Team Trump is in lockstep with Israel’s operation to dismantle the refugee camps in preparation for annexation. This is a recipe for disaster and much more conflict to come
By David Hearst
23 January 2025
Anyone who imagined that US President Donald Trump would be the Stop the War president the Middle East had been waiting for, should have a look at what is currently underway in the Occupied West Bank.
Dumbfounded by the sight of hundreds of well turned out Hamas fighters and jeeps surrounding the Red Cross transport vehicle which held the first three Israeli hostages to be released, the Israeli army is laying waste to Jenin with a fury uninhibited by 15 months of continuous war.
The images from the hostage release in Gaza City shocked an Israeli public fed on myths of total victory. “After a year and four months, in which the public’s eyes have been flooded with information and baseless narratives of stories of total victory and revenge, the Israeli public sees from Gaza images of Toyotas, armed Hamas members and Gaza rising from the ruins,” journalist Israel Frey told Middle East Eye.
That said, the large-scale ground assault on the West Bank refugee camps was preplanned. But its timing was enough to keep Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s far right finance minister and de facto consul general of the occupied West Bank, in the cabinet when he threatened to resign over the ceasefire in Gaza.
The other item in Smotrich’s sweetie bag was the promise to clear out the army leadership.
If you think that Lt General Herzi Halevi, Israel’s top general who resigned this week, has done enough in Gaza to be considered the next recipient of an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court (ICC), his replacement will be worth watching.
With the accompanying settler attack on the Palestinian town of Funduq, as Trump was lifting sanctions on its most violent lynch mobs, you could be forgiven for thinking that Israel had merely pressed the pause button on Gaza, only to unleash the same hell on the West Bank. Within hours, 10 bodies lay on the streets of Jenin, too dangerous to retrieve.
So has the pattern for Trump’s second term in office already been set, and is this what it looks like?
A repeat of the dream relationship?
No one can argue with the facts: all the pieces are in place for a repeat of the dream relationship with Israel achieved by Trump during his first term.
Trump allowed Israel to annex the occupied Golan Heights – a move destined, one day, to create war with Syria -to use the Abraham Accords as a lever to bury the Palestinian cause, and to move the US embassy to Jerusalem.
For his second and last term, Trump has appointed an ambassador in Mike Huckabee, who believes there is no such thing as a Palestinian, a defence secretary in Pete Hegseth, who said a Third Temple should be built on the ruins of Al Aqsa mosque, and a peace envoy in Steve Witkoff who wants to “relocate Gazans to Indonesia”.
Trump himself has made it abundantly clear that he cares not one fig for the fate of seven million Palestinians.
Trump is interested, as is his son in law Jared Kushner, in Gaza as the largest demolition site in the world, if only for all that beachfront opportunity it represents: “Beautiful things could be done over there, fantastic things,” the busy president opined.
But as for the people who live there, not one concern clouds his empty brain.
To be fair, Trump doesn’t care much for any Arab, rich or poor. His empathy with Saudi Arabia stretches just as far as Mohammed Bin Salman, the crown prince, is willing to open his wallet.
Asked about his first foreign trip, Trump remembered going to Riyadh the first time round, but only because Saudi had shelved out $450bn on American products. “I dont know, if Saudi Arabia wanted to buy another $450 billion, or $500 billion we will put it for inflation.”
Oblivious to genocide, intent on being obeyed, surrounding himself with people who parrot Israel’s worst talking points, will Trump prove once again to be the perfect foil for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu? Will Netanyahu’s legacy policy really be the abortion of a Palestinian state before it was even born?
The answer I am reaching for is mixed. The dream ticket of Trump and an Israel wholly in the sway of religious Zionism is certainly there. Religious Zionism occupies a larger piece of Israel’s real estate today than it did in 2017 or ever before. It is no longer the unacceptable fringe.
It controls the occupation of the West Bank, the border police and it has infected the highest echelons of the army and crushed the courts. It is now a voice in the cabinet Netanyahu can not ignore and it has brought a Democrat president to heal. It is fully justified in expecting the unalloyed loyalty of the Trump administration.
All this is true. But neither Trump nor Netanyahu are living in the world they thought they had mastered in 2017.
Left to itself, free-wheeling Israel could be as potent a source of instability to the region and thus to Trump, as it was to Biden.
No country for old men
Netanyahu may have used his short meeting with Witkoff as an excuse to go for a ceasefire he could have secured in July last year, but there were also growing domestic reasons for doing so now.
The polls are, at face value, contradictory. Sixty-tw0 percent of Israelis believe there are no innocents in Gaza, but between 60 and 70 percent support ending the war.
The reason for this discrepancy is a complete absence of any empathy with Palestinians.
Israelis are war weary merely and solely because of the cost they themselves have paid in the lives of soldiers and the injured, the cost to the economy, and the dent that the war has made on their easy western style of life to which this generation of Israeli feels is its birthright.
War, as my colleague Meron Rapoport observed, has become a heavy burden on the government, the military and society as a whole.
Israeli society is divided as never before. The weekly demonstrations by the families of hostages kept the pressure up on a government that argued in vain, and against all evidence, that only military action could bring the hostages back alive.
Never before had there been this level of internal dissent against a war as it was being fought.
The ceasefire in Lebanon did not relieve the pressure on Netanyahu. It increased it. Reading this, Netanyahu, who is approaching the halfway mark of his current term as premier, knows he will be wiped out at the next election if he continues like this.
Put to one side his responsibility for the 7 October attacks; since then over 400 soldiers have died and untold thousands have been injured. For what cause have they perished, if Hamas continues to flourish in the ruins of Gaza?
But if Israel is as war-weary as the polls suggest, why is it starting another one in the West Bank, and why has it occupied a greater amount of Syrian territory than it currently occupies in Gaza?
Partial annexation
For a start, Netanyahu is once again shrewd in his analysis of what Washington will tolerate.
Trump’s stop to the Gaza war only concerns the Israeli hostages. Once they are back, or most of them are, Israel can do what it wants in Gaza or the West Bank.
Asked about the future of the ceasefire while signing executive orders in the Oval Office, Trump said: “It’s not our war. It is their war. I am not confident. But I think they’re very weakened on the other side.”
Second, the military onslaught in the West Bank and Halevi’s replacement are the price of keeping Smotrich on side. And he is quite upfront about that. Smotrich said that the coming period will witness the replacement of the senior military leadership in preparation for the resumption of the war on the Gaza Strip.
Team Trump is also in lockstep with a West Bank operation to dismantle the refugee camps in preparation for partial annexation.
Elise Stefanik, Trump’s nominee for US ambassador to the UN, believes that Israel has biblical dominion over Judea and Samaria, as she puts it. The Palestinians have no rights as a people and certainly not the same ones as Israelis, in her eyes.
It would be foolish to limit Netanyahu’s purpose to just this. He knows his action in Jenin will not only demolish the city, but the Palestinian Authority itself – a body already on life support.
It can not survive as an adjunct to the Israeli military machine in demolishing Jenin, Tulkarm, Nablus and all the other centres of resistance.
We can expect to see increasing defections from its armed and trained Preventive Security Force, as we saw in the Second Intifada.
This Netanyahu knows full well.
Israel’s biggest Achilles’ heel
For Netanyahu, the post-war governance arrangements he wishes to see in the West Bank will be the same as they are for Gaza – a return to the days of individual deals with town and community leaders.
Like Gaza, the West Bank will fall under permanent Israeli military rule. But here lies another key difference from Trump’s first term.
Israel has not just lost a whole generation of American Jews in the brutality it has shown in Gaza. It has lost the sympathy and support of the whole region, which on 6 October showed every sign of dropping the Palestinian cause down the deepest well it could find.
A new generation of autocrats had come to power in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates who were fundamentally indifferent to the Palestinian cause. Before it laid waste to Gaza, Israel was on the cusp of total victory.
Israel’s ability to misread the Arabs it lives among is its biggest Achilles’ heel.
Israel has still to digest the fact that its war on Gaza has roiled and energised a whole generation of Arabs as no war has ever done before in Israel’s short but bitter history.
What else would motivate a Moroccan to abandon the gold dust of Green Card permanent residency in America for certain death in a knife attack on the streets of Tel Aviv?
Morocco was an enthusiastic signatory to the Abraham Accords. What is the price of that piece of paper now?
Israel is so oblivious to the region it lives in, it does not even think it is worth bothering with in any other terms than acting as the biggest bully in the playground.
But if it goes ahead with its plans for the West Bank, Israel will further radicalise six million Palestinians in Jordan and millions of East Bankers as never before.
Trump’s US army will have to act, as it has so many assets and bases in the region which are supremely vulnerable to local public opinion of their host nation.
The Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi has warned countless times of these consequences and been ignored. “The West Bank is on our borders and the situation is dangerous, and what is happening there could destabilise the security of the region,” Safadi said.
Trump will not be in a position to ignore the collapse of Jordan if it happens. None of its neighbours will. It will not be just “their” problem, but his too. It would threaten the entire US military footprint in the region.
We are dealing with an American administration which has no idea who or what the Palestinians are. To a man and woman, they see the region through the prism of Israel.
America has always done this, but the myopia is even greater today.
This is a recipe for disaster and the seed of much more conflict to come. The anti-war platform Trump stood on will soon seem a distant memory.
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