Netanyahu,” said Middle East scholar Paul Salem.
Mr. Trump announced his plan during Mr. Netanyahu’s visit to Washington in early February.
On Friday, Hamas said it had accepted a ceasefire proposal tabled by Mr. Witkoff that would extend the current truce’s first phase by a month and secure the release by the group of Edan Alexander, a 21-year-old dual Israeli American citizen, and the bodies of four other Americans with dual citizenship who were killed in the war in exchange for Palestinians held in Israeli prisons.
In response, Mr. Witkoff charged that “Hamas has chosen to respond by publicly claiming flexibility while privately making demands that are entirely impractical without a permanent ceasefire. Hamas is making a very bad bet that time is on its side. It is not,” Mr. Witkoff warned.
Mr. Witkoff was likely referring to Hamas’s consistent rejection of Israeli and US efforts to decouple further prisoner exchanges from a complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and an end to the war as envisioned by the ceasefire agreement in the truce's second phase.
Hamas “views phase two and any longer-term truce that unfolds as more of a strategic affair, focused on the goal of ensuring that Hamas survives with as many weapons as possible and with de facto control over Gaza, even if it formally agrees not to govern the territory,” said Tel Aviv University analyst Harel Chorev.
Hamas’s statement came as Israel, with US acquiescence, prevented humanitarian aid from entering Gaza for the past two weeks and, more recently, cut off electricity in a bid to force Hamas to accept an extension of the ceasefire’s first phase rather than insist on negotiating the second phase.
Mr. Netanyahu’s ultra-nationalist coalition partners have threatened to collapse the government if the prime minister enters second-phase negotiations.
Speaking on the sidelines of the G-20 in Canada, Mr. Rubio threw cold water on one of the pillars of Mr. Witkoff’s proposal that is central to the ceasefire agreement negotiated in January and has been a fixture of past Israeli-Palestinians prisoner swaps since the 1980s in which Israel would release large numbers of Palestinians for one Israeli.
In 2011, Israel freed 1,027 Palestinians in exchange for soldier Gilad Shalit.
“We want all the hostages released. We believe they should all be released. These trades being made, they’re ridiculous trades. Come on. Four hundred people for three? These are nuts… we’re acting like this is a normal exchange, this is a normal thing that happens? This is an outrage. So, they should all be released,” Mr. Rubio said.
Earlier, US hostage negotiator Adam Boehler discussed with Hamas elements of the mediators’ proposal in the first ever face-to face meetings with the group. The unprecedented meetings violated a long-standing policy of not talking to groups the United States designates as terrorists and infuriated Israel.
The deal allows Mr. Trump to take credit for the return of American hostages but cynically delayed the potential release of the remaining 53 Hamas-held captives, of which 23 are believed to be alive. They were supposed to be exchanged in the second phase for Palestinians incarcerated in Israel.
The fact that Messrs. Trump and Witkoff have bought Mr. Netanyahu a reprieve is no guarantee that the prime minister will not increasingly find himself on thin ice in Mr. Trump’s world in which influential isolationists and conspiracy theorists are less enamoured by Israel.
Similarly, Mr. Netanyahu would be well-advised not to take too much heart from the administration’s decision to pull Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s pick of Lt. Col. Daniel Davis, a retired army officer and whistle-blower during the Afghanistan War, to be one of her top deputies.
Pro-Israel groups and members of Congress were up in arms because of Mr. Davis’s harsh criticism of US support for Israel and Ukraine.
The administration pulled Mr. Davis’s candidacy in the same week that the conservative Washington-based Heritage Foundation postponed publishing a report calling for a rejiggering of the US-Israeli relationship and a phasing out of US assistance to the Jewish state.
The two incidents shine a spotlight on proponents of a more isolationist foreign policy that evaluates Israel’s importance differently, occupying influential deputy-level foreign policy and national security positions in the Trump administration.
Last month, Mr. Rubio, named Darren Beattie, a former White House speechwriter in the first Trump administration, as acting undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs.
An intellectual leader of Make America Great Again loyalists who was fired as a speechwriter for attending a white nationalist gathering. He has demeaned women and Black people as “complaining minorities,” amplified Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes, and criticized what he called Israel’s “victimhood narrative” in the wake of Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack, arguing that the Jewish state would need to rethink the way it projects itself to justify its continued existence.
An ally of influential conservative podcaster Tucker Carlson who has hosted purveyors of anti-Semitic tropes on his show, Mr. Beattie wrote his political science PhD dissertation on German philosopher Martin Heidegger, a member of the Nazi Party.
Dan Caldwell, an advisor to Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, has successfully ensured that isolationists critical of US policy in the Middle East occupy key Pentagon positions. They include Elbridge Colby as undersecretary of defence for policy and Michael DiMino as deputy assistant secretary of defence.
American Jewish activist Jamie Beran suggested that Mr. Trump’s tolerance of purveyors of anti-Semitism raised alarm bells about his attitudes towards Jews. Those are questions that should worry not only Jews but also Israelis, first and foremost, Mr. Netanyahu as the leader of a Jewish state.
“If Trump actually cared about Jewish people or wanted to end anti-Semitism…(he) wouldn't allow MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement leaders and administration officials to actively promote anti-Semitic and racist conspiracy theories, use anti-Semitic messages to win elections, or – lest we forget – perform Nazi salutes from its biggest platforms, and then turn around and claim to be enacting unpopular policies on behalf of Jewish people,” Ms. Beran said.
Source: Haaretz
Ms. Beran was referring to officials such as technology billionaire and Trump associate Elon Musk who made a public gesture widely viewed as resembling the Heil Hitler greeting, and Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson, who compared the killing of infants the October 7 to abortions.
Ms. Beran’s reference to ‘unpopular policies’ was prompted by the detention of Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University student whom the administration wants to deport for his public support for the Palestinians.
“Everything about (Mr. Khalil’s arrest) is nightmarish… The message is abundantly clear: U.S. President Donald Trump wants the world to know that he's pursued this unconscionable act on behalf of Jews,” Ms. Beran said.
Ms. Beran asserted that Mr. Trump’s associates “have learned that positioning repressive actions as benefiting Jewish people obfuscates their audience and drives wedges between Jews and their neighbours who might otherwise join together to oppose these actions. And like all expressions of anti-Semitism, this strategy directly harms Jews.”
Mr. Netanyahu may be the exception that proves the rule. He seems to believe that what is bad for the Jews is good for him.
Dr. James M. Dorsey is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, and the author of the syndicated column and podcast, The Turbulent World with James M. Dorsey. -