President Donald Trump arrived at Ben Gurion Airport on Monday morning, October 13, just as Hamas was freeing the last surviving Israeli hostages after two years of brutal captivity and Israel was ending its devastating bombing of Gaza. Since October 7, 2023, two thousand Israelis and sixty-seven thousand Palestinians have been killed. The Strip became a landscape of poverty and ruin. The truce, which could and should have happened long ago, finally, spasmodically, came into force.
In Jerusalem, Trump was greeted on billboards and in the Knesset as a modern-day Cyrus the Great, the Persian ruler who in 538 BC allowed Jews to return to the Holy Land from Babylonian exile and rebuild the Temple. During Trump's Knesset speech, two left-wing lawmakers, Ofer Kassif, a Jewish Israeli, and Ayman Odeh, a Palestinian-Israeli, held up small signs reading “Recognize Palestine.” The guards quickly pulled them out of the room. The President praised the speed with which this modest protest was suppressed. “It was very effective,” he said cheerfully. In his self-indulgent chatter, Trump took time to thank his lead negotiator Steve Witkoff (“Kissinger who doesn’t leak”) and one of his wealthiest backers, Miriam Adelson (“She’s got sixty billion in the bank!”), and then turned to Joe Biden—“the worst president in the history of our country, by far” and Barack Obama wasn't far behind.”
It is impossible not to feel enormous relief that this long and terrible war may finally be over; It's also hard to ignore the fact that the president's decision to apply his sense of leverage and cunning to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has little to do with coherent strategy, empathy or conviction. Indeed, his reckless musings earlier this year about turning Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East” fueled Israeli right-wing fantasies about repopulating the strip and annexing the West Bank. They have also exacerbated much of the world's anger. The turning point came on September 9, when Netanyahu ordered an air strike on a residential building in Doha, hoping to kill four Hamas leaders who were then negotiating a ceasefire. The strike missed its target but clearly alarmed Trump.
Like many presidents before him, he pandered to Netanyahu's tendency to take American military and political support for granted. But the blow to Doha touched on something more delicate than principle: the bottom line. The Trump family's business ventures are increasingly intertwined with Qatari and Gulf capital. Trump forced Netanyahu to issue a planned apology to the Qataris, a humiliation that restored their trust and amour propre, reassured Turkey and Egypt and prompted those regimes to pressure Hamas to accept an expected ceasefire. The most effective Israeli air strike of the entire war ultimately failed.
The president now hails the “historic dawn of a new Middle East.” When Shimon Peres used this phrase during the promising years of the Oslo Accords, he was ridiculed for his naivety. Trump's version owes less to diplomacy than to real estate chatter, the “it's so if you believe it is so” spirit he invoked when he claimed Trump Tower had sixty-eight floors when in fact it was fifty-eight. Even though the president values ”deal guys” over stuffy diplomats, achieving peace in the Middle East is not as simple as selling off a defunct casino. The administration cannot simply declare an end to what the president calls “three thousand years” of conflict and move on to its domestic project of undermining the rule of law. History resists shortcuts.
The idyll of a “new Middle East,” according to Netanyahu’s triumphant view, is one in which, thanks to his Churchillian leadership, threats from Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria, Yemen and Iran are reduced or defeated. It's dawn. As for Netanyahu's failure to defend the country on October 7? Everything is forgotten. This deliberately blinkered vision, or more accurately re-election platform, ignores the cost in global public opinion, as well as the moral and political divisions within Israel itself. He also misses the rage in the bones of young Palestinians who have lost family members and friends, but not their insistence on dignity and a home. Real progress in the region, real justice and stability will require healing, persistence, imagination and endurance – day after day, year after year, long before any administration does.
