Netanyahu gambles on Trump
Credit:
Haaretz
By James M.
Dorsey
Substack
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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.
Donald J.
Trump shares bizarre AI-generated video of 'Trump's Gaza'
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.
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 in the
October 7 attack 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.
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