The forever wars may be over, but Trump is no peacemaker

The new guard of kleptocrats are seeking quick deals on Gaza and Ukraine, not because they want peace but because they've found a better way to make themselves even richer

[First published by Middle East Eye]

Anyone trying to make sense of the Trump administration's policy towards Gaza should have a thumping headache by now.

Initially, US President Donald Trump called for the mass expulsion of Palestinians from the tiny territory wrecked by Israel over the past year and a half, so that he could build the "Riviera of the Middle East" on the crushed bodies of Gaza's children.

He followed up last week with an explicitly genocidal threat addressed to "the people of Gaza" – all two million-plus of them. They would be "DEAD" if the Israeli hostages held by Hamas were not quickly released – a decision over which Gaza's population has precisely no control.

To make this extermination threat more credible, his administration has expedited the transfer of an extra $4bn worth of US weapons to Israel, bypassing Congressional approval.

Those arms include more of the 2,000lb bombs sent by the Biden administration, which turned Gaza into a "demolition site", as Trump himself called it.

The White House also nodded through Israel's reimposition of a blockade that has once again choked off food, water and fuel to the enclave – further evidence of Israel's genocidal intent.

But while all this was going on, Trump also dispatched to the region a special envoy, Adam Boehler, to negotiate the release of the few dozen Israeli hostages still held in Gaza.

He was given permission to break with more than 30 years of US foreign policy and meet directly with Hamas, long designated a terrorist organisation by Washington.

'Pretty nice guys'

The meeting reportedly took place without Israel's knowledge.

One Israeli official observed: "You can't announce that this organisation [Hamas] needs to be eliminated and destroyed, and give Israel full backing to do it, and at the same time conduct secret and intimate contacts with the group."

In an interview with CNN at the weekend, Boehler remarked of Hamas: "They don't have horns growing out of their head. They're actually guys like us. They're pretty nice guys."

Then, in another unprecedented move, Boehler gave interviews to Israeli TV channels to speak directly to the Israeli public – apparently to prevent Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, from misrepresenting the content of his talks with Hamas.

In one interview, Boehler said Hamas had proposed a five to 10-year truce with Israel. During that period, Hamas would be expected to "lay down its arms" and forgo political power in Gaza. He described the proposal as "not a bad first offer".

In another, he referred to Palestinian prisoners as "hostages".

His approach left Israel quietly seething but unable to say much for fear of antagonising Trump.

'No agent of Israel'

In parallel, Trump's Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff – who reportedly laid down the law early on to Netanyahu by ordering him to attend a meeting on the Sabbath – headed to Doha this week to try to restore a ceasefire deal he had previously negotiated.

He appears determined to push Israel into honouring the second phase of that agreement, which requires the Israeli army to withdraw from Gaza and halt its war on the enclave. That would pave the way for a third phase, in which Gaza is reconstructed.

Witkoff's terms, according to reports, are that Hamas agrees to demilitarise and its fighters leave the enclave.

Israel is deeply opposed to a second phase. It wants to stick with phase one, in which it finishes swapping the remaining Israeli captives held by Hamas for some of the many thousands of Palestinians imprisoned in Israeli torture camps.

The idea is that, once completed, Israel will be free to restart the slaughter.

Boehler reinforced Witkoff's message, saying the White House hoped to "jump-start" talks and that the US was not "an agent of Israel" – implicitly acknowledging that, for many decades, it has very much looked like one.

Trump indicated a change of heart himself on Wednesday, telling reporters at the White House: "Nobody will expel the Palestinians."

Sword of retribution

Apparently confounding Boehler's claim that the US is able to make its own decisions about the Middle East, Trump was reported on Thursday to have removed him from dealing with the hostages issue following Israeli objections.

Meanwhile, Trump noisily shredded First Amendment protections on political speech, specifically in relation to Israel.

He signed an executive order empowering US authorities to arrest and deport visa holders protesting Israel's year-and-a-half-long slaughter in Gaza – or what the world's highest court is investigating as a "plausible" genocide.

That quickly resulted in the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a leader of last spring's student protests at New York's Columbia University – one of the most high-profile of dozens of protracted demonstrations on US campuses last year, which were often met with police violence.

The Department of Homeland Security accused Khalil of "activities" – namely, campus protests – supposedly "aligned to Hamas". These demonstrations, it alleged, threatened "US national security".

"This is the first arrest of many to come," Trump wrote on social media, declaring that his administration would be coming after anyone "engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity". Axios reported last week that Secretary of State Marco Rubio planned to use AI to search through foreign students' social media accounts for signs of "terrorist" sympathies.

These developments formalise Washington's working assumption that any opposition to Israel's killing and maiming of tens of thousands of Palestinian children should be equated with terrorism – a view increasingly shared, it seems, by UK and European authorities.

In concert, the White House announced that it was cancelling some $400m in federal grants and contracts to Columbia University over its "continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students".

Confusingly, the university administration was among the most hardline in calling in police to crush the protests against the genocide. But the financial cuts had the intended effect, with Columbia announcing on Thursday it would inflict stringent punishments, including expulsions and degree revocations, on students and graduates who had taken part in a campus sit-in last year.

Some 60 other institutions have reportedly received letters warning that they are in danger of funding cuts if they do not "protect Jewish students" – a reference to those who cheerlead Israel's war crimes.

That will come at a heavy price for other students, including many Jewish students, who have been exercising their constitutional right to criticise Israel's crimes.

A sword of retribution now hangs over every single publicly funded centre of higher learning in the US: crush any sign of opposition to Israel's destruction of Gaza, or face dire financial consequences.

'Baffling rhetoric'

Does any of this amount to a clear strategy? Does it make any sense?

These mixed messages fit a pattern with the Trump administration. Its wider strategy is, as Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the occupied territories, calls it: psychological overwhelming.

"Hitting us every day with XXL [extra-extra large] doses of baffling rhetoric and erratic policies serves to 'control the script', distracting and disorienting us, normalising the absurd, all while disrupting global stability (and consolidating US control)."

The White House is doing something similar over Ukraine.

It is now talking directly to Russia, shutting the door on Nato membership for Ukraine, publicly humiliating Ukraine's president, while also threatening more sanctions and tariffs on Moscow unless it agrees to a rapid ceasefire.

The Trump administration's goal is to normalise its inconsistencies, hypocrisies, lies and misdirections so they become entirely unremarkable.

Opposition to its will – a will that can change from day to day, or week to week – will be treated as treasonous. The only safe response in such circumstances is acquiescence, passivity and silence.

In the tumultuous political landscape Trump has created, the one constant – our North Star – is the western media's uncritical cheerleading of the West's war industries.

Consider the Biden administration. The media's harshest condemnation came not over the destruction Washington wrought on Afghanistan during its 20-year occupation, but for ending the war – a war that had left the country in ruins and the official enemy, the Taliban, stronger than ever.

Contrast that with the media's resolutely muted response to Biden's 15 months of arming Israel's genocide in Gaza. In doing so, the media eagerly cast aside their supposed humanitarian concerns, including their ritualistic nods to the post-Second World War global order and international law.

Similarly, the media have been openly critical of Trump's overtures to Russia over Ukraine, siding with European leaders who insist the war must continue to the bitter end – regardless of how much higher the death toll of Ukrainians and Russians climbs as a result.

And predictably, the media have gone out of their way to accommodate Trump's Israel-supporting, openly genocidal rhetoric and actions towards Gaza.

It was astonishing to watch outlets that regularly portray Trump as a threat to democracy contort themselves to whitewash his explicit call to exterminate "the people of Gaza" should the hostages not be immediately released. Instead, they mendaciously suggested he was referring only to Hamas leadership.

It is not just Trump and his team who are well practised in the dark arts of deception.

Illegitimacy trap

While the Trump administration may be playing fast and loose with Washington's political culture, it is largely adhering to the West's traditional script on Israel and Palestine.

Witkoff and Boehler are deploying a well-worn strategy, binding the Palestinians into what could be called an illegitimacy trap. Damned if you do; damned if you don't.

Whatever Palestinians choose – and however much they are dispossessed and brutalised – it is they, and anyone who supports them, who are cast as the villains. The criminals. The oppressors. The Jew-haters. The terrorists.

This applies not only to Hamas but also to the accommodationists of Fatah.

Faced with relentless dispossession through decades of Israeli colonisation, Palestinian factions have responded in the two main ways available to them.

One is to adopt the course enshrined in international law as the right of all occupied peoples: armed resistance. This is the path Hamas has taken as it governs the concentration camp that is Gaza.

Every US administration, including the current one, however, has conditioned any talks about statehood on Palestinians renouncing armed resistance from the outset, dismissing their right in international law as terrorism.

For that reason, until now, Hamas has always been excluded from negotiations. The talks that have taken place – over its head – have operated on the assumption that Hamas must be disarmed before Israel is expected to make any concessions.

Hamas must relinquish its weapons voluntarily – against an opponent armed to the teeth, whose bad faith in negotiations is legendary – or it will be forcibly disarmed by Israel or its rival, Fatah.

In other words, peace with Israel is premised on civil war for Palestinians.

That appears to be the course the Trump administration will pursue. For now, it is demanding that Hamas "demilitarise" voluntarily. When that fails, Hamas will find itself back at square one.

Endless accommodation

Faced with Trump's plan to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians from Gaza, Hamas has precisely no incentive to disarm.

In fact, it has a further disincentive. Its rivals in Fatah are all too visibly caught in their own, even more fatal, illegitimacy trap.

Mahmoud Abbas's faction, which heads the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank, has chosen the alternative to armed resistance: diplomacy and endless political accommodation.

The problem is that Israel has never shown the slightest interest in granting the Palestinians – even Fatah's "moderates" – a state.

Even during the so-called apex of peacemaking – the Oslo Accords of the 1990s – Palestinian statehood was never mentioned.

Oslo was simply a nebulous process in which Israel was supposed to gradually withdraw from the occupied territories as Palestinian leaders took responsibility for maintaining "security" – meaning, in practice, Israel's security.

In short, the Oslo concept of "peace" was little different from the catastrophic status quo in Gaza before the genocide began.

During its so-called disengagement in 2005, Israel pulled its soldiers back to a fortified cordon, and from there controlled all movement and trade in and out of the enclave.

In the vacated space, Israel allowed only a glorified local authority, running the schools, emptying the bins and acting as a security contractor for Israel against those not ready to accept this as their permanent fate.

Hamas refused to play ball.

Abbas's PA, on the other hand, accepted this kind of model for its series of cantons across the West Bank – on the assumption that obedience would eventually pay dividends.

It hasn't. Now Israel is gearing up to formally annex most of the West Bank, backed by the Trump administration. Behind the scenes, the White House is finagling support from the Gulf states.

Fatah cannot extricate itself any more than Hamas from the illegitimacy trap set for it by Washington and Europe.

Clinging to the old order

Paradoxically, critics in Washington – backed by the media and European elites – dismiss Trump's moves on Ukraine as appeasement of a supposedly resurgent Russian imperialism, rather than as peacemaking.

These same critics are equally discomfited by the Trump administration's meetings with Hamas.

All of this breaks with the decades-old Washington consensus, which dictates who are the good guys and who are the bad guys, who are the law enforcers and who are the terrorists.

In typical fashion, Trump is disrupting these former certainties.

The reassuring, knee-jerk response is to take one side or another. Either Trump is a mould-breaker, remaking a dysfunctional world order. Or he is a fascist-in-the-making, who will hasten the collapse of the established world order, bringing it crashing down on our heads.

The truth is he is both.

There is a consistency to Trump's approach to both Ukraine and Gaza – despite the apparent contradiction. In both he appears determined to bring to an end a failing status quo. In the former, he wants an end to war and destruction by forcing Ukraine's surrender; in the latter, he wants the running sore of a Palestinian concentration camp gone by forcibly emptying it of its inhabitants.

This new consistency replaces an older one, in which Washington's elite perpetuated forever wars against painted devils that justified the siphoning of national wealth into the coffers of the war industries on which that elite's wealth depended.

The pretexts for those forever wars had become so threadbare, and so destabilising in a world of ever-depleting resources, that the elites behind those wars were utterly discredited.

The far-right, most especially Trump, is riding that wave of disillusionment. And its success stems precisely from this rule-breaking, by presenting itself as a new broom sweeping away the old guard of corporate war-makers.

As the Bidens, Starmers, Macrons, and Von der Leyens sink deeper into the mire, the more desperately they cling to a crumbling system. Trump's disruption works against them.

Feathering their nests

But the new guard is no more invested in peace than the old, as Gaza makes clear. It is simply looking for new ways to do business – new deals that still siphon national wealth away from ordinary people and into the pockets of billionaires.

Trump would rather strike lucrative deals with Russia's Vladimir Putin over resources – in both Russia and Ukraine – than sink more money into a futile war that locks up the region's vast potential profits.

And he would rather put an end to Gaza's decades-long status as a no-go zone, a holding centre for Palestinians, when it could instead be transformed into a playground for the rich, its vast offshore gas reserves finally exploited.

The new guard of kleptocrats is less interested in forever wars – not because they have any love for peace, but because they believe they've found a better way to make themselves even richer.

This newfound openness to "doing things differently" has an appeal, especially after decades of the same cynical elites waging the same cynical wars.

But make no mistake: the fundamentals remain unchanged. The rich are still looking out for themselves. They are still feathering their own nests, not yours. They still see the world as their plaything, where lesser humans – you and me – are expendable.

If he can, Trump will end the war in Ukraine by cutting a money-making deal, over Kyiv's head, with Russia.

If he can, Trump will end the slaughter in Gaza by striking a deal with Israel and the Gulf states, over the heads of Hamas and Fatah, to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians from their homeland.

And if he can get away with it, Trump is ready for something else, too. He's prepared to break heads at home to ensure his critics can't stop him and his billionaire pals from getting their way.

[Many thanks to Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article.]

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