Trump’s Middle East reality check

 

By James M. Dorsey

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US President Donald Trump may think his 20-point proposal will end the Gaza war and solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but reality on the ground suggests otherwise.

To be sure, Mr. Trump's proposal is the only game in town, if only because no one, not Israel, not the Palestinians, who weren't consulted, not the Arab states, wants to get on the wrong side of the president.

While all welcomed Mr. Trump's proposal, a set of principles with no terms or mechanism for implementation, no one has wholeheartedly bought into the scheme.

Israel has so far endorsed only the first phase of the proposal, involving a fragile ceasefire, an exchange of Hamas-held alive and dead captives for Palestinians incarcerated in Israeli prisons and Palestinian corpses in Israeli custody, and a partial withdrawal of Israeli forces in Gaza.

US Vice President J.D. Vance and negotiators Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are in Israel to prevent the already disrupted ceasefire from breaking down and to nudge Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to engage in a second phase that would involve post-war security and governance arrangements in Gaza.

Hamas has released the remaining 20 living hostages, returned 13 bodies of dead captives it has been able to find under the rubble in Gaza, and is searching for the outstanding 15 corpses.

The group has also agreed that it will not be part of a post-war Gaza administration.

Even so, Hamas has rejected key elements of the proposal, such as disarmament of the group, and insisted that non-aligned Palestinian technocrats should govern Gaza in advance of elections with no international oversight.

Hamas has also rejected the idea of an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement, saying it would only agree to a long-term ceasefire with the Jewish-majority state.

Speaking at the inauguration of a US military coordination centre in Israel, Mr. Vance insisted that Hamas would have to disarm, but refrained from setting a deadline. He also stopped short of reiterating Israel’s goal of destroying Hamas.

“Hamas has to disarm… Hamas actually has to behave itself, and that Hamas, while all the fighters can be given some sort of clemency, they’re not going to be able to kill each other and they’re not going to be able to kill the Palestinians,” Mr. Vance said.

At the same time, Mr. Kushner said there would be no funding for reconstruction in areas controlled by Hamas.

For their part, Arab and Muslim states want to see a reformed Palestine Authority involved in post-war Gaza to lend the process legitimacy. The West Bank-based, internationally recognised representative of the Palestinians is widely seen as corrupt and ineffective.

Moreover, wealthy Gulf states are unlikely to fund the reconstruction of the territory that Israel’s military has turned into a moon landscape without credible assurances that the post-war process will not disintegrate into renewed hostilities.

Complicating matters is the fact that Mr. Trump and Israel's approach to ending the war and resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict once and for all, authored by Mr. Kushner during the president’s first term in office, is at loggerheads with what the rest of the international community, including the Palestinians, the Arabs, the Muslim world, China, Russia, and Europe, envisions.

In contrast with the international community that sees the creation of an independent Palestinian state as the solution, the Trump administration, backed by Israel, has backed away from a two-state solution, believing instead that economic development will be the panacea.

In doing so, it reversed three decades of US backing for a two-state solution, involving the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.

 

“The biggest message that we've tried to convey to the Israeli leadership now is that, now that the war is over, if you want to integrate Israel with the broader Middle East, you have to find a way to help the Palestinian people thrive and do better,” Mr. Kushner said in a recent CBS 60 Minutes interview.

Compounding obstacles to the implementation of the Trump proposal, Hamas, unlike the United States and Israel, and despite suffering enormous body blows during the war, was prepared for the day the guns would fall silent.

Body blows are nothing new for Hamas, even if the group suffered the most in the latest war. Israel has targeted, detained, and assassinated its leaders for more than two decades and has fought five wars with Hamas since 2008.

Rather than committing all its resources to a war it could not win, Hamas kept thousands of activists in reserve for the day it hoped to reestablish control in those parts of Gaza from which Israel would withdraw.

Moreover, Hamas benefitted from the fact that Gazan clans and criminal gangs that Israel armed failed to confront Hamas and take control of areas from which Israel withdrew as part of the ceasefire.

As a result, Hamas was able to reassert brutally its authority in areas from which Israel withdrew.

The clans and gangs either disbanded when the ceasefire took effect last week or were confronted and suppressed by Hamas, which demonstrated a degree of control and command Israel thought it had destroyed during the war.

Israeli officials fear that the possible inclusion of Turkey in an international stabilisation force that, if and when it is established, would maintain security in those parts of post-war Gaza from which Israel withdraws, could back Hamas in its effort to retain control.

Mr. Vance said Israel would have to agree to the composition of the force. “We’re not going to force anything on our Israeli friends when it comes to foreign troops on their soil. But we do think there is a constructive role for the Turks to play,” he said.

A mediator, alongside the United States, Qatar, and Egypt, Turkey endorsed the Trump proposal, which includes a call for the disarmament of Hamas, even though it tacitly allows the group's exiled members to travel in and out of Turkey and spend months at a time in Istanbul.

Early in the war, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan asserted that "Hamas is not a terrorist organisation, it is a liberation group, 'mujahideen' waging a battle to protect its lands and people."

That didn't stop Israel from acceding to a Turkish request earlier this month to allow 66 Palestinians, some of whom have Turkish citizenship or family ties to Turkey, to leave Gaza. They included 16 relatives of former Hamas leader and chief negotiator Ismail Haniyeh.

Israel sees the gesture as a way of improving relations with Turkey in advance of the country possibly playing an on-the-ground role in post-war Gaza.

Israel assassinated Mr. Haniyeh in Tehran in July of last year. The Israeli military killed three of Mr. Haniyeh's sons and four of his grandchildren in an air strike on their car in Gaza three months earlier.

Significantly, Turkey is one of four non-Arab Muslim countries, together with Pakistan, Azerbaijan, and Qatar, that has expressed a potential interest in contributing to the stabilisation force that Egypt could lead.

Even so, contributors would need the fig leaf of an invitation by the Palestine Authority.

With Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu opposing the Authority's involvement in post-war Gaza and the US and Israel focussing on economics and reconstruction of Gaza rather than Palestinian national aspirations, that could prove another hard nut to crack.

In the ultimate analysis, ending the Gaza war, let alone resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, hinges on the Trump administration remaining engaged in the process and willing to pressure Israel to make a 180-degree political U-turn.

Given the administration's track record and backing away from the notion of an independent Palestinian state as the resolution of the conflict, and the opposition of a majority of Israelis to a Palestinian state, the odds are that the Trump proposal, at best, will lead to a lull for whatever period rather than a sustainable end to hostilities.

This story is being simultaneously published by WhoWhatWhy.

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.