Trump’s meeting with Netanyahu could decide the Gaza ceasefire’s fate

 

By James M. Dorsey

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Donald Trump’s Oval Office could be Binyamin Netanyahu’s brick wall.

That is if the president uses Tuesday’s meeting with Mr. Netanyahu, the first foreign leader to visit Washington since Mr. Trump returned to office, to ensure a successful Israeli-Hamas negotiation of the Gaza ceasefire agreement’s second phase.

For that, Messrs.  Netanyahu and Trump would have to agree on who will administer the devastated Strip when the guns permanently fall silent and Israeli troops withdraw entirely from Gaza in the second phase.

Mr. Netanyahu has delayed sending negotiators to Doha for the second phase negotiations, which were supposed to begin on Monday. He wants to wait until he has met with Mr. Trump to give his negotiators their marching orders.

Mr. Trump demonstrated his ability to bend Mr. Netanyahu to his will when he got the prime minister to accept the Gaza ceasefire in a matter of days after Mr. Netanyahu refused for eight months to agree to a cessation of hostilities on more or less the same terms.

Mr. Netanyahu has long insisted that ceasefires facilitate prisoner exchanges, but only the total destruction of Hamas can end the war.

 

Failing to have definitively defeated Hamas, Mr. Netanyahu has so far refused to spell out his vision of Gaza’s future beyond ruling out a role for either Hamas or the West Bank-based internationally recognised Palestine Authority and hinting at recruiting Gazan tribal and clan leaders instead.

Mr. Netanyahu’s failure has allowed him to prolong the Gaza war at an unconscionable human cost, particularly involving Palestinian lives, and extend the shelf life of his fragile coalition.

Mr. Netanyahu’s acceptance of the ceasefire’s first phase prompted ultra-nationalist National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir to resign. The second-phase negotiations could spark the departure of hardline Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and potentially the collapse of the government.

Hamas complicated things for Mr. Netanyahu by demonstrating this week its ability to maintain command and control, field a disciplined armed force, and choreograph the release of hostages abducted by the group and Islamic Jihad during their October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, despite having been severely battered for 15 months during Israel’s relentless assault on Gaza.

Adding fuel to the fire, Palestinians see the return of hundreds of thousands of displaced Gazans to their devastated homes in northern Gaza as having thwarted a perceived Israeli plan to cleanse the region ethnically.

Israel has acknowledged Hamas’ survival by negotiating a ceasefire with the group and agreeing to a security protocol that allows unarmed Hamas policemen to maintain law and order in designated areas except when carrying arms is deemed an absolute necessity.

Even so, Messrs. Trump and Netanyahu will agree in their meeting that there is no place for Hamas in post-war Gaza.

Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mohammad Mustafa

However, the Palestine Authority is likely to be in a different category. Mr. Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, signalled there was a place for the official representative of the Palestinian people when he met in Saudi Arabia in recent days with Hussein al-Sheikh, the secretary general of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), the Palestine Authority’s backbone.

It was the first meeting between a Trump administration official and the Authority since 2017, when the Authority boycotted Mr. Trump’s first administration for moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and recognising Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

To bridge the gap with Mr. Netanyahu, Mr. Trump could adopt a proposal for an interim international administration in Gaza that the Biden administration had discussed with the United Arab Emirates and Israel.

Under the proposal, the Authority, widely viewed as ineffective and corrupt, would initially be part of an international administration while it cleans up its act and its security forces are retrained and vetted to weed out elements sympathetic to armed militants on the West Bank and in Gaza.

The administration would employ private security companies to assist in enforcing law and order and training the Palestinian security forces.

Catering to Mr. Abbas’ insistence that the Authority is the entity legally entitled to govern Gaza, the Authority would formally invite the international partners, even though the ceasefire agreement made no mention of the Palestine Authority. In 2007, Hamas expelled from Gaza Mr. Abbas’s Al-Fatah movement, the group’s archrival and dominant force in the PLO and the Authority.

In recent months, Mr. Abbas has sought to demonstrate to Israel and Mr. Trump the Authority’s ‘reliability’ at the risk of further jeopardising what little credibility it still had among Palestinians by cracking down on militants in the Jenin refugee camp in between Israeli attacks on the settlement and replacing an Israeli ban on Al Jazeera reporting from the West Bank with a prohibition of his own.

Hamas’ show of strength during the prisoner releases highlights the group’s ability to disrupt a transition in Gaza if a post-war administration fails to recognise the group in a mutually acceptable fashion.

Hamas and Al-Fatah have discussed forming an administration of politically independent technocrats nominated by both groups that would govern Gaza and the West Bank.

A technocratic government may encourage donors to help Gaza get essential services back on track, but investors will need more to convince them that pumping billions into the Strip’s reconstruction is not pouring money into a black hole of cyclical violence.

To create that kind of confidence, Mr. Trump will have to do some serious arm-twisting when he meets Mr. Netanyahu on Tuesday.

The president got off to a wrong start with his call for the resettlement in Egypt and Jordan of Gazan Palestinians. Rejected by Arab foreign ministers, the call sent Mr. Netanyahu the wrong message on the eve of his meeting with the president.

Diplomats and analysts say that is easily corrected.

“I would like to see the Palestine Authority and other countries enter Gaza and rehabilitate it. There is a readiness to put boots on the ground and pour money into Gaza, provided there is a political horizon for the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This has to be a two-state solution. That’s where President Trump has a lot to say,”’ said former Israeli justice minister and peace negotiator Yossi Beilin.

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.