A Silver Lining in the Middle East?

The Trump-Witcoff-Kushner-Qatar-Turkey-Egypt peace deal is clearly flawed, but maybe now that the hot Gaza war is (hopefully) ending, peace-makers can seize the moment.

Is the worst president we’ve ever had about to be the best president the Middle East ever had? Those of us who want to live in a democracy governed by the rule of law rather than the rule of one man and his whims can’t ignore this question, now that the 2023-2025 Gaza War appears to be ending. I’ve noticed a fair amount of compartmentalizing of late, as if it’s possible to act like there’s no connection between the Orange Cheeto’s international deal-making and his domestic standing. But these things are connected—and anything that makes his poll numbers go up (like a genuine foreign policy success) may make it harder to block all the terrible things he is doing here at home.

On the one hand, Trump has succeeded in forcing Israel and Hamas to trade hostages for prisoners. He at least temporarily has silenced the guns. He also forced Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to apologize to his Qatari counterpart for violating that nation’s sovereignty in early September. And he has declared that there will be “no annexation” of the West Bank by Israel. On the other hand, he’s canceled President Biden’s sanctions on the most violent Israeli settlers and given America’s tacit approval to a massive new settlement east of Jerusalem that will effectively bisect any future West Bank Palestinian state. Plus he is prone to saying things like this, which he babbled to the press gaggle on Air Force One during his flight back to the US on Monday: “We’re talking about a different plan...I’m talking about rebuilding Gaza. I’m not talking about single-state, or double-state, or two-state...A lot of people like the one-state solution. Some people like the two-state solution. We’ll have to see.”**

So, who knows where the Trump-Witkoff-Kushner-Qatar-Turkey-Egypt “peace deal” is going, or if it will soon fall apart as Israel and Hamas dig in on the plan’s many unresolved sticking points. To me, one of the most troubling aspects of the whole thing is how much it demonstrates the emergence of a global alliance of kleptocrats, autocrats, high-tech arms merchants and oil monarchs led by the United States Don Trumpeone. Or is it Qatar, which has enriched the Trump family multiple times over and has now reaped a NATO-like US security guarantee and an airbase on US soil, that is really pulling the train forward? Either way, this deal looks like the Abraham Accords on steroids. Recall that those were mostly about normalizing business and military deals between Israel and some of the Gulf states. It’s a bit hard to see how all this holds together, especially as Israel has never been willing to be subservient to Saudi Arabia or any of America’s allies in the Persian Gulf, and Trump seems to be promising all of them that he’s going to be their very best friend. But maybe trillions of dollars from the Gulf monarchies are enough to buy everyone off.

On the other hand, maybe now that the hot phase of the Gaza War appears to be ending, global attention to the still-unresolved problem of justice for Palestine will take the region in an unexpected direction. So here I am, as always searching for a silver lining. And it could be this—when wars end, long-repressed feelings often surge to the fore. War hero Winston Churchill lost Britain’s first post-war election in 1945 because the public wanted Labor to lead a host of needed social reforms. In 1977, Israel’s long-dominant Labor Party was unseated in the first national election after the disaster of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. So, the next year could be a time of upheaval inside Israel and Palestine. Netanyahu’s term will run out next October, though many expect his governing coalition will collapse sooner, triggering new elections. And Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas told the UN last month that he would hold new presidential and parliamentary elections within one year from the end of the war in Gaza. Both decks will be reshuffled. Could this be an opportunity for a historic breakthrough?

The most interesting analysis I’ve read so far of the tectonic shifts now rumbling through the Middle East in the wake of Israel and Hamas accepting the first phase of Trump’s peace deal was published Sunday in Ha’aretz (gift link). Writing about how Trump envoy Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner were received Saturday night at Tel Aviv’s Hostages Square by a celebratory crowd on 400,000 Israelis, columnist Joshua Leifer focused less on how the crowd cheered Trump and booed Netanyahu, and more on the disconcerting effect of the word “peace” on the huge audience. This is not a word that recent Israeli leaders have used much, Leifer noted – indeed Netanyahu has insisted for years that Israel will forever have to live “by the sword” and only weeks ago gave a speech telling his countrymen that they had to become a “super-Sparta” in response to worldwide criticism.

As Leifer wrote:

“The first time Witkoff said it, the word seemed suspended in an awkward near-silence, the crowd muted, almost confused. Witkoff kept saying it. He must have used the word, which has become an object of colloquial ridicule in Israel, at least a dozen times. And each time, the crowd responded tentatively, as if unsure of what to make of the real estate-mogul-turned-diplomat’s resurrection of an idea that many Israelis have grown accustomed to treating as extinct.”

Speaking before Israel’s Knesset the next day, Trump piled on. “This is not only the end of war – this is the end of an age of terror and death,” Trump said. “Like the U.S.A. right now, it will be the golden age of Israel and the golden age of the Middle East.” He went on, “Israel, with our help, has won all that it can by force of arms. Now it’s time to translate those victories against terrorists on the battlefield into the ultimate prize of peace and prosperity for the entire Middle East.” Trump asserted that nearly every country in the region supported his plan to end the war, which would ensure that “Israel’s security will no longer be threatened in any way, shape or form.” Some Israeli Members of Knesset even wore red hats emblazoned with the slogan “Trump—The Peace President.”

Leifer quite correctly observed that the whole Trump team appears to “believe sincerely that they are on the cusp of negotiating a kind of right-wing rerun of the Oslo Accords. Their vision is one of a new regional order, sponsored, it seems, by the Gulf states, with whom both Witkoff and Kushner have strong (and lucrative) ties.” (It’s worth noting in this context that far-right pro-Israel types are also attacking the Trump plan as “Oslo 2.0.”) This “peace in our time” theme was only reinforced by the optics of the signing ceremony that took place Monday in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, where twenty world leaders watched as Trump signed a document outlining the ceasefire agreement along with the leaders of Egypt, Qatar and Turkey. Trump, bombastic as always, declared, “It’s peace in the Middle East. And everybody said it’s not possible to do. And it’s gonna happen, and it is happening, before your very eyes.”

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread

I’d like to suspend disbelief and say that it would be great if the Trump team could bring a just resolution to the Hundred Years War between Israelis and Palestinians over the land between the river and the sea. (If you’d prefer a much less charitable but perhaps more realistic reading of where things stand, Peter Beinart has a depressing take in Jewish Currents.) But unless Trump has some kind of magical power over Israeli minds, it won’t be long before the current euphoria disappears. That’s because there’s no way to square the desire of Israeli maximalists like Netanyahu to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state with the insistence of all of Trump’s Arab partners, most notably Saudi Arabia, that such a state is a necessary condition for any broader coexistence across the region.

Recall that in 2020, the last time Kushner tried to cobble together a compromise which would have involved giving the Palestinians their own state in a shrunken set of enclaves in the West Bank plus some additional territory to be carved out of parts of Israel’s Negev desert, it went nowhere. No one really liked it and the Palestinians weren’t even consulted during the process. What was missing now, as it was then, is a big constituency of Israelis and Palestinians hopeful enough to counterbalance their more extreme counterparts.

My new book, When Doves Try (print copies now available from Bookshop.org if you are boycotting Amazon) is mainly about a time when a risky move by one Arab leader, Egypt’s Anwar Sadat, to seek peace with his former adversaries, led to the rise of a home-grown Israeli peace movement in response, which ultimately helped midwife the Israel-Egypt peace treaty. It was an imperfect resolution, to be sure, because Israel’s rightwing leaders still refused to consider any recognition of Palestinian national hopes—but it also kept two of the biggest armies in the region from again attacking each other. Brave leadership can lead to unexpected change.

In that light, it’s a shame that quiet efforts—including by American Jewish leaders—to include Marwan Barghouti, a Palestinian activist serving five life sentences for helping to plan terror attacks during the second intifada, among the hundreds of security prisoners released in the Gaza deal, failed. During his time in prison, Barghouti was a lead author of the 2006 Palestinian Prisoners Document, which embraced a political path to a two-state solution, and he consistently tops polls among Palestinians for who they would support as their next president. As former Shin Bet chief Ami Ayalon said last year, “Marwan is the only Palestinian leader who can be elected and lead a united and legitimate Palestinian leadership toward a path of mutually agreed separation from Israel.” But Israel’s rightwing security cabinet vetoed including him in the deal.

Gershon Baskin, an Israeli peace activist who has frequently served as a channel between Israeli leaders and groups like Hamas, wrote recently that he “tried to convince the American side that Marwan’s release was important to the future of Israel and Palestine” in the same way that Nelson Mandela’s release helped pave the way toward peaceful transformation in South Africa. Media reports suggest the Trump team did indeed ask Israel to do so. So maybe Kushner and Witkoff recognize that they need a Palestinian partner with enough public legitimacy to carry off any real peace deal.

Baskin, for his part, says that “an Israeli, Palestinian, and international campaign should be organized to call for [Barghouti’s] release and although It will have no impact on the current irresponsible, right-wing irrational government of Israel, we can make this into a campaign issue in the next round of Israeli elections – if we gather enough local and international support. For the sake of Israeli-Palestinian peace – Free Marwan.”

—Related: Conflict resolution expert Jay Rothman explains why he’s “re-engaging” with the Israel-Palestine issue despite the flawed nature of Trump’s deal.

**The same guy also posts sheer nonsense like this, which could only have happened if President Biden’s FBI owned a time machine: “THE BIDEN FBI PLACED 274 AGENTS INTO THE CROWD ON JANUARY 6. If this is so, which it is, a lot of very good people will be owed big apologies. What a SCAM - DO SOMETHING!!! President DJT”

In Other News

—While some universities still haven’t decided whether they want to join the Trump regime’s “compact” for higher education, student leaders are united in opposition. A joint statement by student government representatives at MIT, University of Virginia, University of Arizona, Dartmouth, University of Pennyslvania, Brown and Vanderbilt says “We must not allow these attempts to control what can be taught, studied, or spoken on our campuses.”

—Andrea Pitzer says what needs to be said about Ezra Klein’s dismaying performance as an official “smart person” unsure of his own core values these last few months. “You don’t have to swallow frogs,” is just a very witty way of summing things up. Kudos!

—I live in New York, not Massachusetts, but this report by independent journalist Aaron Singer in CommonWealth Beacon on how the Democratic supermajority on Beacon Hill won’t pass Democratic bills made me feel like I was reading about my home state.

—Did you get the message from the leaders of the No Kings national protest happening this Saturday urging participants to “Wear Yellow” as a unifying color? Probably not, which is honestly a bit confusing. Movement strategist Anat Shenker-Osorio posted that call on Monday night on Bluesky, as did Indivisible National, but I haven’t seen it amplified much. Who knows, maybe it will catch on? Speaking just for myself, I wouldn’t mind if the titular heads of a few groups just came out and said, “We’re adopting ________ as our unifying symbol” but up until now they’ve been reticent to do so. Shenker-Osorio says yellow is the choice because it’s highly visible, symbolizes optimism, and has been used by pro-democracy movements in Hong Kong, South Korea, Ukraine and Thailand. All good company. Yellow it is.

—Lots of American airport authorities are refusing to play a TSA video featuring Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem blaming the federal shutdown on Democrats, including the NY/NJ Port Authority, which oversees JFK, Newark and LaGuardia Airports, Buffalo, Charlotte, Cleveland, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Portland (OR), and Seattle. Smaller county-administered airports are also rejecting the video, like ours in Westchester, NY. Noem’s use of government resources for a partisan message is a blatant violation of the Hatch Act, so kudos to local authorities for rejecting the video.

End Times

Sorry, but this one isn’t fun. It’s deadly serious.