Trump's Return Is a Victory for Greater Israel, Annexation and Apartheid
Between Jared Kushner, David Friedman and the president-elect's own alarming record, Trump's triumph is likely to be calamitous for Palestinians. But it should terrify Israelis, too
Haaretz
Hussein Ibish
Nov 10, 2024 3:20 pm IST
The re-election of Donald Trump for second term as U.S. president is likely to prove extremely dangerous for Israel, and calamitous for the Palestinians.
With Trump back in power in Washington, the Middle East faces a period of even greater uncertainty, and possible destabilization, then it has even over the past year of carnage and upheaval. Israeli extremists are delighted, but the rest of the Israeli people should be deeply alarmed about the future that this extremism, which Trump is very likely to abet, portends.
It's hard to know whether the biggest losers outside America from Trump's re-election will be Ukraine or the Palestinians, both of which face devastating blows to their national projects.
But Ukraine will continue as a country, whereas the Palestinians may be losing any prospect of ever achieving independence. And that, of course, is also devastating for Israel because, without a two state solution, Israelis face the future of unending war with a still-disenfranchised and dispossessed Palestinian people who will, as all human beings would, continue to fight for their basic human rights and citizenship – something most of them do not presently enjoy.
This prediction isn't a matter of context-free speculation. Trump has a detailed track record from his first term in dealing with the Palestinians.
The Palestine Liberation Organization was initially excited by Trump's first election triumph, because, after having been ignored by the White House during the entirety of the second Barack Obama term, Trump put the Palestinian issue back on the table early after his inauguration. PLO leaders came to Washington feeling like Lazarus raised from the dead. Many of us tried to warn them they didn't really understand who they were dealing with, but they soon came to find out for themselves.
In his effort to force the Palestinians to accept outrageously disadvantageous terms in a final status agreement with Israel, Trump decided to treat them like obstreperous tenants who required forcible eviction from one of his New York properties. He decided to cut off their utilities, stop collecting the garbage and essentially forcing them into capitulation.
By the middle of his first term in 2018, he had cut off all diplomatic relations with the Palestinians and all U.S. aid to them, even to their security forces that work with Israel to maintain security in the occupied West Bank. Working with Congress, he made it virtually impossible for the PLO to reopen its mission in Washington D.C., reducing it to dealing with Americans and the administration through its office at the UN in New York.
And he showered Israel with unearned benefits, mainly at the expense of Palestinians. He moved the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem without extracting any concessions from Israel. He issued a vague statement recognizing Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem, although not committing to any territorial boundaries of such sovereignty, leaving it open to the imagination of any reader, including Israeli maximalists.
He also threw in U.S. recognition for Israel's unilateral annexation of the occupied Syrian Golan Heights in contravention of the UN charter's categorical prohibition of the acquisition of territory by war.
And, as a parting shot, in January 2020 his administration issued the notorious "Peace to Prosperity" plan that invited Israel to annex 30 percent more of the remaining West Bank, including the Jordan Valley. That would leave any remaining Palestinian areas entirely surrounded by a new, U.S. engineered, Greater Israel.
When Benjamin Netanyahu stood for election in Israel promising to implement this annexation plan, and won, a sudden crisis was created for the incoming prime minister and Trump.
Neither of them really wanted Israel to act on annexation right away. Netanyahu is a cautious person who conceives of annexation as a goal to be achieved carefully rather than suddenly. Trump found himself embroiled in a difficult reelection campaign, the COVID pandemic, and felt he had done enough for Israel already. Annexation was slated to be a second term project, at most.
Neither of them knew what to do, but the UAE swooped in with a brilliant proposal: In exchange for Israel promising not to annex anymore Palestinian land for the next five years, Abu Dhabi would normalize diplomatic relations with Israel (something the UAE had decided it wanted to do several years earlier for complex reasons of its own).
The informal but important five-year timeframe entirely revolved around Trump: one year to cover his remaining first term and another four years after his anticipated reelection. There was no other basis for it. The UAE was able to explain that it had salvaged the two state solution from the threat of annexation and therefore save the Palestinian people from the final blow to its dreams of independence. Bahrain quickly joined the parade, and after that Morocco and Sudan as well. The Abraham Accords were born.
The Palestinians were livid, but unable to do anything to prevent the first Arab normalizations with Israel that, unlike the peace deals with Egypt and Jordan, had nothing to do with territorial exchanges, and were entirely unconnected to Israeli-Palestinian dynamics.
So the Trump track record on Israel and the Palestinians could hardly be more alarming. The titular author of the Trump annexation proposal, his son-in-law Jared Kushner, will undoubtedly be playing a significant role in his Israel policies, whether formally within the White House or informally on the telephone.
Either way, it's unimaginable that he would be completely disengaged. His familial ties to Netanyahu – who used to sometimes sleep in the young Jared Kushner's bedroom during his early years at the UN, with the young man dispatched to another part of the house – are too deep, as are his commitments to the settlement movement.
Even more alarming, Trump's hyper-empowered ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, remains highly active in the president-elect's political circles, and is extremely likely to be an influential figure, and probably a high-ranking official, in the new Trump administration's policies towards Israel and the Palestinians.
Friedman has just published a book called "One Jewish State," which lays out a vision for Israeli-Palestinian peace. Israel would annex the entirety of the occupied territories, including Gaza, and the Palestinians there would remain in their own country only at Israel's sufferance and as residents without citizenship or votes.
Fittingly, Friedman recently launched the Hebrew edition of his book in the West Bank settlement of Nofim, in an event attended by six Israeli cabinet members; he published a promotional video message addressing American evangelicals in which he says: "We hope that one day, with God's help, and with your help, Israel will have complete sovereignty over all of its biblical homeland."
My new book @onejewishstate is now out in Hebrew. Grateful that so many leaders of the Israeli Government joined with me to launch the book. Many thanks to all of you, including @Israel_katz @NirBarkat @AmichaiChikli @GilaGamliel @oritstrock Eli Cohen, Yossi Dagan and so many… pic.twitter.com/tEcIG5XX5E
— David M Friedman (@DavidM_Friedman) October 31, 2024
There is no other word for this than formalized apartheid. It takes the Kushner proposal to its logical conclusion.
With this legacy and inner circle, and other Greater Israel fans ready to take on key national security positions, the second Trump term is likely to prove a decisive catastrophe for the last remaining hopes of the two state solution.
The most ardent annexation proponents in the Israeli government, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, have been placed in charge of the West Bank since October 7, and even before, especially to keep them away from the wars in Gaza and Lebanon. But they have been busily arming and radicalizing the settler movement on the ground in the occupied West Bank and using the Israeli military to aggressively confront Palestinian youth groups in cities like Jenin and Tulkarm.
Smotrich, in particular, is doing his best to destroy the Palestinian Authority, not just withholding its all-important tax revenues, but even threatening to cut off all its access to the Israeli banking system, which would cripple it financially and remove the last important way it serves the Palestinian people in Area A: paying public employees, including security personnel, and providing basic services like health and education. All of that would go with no income and no access to Israeli banks.
These extremists are clearly just waiting for an explosion of uncontrolled violence in the occupied West Bank, and are indeed obviously trying to provoke it, in hopes of using that as cover for annexation that will be presented as a necessary move in the interests of Israelis and Palestinians alike.
"It was the last thing we ever wanted to do," Israelis will tell the world, "but a divorce is necessary to save lives. We have to be the adults here. We have to draw a line with us over here and them over there, and if so many of them just happened to end up on the other side of this line that we have unilaterally drawn as a new border, that's all for the better."
For all his support for Israel, Joe Biden would not have endured this in silence and with complicity. Trump might well. If his Israel policy is being shaped by the likes of Kushner and Friedman, as seems extremely probable (it was reported this weekend that, for months, Israeli officials have been quietly briefing Kushner and Friedman on the Gaza war), then active collaboration with annexation and protection for Israel can probably be expected – which could also include a partial annexation of Gaza, too.
Ukrainians are probably going to be pressured into an armistice with Russia that effectively cedes large amounts of their territory to Moscow. They may or may not agree to that. Palestinians will be pressured to accept non-citizenship in a Greater Israel, and they will not agree to that. But Ukrainians can fight on on, with European support. Palestinians will have, effectively, no such option.
In Trump's moral universe, the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. Israeli annexationists can hardly contain their glee at Trump's victory. And they may get what they want: the next major step towards a Greater Israel. But if anyone in Israel imagines this will end the conflict, they have learned nothing over the past hundred years. A Trump-facilitated annexation will merely change its context, but the struggle will go on.
Under such circumstances, Israelis can probably expect future October 7s, and worse, into the foreseeable future. Settlement, colonization and annexation – not to mention expulsion – are hardly recipes for a stable and peaceful future. To the contrary, it guarantees an inheritance of bloodshed, suffering and horror for future generations.
Haaretz
Hussein Ibish
Nov 10, 2024 3:20 pm IST
The re-election of Donald Trump for second term as U.S. president is likely to prove extremely dangerous for Israel, and calamitous for the Palestinians.
With Trump back in power in Washington, the Middle East faces a period of even greater uncertainty, and possible destabilization, then it has even over the past year of carnage and upheaval. Israeli extremists are delighted, but the rest of the Israeli people should be deeply alarmed about the future that this extremism, which Trump is very likely to abet, portends.
It's hard to know whether the biggest losers outside America from Trump's re-election will be Ukraine or the Palestinians, both of which face devastating blows to their national projects.
But Ukraine will continue as a country, whereas the Palestinians may be losing any prospect of ever achieving independence. And that, of course, is also devastating for Israel because, without a two state solution, Israelis face the future of unending war with a still-disenfranchised and dispossessed Palestinian people who will, as all human beings would, continue to fight for their basic human rights and citizenship – something most of them do not presently enjoy.
This prediction isn't a matter of context-free speculation. Trump has a detailed track record from his first term in dealing with the Palestinians.
The Palestine Liberation Organization was initially excited by Trump's first election triumph, because, after having been ignored by the White House during the entirety of the second Barack Obama term, Trump put the Palestinian issue back on the table early after his inauguration. PLO leaders came to Washington feeling like Lazarus raised from the dead. Many of us tried to warn them they didn't really understand who they were dealing with, but they soon came to find out for themselves.
In his effort to force the Palestinians to accept outrageously disadvantageous terms in a final status agreement with Israel, Trump decided to treat them like obstreperous tenants who required forcible eviction from one of his New York properties. He decided to cut off their utilities, stop collecting the garbage and essentially forcing them into capitulation.
By the middle of his first term in 2018, he had cut off all diplomatic relations with the Palestinians and all U.S. aid to them, even to their security forces that work with Israel to maintain security in the occupied West Bank. Working with Congress, he made it virtually impossible for the PLO to reopen its mission in Washington D.C., reducing it to dealing with Americans and the administration through its office at the UN in New York.
And he showered Israel with unearned benefits, mainly at the expense of Palestinians. He moved the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem without extracting any concessions from Israel. He issued a vague statement recognizing Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem, although not committing to any territorial boundaries of such sovereignty, leaving it open to the imagination of any reader, including Israeli maximalists.
He also threw in U.S. recognition for Israel's unilateral annexation of the occupied Syrian Golan Heights in contravention of the UN charter's categorical prohibition of the acquisition of territory by war.
And, as a parting shot, in January 2020 his administration issued the notorious "Peace to Prosperity" plan that invited Israel to annex 30 percent more of the remaining West Bank, including the Jordan Valley. That would leave any remaining Palestinian areas entirely surrounded by a new, U.S. engineered, Greater Israel.
When Benjamin Netanyahu stood for election in Israel promising to implement this annexation plan, and won, a sudden crisis was created for the incoming prime minister and Trump.
Neither of them really wanted Israel to act on annexation right away. Netanyahu is a cautious person who conceives of annexation as a goal to be achieved carefully rather than suddenly. Trump found himself embroiled in a difficult reelection campaign, the COVID pandemic, and felt he had done enough for Israel already. Annexation was slated to be a second term project, at most.
Neither of them knew what to do, but the UAE swooped in with a brilliant proposal: In exchange for Israel promising not to annex anymore Palestinian land for the next five years, Abu Dhabi would normalize diplomatic relations with Israel (something the UAE had decided it wanted to do several years earlier for complex reasons of its own).
The informal but important five-year timeframe entirely revolved around Trump: one year to cover his remaining first term and another four years after his anticipated reelection. There was no other basis for it. The UAE was able to explain that it had salvaged the two state solution from the threat of annexation and therefore save the Palestinian people from the final blow to its dreams of independence. Bahrain quickly joined the parade, and after that Morocco and Sudan as well. The Abraham Accords were born.
The Palestinians were livid, but unable to do anything to prevent the first Arab normalizations with Israel that, unlike the peace deals with Egypt and Jordan, had nothing to do with territorial exchanges, and were entirely unconnected to Israeli-Palestinian dynamics.
So the Trump track record on Israel and the Palestinians could hardly be more alarming. The titular author of the Trump annexation proposal, his son-in-law Jared Kushner, will undoubtedly be playing a significant role in his Israel policies, whether formally within the White House or informally on the telephone.
Either way, it's unimaginable that he would be completely disengaged. His familial ties to Netanyahu – who used to sometimes sleep in the young Jared Kushner's bedroom during his early years at the UN, with the young man dispatched to another part of the house – are too deep, as are his commitments to the settlement movement.
Even more alarming, Trump's hyper-empowered ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, remains highly active in the president-elect's political circles, and is extremely likely to be an influential figure, and probably a high-ranking official, in the new Trump administration's policies towards Israel and the Palestinians.
Friedman has just published a book called "One Jewish State," which lays out a vision for Israeli-Palestinian peace. Israel would annex the entirety of the occupied territories, including Gaza, and the Palestinians there would remain in their own country only at Israel's sufferance and as residents without citizenship or votes.
Fittingly, Friedman recently launched the Hebrew edition of his book in the West Bank settlement of Nofim, in an event attended by six Israeli cabinet members; he published a promotional video message addressing American evangelicals in which he says: "We hope that one day, with God's help, and with your help, Israel will have complete sovereignty over all of its biblical homeland."
My new book @onejewishstate is now out in Hebrew. Grateful that so many leaders of the Israeli Government joined with me to launch the book. Many thanks to all of you, including @Israel_katz @NirBarkat @AmichaiChikli @GilaGamliel @oritstrock Eli Cohen, Yossi Dagan and so many… pic.twitter.com/tEcIG5XX5E
— David M Friedman (@DavidM_Friedman) October 31, 2024
There is no other word for this than formalized apartheid. It takes the Kushner proposal to its logical conclusion.
With this legacy and inner circle, and other Greater Israel fans ready to take on key national security positions, the second Trump term is likely to prove a decisive catastrophe for the last remaining hopes of the two state solution.
The most ardent annexation proponents in the Israeli government, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, have been placed in charge of the West Bank since October 7, and even before, especially to keep them away from the wars in Gaza and Lebanon. But they have been busily arming and radicalizing the settler movement on the ground in the occupied West Bank and using the Israeli military to aggressively confront Palestinian youth groups in cities like Jenin and Tulkarm.
Smotrich, in particular, is doing his best to destroy the Palestinian Authority, not just withholding its all-important tax revenues, but even threatening to cut off all its access to the Israeli banking system, which would cripple it financially and remove the last important way it serves the Palestinian people in Area A: paying public employees, including security personnel, and providing basic services like health and education. All of that would go with no income and no access to Israeli banks.
These extremists are clearly just waiting for an explosion of uncontrolled violence in the occupied West Bank, and are indeed obviously trying to provoke it, in hopes of using that as cover for annexation that will be presented as a necessary move in the interests of Israelis and Palestinians alike.
"It was the last thing we ever wanted to do," Israelis will tell the world, "but a divorce is necessary to save lives. We have to be the adults here. We have to draw a line with us over here and them over there, and if so many of them just happened to end up on the other side of this line that we have unilaterally drawn as a new border, that's all for the better."
For all his support for Israel, Joe Biden would not have endured this in silence and with complicity. Trump might well. If his Israel policy is being shaped by the likes of Kushner and Friedman, as seems extremely probable (it was reported this weekend that, for months, Israeli officials have been quietly briefing Kushner and Friedman on the Gaza war), then active collaboration with annexation and protection for Israel can probably be expected – which could also include a partial annexation of Gaza, too.
Ukrainians are probably going to be pressured into an armistice with Russia that effectively cedes large amounts of their territory to Moscow. They may or may not agree to that. Palestinians will be pressured to accept non-citizenship in a Greater Israel, and they will not agree to that. But Ukrainians can fight on on, with European support. Palestinians will have, effectively, no such option.
In Trump's moral universe, the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. Israeli annexationists can hardly contain their glee at Trump's victory. And they may get what they want: the next major step towards a Greater Israel. But if anyone in Israel imagines this will end the conflict, they have learned nothing over the past hundred years. A Trump-facilitated annexation will merely change its context, but the struggle will go on.
Under such circumstances, Israelis can probably expect future October 7s, and worse, into the foreseeable future. Settlement, colonization and annexation – not to mention expulsion – are hardly recipes for a stable and peaceful future. To the contrary, it guarantees an inheritance of bloodshed, suffering and horror for future generations.
