Trump can only play both sides against the middle so long

 

By James M. Dorsey

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Second-guessing US President Donald J. Trump is a tricky business.

Earlier this month, Mr. Trump took many by surprise when he seemingly handed Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu the ethnic cleansing of Gaza on a silver platter.

Mr. Trump’s gift to Mr. Netanyahu on his visit to Washington came out of left field. Many had expected the president to force the prime minister to agree to a second phase of the Gaza ceasefire in which Israel would relinquish control of the Strip and completely withdraw its troops.

Instead, Mr. Trump asserted that the United States would take ownership of Gaza and turn it into a high-end beachfront real estate development project. Gazan Palestinians would be resettled in Egypt, Jordan, and other countries willing to accept them.

At face value, Mr. Trump’s gift robs Israel and Hamas of any incentive to negotiate a second phase of the ceasefire if the president and Mr. Netanyahu have already decided that there was no place for Palestinians in Gaza’s future.

Even so, Hamas this week agreed to speed up the ceasefire’s first phase of prisoner exchanges. Hamas also proposed to release in one go all remaining 59 hostages scheduled to be swapped in drips and drabs in the ceasefire’s second phase, provided Israel declares a permanent end to the war and pulls its forces out of Gaza.

Among the 33 hostages Hamas is releasing in the first phase are the remains of eight killed in captivity. Of the 59 in the second phase, 35 are presumed dead.

At the same time, Israel, pressured by the Trump administration and the hostage families, has reluctantly agreed to engage in delayed second-phase ceasefire negotiations.

Hamas’s proactive approach may constitute an effort to exploit the fact that Messrs. Trump and Netanyahu’s subtexts don’t necessarily support their ethnic cleansing headlines and that both men are trying to square circles.

Mr. Trump’s associates, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff have created wiggle room for the president by suggesting that his resettlement plan was intended to start a conversation.

“Now you have the Egyptians saying we have a plan, the Jordanians are saying we have a plan, and people are actually engaging in really important cogent discussions… We are actually engaging in a productive conversation around what is best for Gaza and how do we make people’s lives better,” Mr. Witkoff said.

An Arab summit scheduled for February 27 in Cairo is expected to adopt a plan for post-war governance and reconstruction of Gaza that would not require moving the population out of the territory. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Egypt, and Jordan are likely to put forward the plan.

“Hopefully, they’re going to have a really good plan to present (to) the president,” Mr. Rubio said.

The Palestinians and most countries, except Israel, have condemned the Trump proposal. Members of the US Congress on both sides of the aisle have questioned the idea.

Mr. Trump may be betting on the fact that men like Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and United Arab Emirates President Mohammed bin Zayed have little love for the Palestinians.

Mr. Bin Salman reportedly told former US Secretary of State Antony Blinken as much last fall but also conceded that Saudi public opinion limited his ability to ignore the Palestinians.

“Seventy per cent of my population is younger than me. For most of them, they never really knew much about the Palestinian issue. And so, they’re being introduced to it for the first time through this conflict. It’s a huge problem. Do I care personally about the Palestinian issue? I don’t, but my people do,” The Atlantic quoted 39-year-old Mr. Bin Salman as saying.

Mr. Trump may have bought himself some maneuverability by allowing Saudi Arabia to host this week’s high-level Ukraine talks between Mr. Rubio and his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, the first such meeting in over three years.

The hosting positions the kingdom as a major international player in competition with Qatar, one of Mr. Bin Salman’s goals.

To secure hundreds of billions of dollars in Saudi investment dangled by Mr. Bin Salman and a potential reduction of oil prices, Mr. Trump will have to do more. He could use the Arab plan to back away from his call for resettling Gazan Palestinians.

Mr. Trump’s apparent insistence on taking the Gaza ceasefire to the next level appears to point in the same direction.

“Phase two is absolutely going to begin… It just is a little bit more intricate and complicated in terms of how we bring the two sides together on this because phase two contemplates an end to the war, but it also contemplates Hamas not being involved in the government and being gone from Gaza,” Mr. Witkoff said.

Mr. Witkoff’s rendering of what the ceasefire’s phase two was about overlooked the understanding that it would Israel involve Israel starting to completely withdraw from the Strip and added Israel’s demand that Hamas leave Gaza even though the ceasefire agreement does not stipulate that.

In this context, the Arab plan takes on added significance, particularly if it involves Arab participation in a Palestinian-led interim administration that would oversee reconstruction and take Gaza and the West Bank to elections, as well as the training of a Palestinian security force.

Hamas has said it was willing to cede government in Gaza to a national committee provided it had a say in choosing its members.

Messrs. Trump and Witkoff’s insistence that Israel and Hamas agree on the terms of the ceasefire’s second phase potentially puts Mr. Netanyahu between a rock and a hard place.

Mr. Netanyahu reluctantly agreed to second-phase talks this week, two weeks after they were supposed to begin according to the ceasefire agreement.

Some Israeli officials charged Mr. Netanyahu with seeking to please Messrs. Trump and Witkoff by going through the motions without wanting to negotiate seriously.

Mr. Netanyahu is exploiting the fact that the ceasefire agreement envisions the truce’s 42-day first phase being extended as long as Israel and Hamas engage in second-phase talks.

That would suit Mr. Netanyahu’s purpose, particularly if he can get Hamas to swap more hostages for Palestinians incarcerated in Israel in phase one while the negotiations drag on.

The question is whether it suits Messrs. Trump and Witkoff’s purpose to allow Mr. Netanyahu to get away with playing games, much like former President Joe Biden did.

 

Looking back, former Biden administration official Ilan Goldenberg said that three months into the Gaza war “It became clear to me…that Netanyahu was never going to make the incredibly hard decisions he would need to make to start to build an alternative to Hamas in Gaza.”

Mr. Goldenberg noted that “such decisions would have involved working with the Arab States and the (West Bank-based, internationally recognised) Palestinian Authority on some kind of a plan…to replace Hamas with a viable Palestinian alternative that would in the long-term probably mean the reunification of Gaza and the West Bank under one Palestinian leadership.”

Mr. Netanyahu fears that a second-phase agreement that would oversee the complete withdrawal of Israeli forces and the introduction of a predominantly Arab, Palestinian-led interim government would turn Mr. Trump’s gift into a stillborn baby.

Even worse, Mr. Netanyahu’s agreement to end the war would likely collapse his government, with ultra-nationalist Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich leaving the coalition because he had failed to live up to a promise to resume the war after the ceasefire’s first phase.

Mr. Netanyahu could persuade Mr. Smotrich to remain in government with promises of increasing escalating Israeli military operations in the West Bank and/or steps to annex the territory captured during the 1967 Middle East war.

Mr. Trump said in early February that his administration would declare its attitude toward annexation within a matter of weeks.

In his first term, Mr. Trump proposed his ‘deal of the century’ Middle East plan that initially envisioned Israel annexing 30 per cent of the West Bank. Mr. Trump dropped that provision when the UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco agreed to recognise Israel.

In this intricate dance, Mr. Trump’s transactionalism centred on a post-war Arab plan may be the Palestinians’ best hope based on the principle of the one-eyed is king in the land of the blind.

“It is possible that…the current situation will give birth to a modus vivendi in which actors who define each other as existential threats still manage to work out informal arrangements on a daily basis. These won’t lead to a better future, necessarily, but they could enable the emergence of other trends, like informal networks, long-term economic prospects, and new alliances,” said Middle East scholar Nathan Brown.

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.