President Donald Trump arrived at Ben Gurion Airport on Monday morning, October 13, just as Hamas was releasing the last surviving Israeli hostages after two years of cruel captivity, and as Israel halted its devastating bombing of Gaza. Since October 7, 2023, two thousand Israelis and sixty-seven thousand Palestinians have been killed. The sector has turned into a scene of poverty and destruction. A ceasefire that could and should have come a long time ago is finally taking hold, in fits and starts.
In Jerusalem, Trump was hailed on billboards and in the Knesset as a modern-day Cyrus the Great — the Persian ruler who, in 538 B.C., allowed Jews to return to the Holy Land from their Babylonian exile and rebuild the Temple. During Trump’s speech to the Knesset, two left-wing lawmakers, Ofer Kassif, an Israeli Jew, and Ayman Odeh, an Israeli Palestinian, held up small signs reading “Recognize Palestine.” The guards quickly took them out of the room. The President praised the speed with which this modest protest was suppressed. “That was very effective,” he said brightly. In his self-admiring ramblings, Trump took time to thank his chief negotiator, Steve Witkoff (“the Kissinger who doesn’t leak”), and one of his richest patrons, Miriam Adelson (“She has sixty billion dollars in the bank!”), then turned to garbage Joe Biden — “the worst president our country has ever had, and Barack Obama was not far behind.”
It is impossible not to feel great relief that this long, terrible war may finally be over; It is also difficult to ignore that the president’s decision to use his sense of influence and guile on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is not due to fixed strategy, compassion or conviction. Indeed, his reckless musings earlier this year about turning Gaza into a “Riviera of the Middle East” fueled the Israeli right’s delusions of repopulating the Strip and annexing the West Bank. It also deepened a great deal of global anger. The pivotal moment came on September 9, when Netanyahu ordered an airstrike on an apartment building in Doha, hoping to kill four Hamas leaders who were then engaged in ceasefire negotiations. The strike missed its targets, but it clearly upset Trump.
Like many presidents before him, he has indulged Netanyahu’s tendency to take American military and political support for granted. But the strike on Doha touched something more sensitive than principle: the final result. The Trump family’s business ventures are increasingly intertwined with Qatari and Gulf capital. Trump forced Netanyahu to submit a written apology to the Qataris, which restored their confidence and dignity, reassured Turkey and Egypt, and prompted these regimes to put pressure on Hamas to get it to accept the expected ceasefire agreement. In the end, the most important Israeli air strike of the war was the one that failed.
The president now hails “the historic dawn of the new Middle East.” When Shimon Peres used this phrase during the hopeful years of the Oslo Accords, he was ridiculed for his naivety. Trump’s version owes less to diplomacy than to real estate patter, or the “if you think so” spirit he called for when he insisted that Trump Tower had sixty-eight floors, even though it actually had fifty-eight. As much as the president prefers “deal men” to starchy diplomats, achieving peace in the Middle East is not as simple as emptying an old casino. The administration cannot declare the end of what the president calls “three thousand years” of conflict and turn to its domestic project of undermining the rule of law. History resists abbreviation.
The “New Middle East” idyll in Netanyahu’s triumphant vision is that the threats posed by Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria, Yemen, and Iran will be diminished or defeated, thanks to his Churchillian leadership. This is the dawn. As for Netanyahu’s failure to protect the country on October 7? He forgot everything. This deliberately narrow-minded vision, or more accurately, re-election agenda, ignores the cost in global public opinion as well as the moral and political divisions within Israel itself. It also ignores the anger rooted in the bones of young Palestinians, who have lost family members and friends, but not their insistence on dignity and homeland. Real progress in the region, real justice and stability, will require healing, fortitude, imagination and endurance – day after day, year after year, long after any one administration.