Trump’s second term as US President has been mercurial, with lots of bobbing and weaving more bearing resemblance to a boxer’s opening round in which the point is to feel out the opponent rather than to land decisive punches. The pragmatism of the deal or the inflexibility of firm commitments premised on images of world order and national interest as reflective of hard power calculations in a world of states that political realists perceive as divided among friends, enemies, and those that don’t count.
In the case of Israel, this early rhythm of Trump’s second term is notable mainly for its uncertainty, contrasting with the tight brotherly embrace of Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden, who tried from time to time to adjust this image ever so slightly by gestures of humanitarian concern that Netanyahu seemed to misconstrue as serious US efforts to constrain Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza. As the quickly faded red line in Gaza illustrated Biden’s gentle warnings to Israel were mainly for show in response to public relations concerns arising in the US in response to the American protest activity and liberal media criticisms of Israel’s behavior in Gaza that struck more and more observers as ‘genocide,’ although most influential media platforms shied away from calling a spade a spade, that is, naming Israel’s Gaza violence as genocide. This inhibition on any governmental naming of the crime persists under Trump and is combined with the intensification of the repressive campaign inherited from Biden to treat support for the Palestinian pursuit of their basic rights and criticisms of Israeli excesses as ‘antisemitism,’ as a ‘hate crime against the Jewish people.’ Siding with the victim of flagrant crime is transformed by the magic of language into itself being the crime. This turn of phrase also offers Trump a pretext for advancing his generalized attacks on knowledge-based policy making of experts and reflecting scientific research as typified by elite universities, which are themselves epitomized by Harvard. Trump’s moves against Harvard involving defunding of research and challenging the immigration status of foreign students amount to an pedagogical assault on the accepted modern learning paradigm flavored by appeals to xenophobia rampant among the MAGA base. This campaign is vintage Trump, who combines his trust in belief-based action as fused with professions of ultra-nationalism.
Trump, despite shifts against Israel in US and European civil society sentiments never wastes words by making even the slightest display of empathy for the extrem suffering of the Palestinian people. He seems almost pathologically dazzled by prospects of access to the extreme wealth and geopolitical grandeur of the Gulf monarchies, carried to absurd extremes by proposing a US takeover of Gaza with the surreal promise of establishing ‘the Riviera of the Middle East,’ which included a proviso undoubtedly comforting to Tel Aviv that the reconstruction plan would be preceded by the forced departure of its surviving Palestinian population. It remains unclear to this day whether Trump was seeking a deal in which the financial burden would be shifted to the Arab world while the political administration of post-genocide Gaza, purged of Palestinians, would be entrusted to US administrative supervision, which is a double gain for Israel (no Palestinians, no UN).
As such, more than his predecessors Trump seemed at first to support unconditionally even Israel’s regional game plan of eliminating or weakening by military means potential threats to its future security by states and movements in its region. Despite likely swerves on the road ahead Trump seems at this stage determined to avoid Israeli distractions from the pursuit of his own separate primarily transactional goals in the Middle East that are of a primarily economistic character. Trump’s transactional mindset can be reduced to the pursuit of national gains with respect to trade and investment as awkwardly combined with corrupt personal and family enrichment schemes.
Above all such a course of action presupposes the US being not too overtly seen as aiding and abetting Netanyahu’s resolve to complete the Zionist Project of establishing an Israeli one-state solution that displaces Palestinians from the land and Palestine from maps of the Middle East. It should be noted that long before October 7 and years prior to Netanyahu extremist coalition that assumed governing authority at the start of 2023 the Israeli Knesset formally enacted into law the claim of exclusive Jewish supremacy without the slightest adverse reaction from Washington. [Israel’s Basic Law of 2018]. Netanyahu was Prime Minister at the time heading a less extreme governing leadership in Israel, yet committed to Israel sovereignty from the river to the sea, achieved by relying on a long tradition of patient reliance on salami tactics, taking small steps toward the fulfillment of the Zionist Project.
What the new 2023 Netanyahu team brought to the table was an acceleration of this consensus ‘solution’ to Palestinian resistance and resilience by disclosing its endgame agenda of violent dispossession and provocation. Trump will face a foreign policy dilemma of either opposing the revival of the UN-backed two-state negotiated solution or siding with Israel, concluding that the time has come to legitimize Israel’s one-state genocidally engineered outcome that included permanent statelessness for the Palestinian people, which entailed repudiating their inalienable right of self-determination.
The most revealing near-term regional measure of geopolitical affinity with Israel is whether American foreign policy chooses to normalize relations with Iran by reaching agreement about its nuclear program or eventually goes along with, and possibly even joins, Israel’s strong push for a major miliary strike aimed at destroying Iran’s nuclear facilities and Iran’s large-scale long-range missile response, and possibly sparking regime change in Tehran. Iranian diplomacy seems flexible about accepting enrichment limits and international inspection, although a recent UN inspection concluded that Iran was heightening its enrichment output to near weapons’ grade uranium, presumably devising its own weak form of deterrence to the overt threats to its security constantly being made. Trump seems likely to be tempted, for regional and geopolitical reasons, to explore options for an agreement with Iran, especially if it looks like a win for Washington’s diplomacy. If this is only speculatively accurate Trump would come to resent Israel’s effort to discourage ending Iran’s isolation without first getting rid of its anti-Israeli government. If Israel is antagonized in its regional security plan of neutralizing hostile threats by weakening the unity and capabilities of all Middle East actors, movements as well as states, an open break could occur, however improbable that now seems.
There are many unknowns that will impact upon regional developments, not least of which is Trump’ susceptibility to embarking on drastic changes in policy maneuvers as he or his entourage of submissive advisors perceive and juggle their options. Nevertheless, there are reasons at this time to accord serious attention to contrasting normalization and warmaking scenarios. The world is experiencing the dawn of a new phase of international relations in a less unipolar world order marking a terminal phase of international history best understood as ‘the aftermath of the Cold War’ that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. Among the transitional uncertainties are shifts in geopolitical alignments, alliance relationships, and financial hierarchies. The yet undefined yet ascendant roles and ambitions of China and Russia, and possibly India, are likely to challenge the prior era of undiluted US geopolitical primacy. A major uncertainty is whether the US will adapt to multipolarity or seek at great cost to perpetuate its post-Cold War dominance that it achieved from 1992 to 2022. To do the latter would mean focusing on nullifying the geopolitical challenges of not only Russia and China, but also a more activist and coherent Global South. It would also mean sacrificing the wellbeing of Americans, the ravages of climate change, allowing public indebtedness to reach untenable levels, and letting the national infrastructure to deteriorate even further.
A related uncertainty is whether this new phase of multipolarity would be more conflictual or more cooperative than the world order of the past three decades. Would the less unified West embark upon an all-out worldwide Cold War as was done in the years after 1945 in greatly altered global circumstances? Or would it seek some form of geopolitical collaboration that prepared the way toward problem-solving cooperative relations within reconfigured geopolitical spheres of interest that accorded primacy to political tradition and geographic proximity. The reinvention of viable 21st century spheres of influence and agreed fault lines should preoccupy ‘the best and the brightest’ among foreign policy gurus in the US, Russia, and China.
It is untested whether Trump’s leverage over Netanyahu is sufficient to induce Israel to accept a permanent ceasefire in exchange for the return of the hostages. It is partly a matter of how much Trump is prepared to weaken US domestic support in the US for his presidency in Zionist and Evangelical circles by putting visible pressure on Israel to discontinue its genocidal policies in Gaza, coupled with the Gazification of West Bank policy. Trump currently appears far more concerned about avoiding open war with Iran than stopping the violence in Occupied Palestine. Of course, Trump is the most quixotic leader on the present world scene, and so it may be that he is personally offended by Netanyahu’s refusal to do what he proposes on behalf of wider US strategic interests in the region, and would be prepared to accept an open break with Israel, which would have unpredictable impacts on the governability of the US.
At odds with such transformative prospects for world order are the concrete indications that even give Trump’s ambivalence toward Netanyahu’s approach he is complicit in its recent unfolding. It takes the form of insinuating an American presence in a politically motivated humanitarian aid plan that is managed by an American private security company (SRS) that provides mercenaries to oversea the distribution centers for the dispensing of aid. The whole scheme is disguised by deceptive language of humanitarianism. Even if it ran according to its announced plan, it would bypass the neutral auspices of UN-administered aid as bolstered by international civil society humanitarian aid as well as explicitly collect surveillance information designed to track Palestinian aid recipients. So far, this relief effort directed as alleviating a humanitarian emergency has made ‘starvation’ the lesser of evils when compared to the massacres of those lured to the distribution centers, and then killed and wounded in large numbers by drones, tank fire, and indiscriminate shooting of helpless Palestinians caught by the cruel lure of food. Although the Israeli Occupation Forces deny the allegations, they have confirmed by numerous eye witnesses and journalists on the ground. It seems a particularly grotesque extension of the genocide to kill randomly starving civilians who
Lost their lives while desperately seeking food and aid for their families.
Turning to Netanyahu, the question is how much pressure would be needed to produce a change in Israel’s approach to Gaza. Over the course of almost two years Netanyahu has been notably stubborn and unyielding in response to critics at home and internationally, including in the US. He might expect that Trump would give Israel a bright green light to complete the end game of the Zionist Project by depopulating and partially occupying
Gaza and annexing all or most of the West Bank. Also at issue is whether Netanyahu’s caving into Trump pressure on Gaza would result in the collapse of Israel’s fragile coalition government, and subject Netanyahu to resumed fraud prosecutions in Israel.
In the end I think the safest prediction is a compromise, whereby a long-term ceasefire, less than permanent, is agreed upon coupled with renewedsupport for Israel’s expansion of the settler presence in West Bank (22 new settlements have been approved by the Knesset at the end of May) and accompanying annexationist moves. The whole outcome in Gaza may depend on how seriously Israel is about launching a strike designed to destroy Iran’s nuclear program as balanced is the Trump quest for a more advantageous deal than was negotiated in 2015 while Obama was president.
In the background is the weakening support for Israel among the governments in western Europe partially reflecting the loss of Israeli support in civil societies around the world, including the US and Canada. Whether these countries and others will back up this recent wave of criticism with censure and sanctions is at this time unknown as is how this conjecture of a weakening of western support for Israel will impact US policy. Will it make Trump more or less insistent on backing Israel and move Netanyahu to become somewhat receptive to a ceasefire/hostages deal as a prelude to ending the Gaza ordeal. The weeks ahead will contain signs as to which way the wind is blowing both in the region and internationally. At present, the overall situation is in flux aggravated by these two leaders who are temperamentally autocratic, but one bends with the wind and the other is as rigid as brainless robot.
Global Justice in the 21st Century 