Israel has changed since Donald Trump's last term – has he? - Voice of Asia

Donald Trump has already made his presence felt in the Middle East even before he officially begins his second term as president. He has broken the delaying tactics used by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his extreme nationalist coalition partners to avoid accepting the ceasefire deal put forward by Joe Biden last May.

The pressure from the US on Hamas and other Palestinian groups was inevitable. The leverage of pressuring Israel was never really used during Biden’s tenure. Trump is starting his second term claiming credit for brokering the Gaza ceasefire and with good reason to be proud. He can bask in some glory.

On the other hand, Netanyahu is facing a coalition crisis. The whole principle of a deal with Hamas is anathema to the extreme nationalist politicians who support his government. One of them, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, has said his party, Jewish Power, would only support the government if it resumed the war, cut off all aid to Gaza and destroyed Hamas. If that didn’t happen, he would resign.

This is irrelevant to Donald Trump. The push for a Gaza ceasefire shows that Trump will put his presidential interests ahead of the political demands of the Israeli Prime Minister. The war after the October 7 attacks has left much of Gaza in ruins.

Joe Biden, on the other hand, is prepared to risk losing swing state votes in a presidential election because of his determination to support Israel, despite his unease about Israel killing civilians in Gaza and depriving them of food, medical care, shelter and clean water.

Israel’s nationalist right were delighted by Trump’s overwhelming victory in November. They thought Trump would give them a freer hand than Biden. But the reality may be more complicated than that. Just as Israel is no longer the country Trump left when he departed office in 2021, Trump may no longer be the president they first encountered.

The first sign of how Trump as president would handle the Middle East – and the conclusions that were drawn from it – came in the hot early summer of Trump’s second year as president. If you live outside Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, you might not remember the day – what happened on May 14, 2018. After all, there has been terrible bloodshed since Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, that particular day of the Gaza war is easily forgotten. But in a world where most people get their news online, that day is also known as the ultimate “split-screen moment.”

On one side of the news feed was the Trump administration’s most photogenic couple, first daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner, who was also a senior adviser to the president. They were opening the new US embassy in Jerusalem. Moving the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel was one of Trump’s campaign promises, aimed primarily at the evangelical Christians who make up a large part of his voter base.

For the ecstatic Israeli politicians and the wealthy American donors to Donald Trump and Israel, the appearance of Ivanka and Jared was the long-awaited icing on the cake. On the other side of the screen, Israeli soldiers were firing into Gaza, killing and wounding Palestinians who were trying to break through the border fence.

Between 50 and 60 Palestinians were killed that day. Many more suffered terrible gunshot wounds. It was the climax of what Hamas, the rulers of Gaza, called the “Great March of Return.” Thousands of people took part. A small group, mainly young men, were moving towards the wire fence. About a kilometer back were thousands of peaceful demonstrators. Families were picnicking on the beach. They screamed and ran as Israeli drones bombed them with tear gas.

Hamas commanders must have concluded that mass protests alone were not enough to break through Israel. On October 7, 2023, Hamas launched a much larger, more carefully planned attack that caught Israel by surprise and broke through the border. Its operatives killed about 1,200 people, mostly Israeli civilians, and took another 251 as hostages into Gaza.

In the subsequent war, Israel has taken terrible revenge, leaving much of Gaza in ruins and, according to figures from the Hamas-run Ministry of Health, killing nearly 50,000 people. Israel insists the figures are exaggerated. But a new study in the British medical journal, The Lancet, suggests that the Palestinian Ministry of Health’s “mortality reports underestimated deaths by 41%.”

All US presidents have supported Israel. But the lesson the Israeli nationalist right drew from the other side of the split screen was that Donald Trump would be unusually accommodating. The move of the embassy showed that Trump was prepared to break with what he saw as the conventions that held back American interests. He abandoned the long-standing policy of Israel’s Western allies and most other countries of keeping their embassies in Tel Aviv until a peace agreement with the Palestinians decided the permanent status of Jerusalem.

The embassy opening ceremony came a week after he pulled the US out of the nuclear agreement with Iran, which he called “one of the worst and most one-sided deals the United States has ever signed.” He was also happy to undermine his predecessor Barack Obama’s biggest foreign policy achievement. Trump’s abandonment of the Iran deal was the culmination of a long campaign by Netanyahu.

In March 2019, Donald Trump went further in accepting Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, Syrian territory that Israel has occupied since the 1967 Middle East war. The recognition of Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights broke the post-Second World War consensus among Western nations that countries should not acquire territory through military action.

In 2020, the Trump administration gave Israel another big gift. Jared Kushner brokered the Abraham Accords between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, Sudan and Bahrain. The US offered benefits to all four countries in return for their cooperation. They were persuaded to abandon the long-standing Arab Peace Initiative that promised Israel full recognition in return for allowing the Palestinians to establish their own state in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. For Israel, it amounted to a free gift.

Biden, like Trump’s first term, wants to extend the Abraham Accords to Saudi Arabia. Saudi recognition of Israel, as the custodian of Islam’s two holiest sites, the leader of the Sunni Muslim world, and the richest and most powerful Arab country, would be of enormous significance. In return, the Saudis would get a full security agreement with the US, which of course includes more arms sales deals. It’s more than just lucrative business opportunities for all concerned, although those opportunities exist and are attractive.

The argument is that this would stabilize the volatile Middle East. A US-Saudi security agreement would also be a good way for Washington to get ahead of China, whose rise is creating an intense interest in global power, including the Gulf region, its oil, its money and its strategic position. But this leaves the Palestinian issue. The Saudis wrote and proposed the Arab Peace Initiative at the beginning of the century. They insisted that they were not prepared to trade away Palestinian rights for a deal with Israel and the US before October 7. But that is what Hamas and other Palestinians believe is happening.

They see it as the latest sign that the Palestinian cause has been “forgotten and removed from the negotiating table,” as Khalil al-Hayya, a Hamas leader and its chief ceasefire negotiator, told me in Doha last October. He said they attacked Israel 12 months ago because “no one was considering the rights of the Palestinians. It was necessary to alert the world that there is a people here with a cause and demands that must be met. It was a blow to Israel, the Zionist enemy.”

Trump’s incoming national security adviser has already said that a peace deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia is the president’s “top priority.” Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the country’s de facto ruler, has accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. Even so, the Saudis have made it clear that they are still interested in a US-brokered deal to normalize relations with Israel. Prince Mohammed’s public statement is that his price is irreversible progress towards Palestinian independence.

Donald Trump’s incoming national security adviser, Mike Waltz, has already said that a peace deal with Israel and Saudi Arabia is the president’s “top priority.” He told a conservative commentator in the US in December that it was necessary to “decimate these terrorist groups,” release the hostages and move towards a deal with Riyadh. He said that if Trump hadn’t lost the 2020 election to Biden, they could have had a deal by forming a common front against Iran, rather than “putting the Palestinian issue front and center.”

The problem with this approach is that Saudi Arabia has publicly linked its cooperation to the rights of the Palestinians. The Biden administration agrees that the key to changing the dynamic in the Middle East is not just Arab acceptance of Israel, but Israeli acceptance of the rights of the Palestinians. On January 14, in a valedictory speech, as he prepared to leave office, Biden’s Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, made this clear in a speech to the Atlantic Council in Washington. Blinken, a staunch supporter of Israel, whose speech was interrupted by opponents accusing him of genocide in Gaza, also had some tough words for Israel.

“Israelis have to decide what kind of relationship they want to have with Palestinians. It can’t be the fantasy that Palestinians will accept being non-people with no national rights. Seven million Israeli Jews and about five million Palestinians are rooted in the same land. Neither side is going away.” He added: “Israelis have to give up the fantasy that they can engage in de facto annexation without undermining Israel’s democracy, standing and security.”

Those de facto, cost-free annexations are exactly what many on the Israeli hard right would like Trump to allow. Perhaps he will. He is no friend of the Palestinians. But his Western allies are already hoping that the pragmatic Trump might be more flexible than the self-declared Zionist, Joe Biden, if Trump wants the Saudis to join the Abraham Accords.

Middle East peace is perhaps the biggest prize in global diplomacy because it is so elusive and currently so far away. What price is Donald Trump prepared to accept for a deal between Saudi Arabia and Israel? Prince Mohammed bin Salman has already stated his condition – a Palestinian state. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says the Palestinians will never get an independent state.

It’s unlikely that Donald Trump will be able to bully Mohammed bin Salman into changing his position. MBS’s Saudi Arabia is too powerful, and inviting the Chinese president to visit Riyadh has made the Americans nervous. It’s a moment of hard choices. President Trump will have a lot to think about as he re-enters the White House after his inauguration.