The President’s advisers are for the most part courtiers who echo his most ill-informed and demented views
President Donald Trump’s support for the forced exodus of 2.3 million Palestinians from Gaza is undermining the Hamas-Israel ceasefire and threatens to poison the political waters of the Middle East for generations to come.
He says that Hamas must release all its hostages by noon on Saturday, or he will cancel the ceasefire and “let all hell break out”. On Tuesday evening, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu followed suit, confirmed Israel “will return to intense fighting until Hamas is finally defeated” if the demand is not met.
Trump has repeatedly said that he wants the Palestinians in Gaza relocated permanently to Egypt, Jordan and elsewhere, an operation to be conducted by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), which has already killed at least 48,000 Palestinians, 70 per cent of them women and children, according to the UN.
Since Trump’s relocation plans are wholly contrary to the terms of the ceasefire agreement, it is scarcely surprising that Hamas has stopped their implementation of it, though Hamas cites Israeli non-compliance with the agreement as their reason for not releasing more Israeli hostages.
Palestinians in the enclave are adamant that they will not leave their homeland voluntarily, so the only method by which they could be forced out would be by violent coercion by the IDF. Even if this were to fail, the outcome of such an attempt would be even more horrific loss of life.
The ceasefire agreed on 15 January, following mediation by the US, Egypt and Qatar, might just survive the crisis this week. But Trump’s demarche has already sabotaged the very idea of an Israel-Palestine peace deal by offering Netanyahu and his government the alternative option of getting rid of the Palestinians altogether. This policy was in the past openly espoused only by the ethno-nationalist far right in Israel.
Hamas, for their part, will have no incentive to give up the hostages, their only real negotiating card, if Trump is ending US backing for the next two stages of the ceasefire deal.
Trump meets Jordan’s King Abdullah on Tuesday to press him to receive Palestinians from Gaza. He will threaten to cut off US aid to Jordan and Egypt, if they do not accept the relocation of the Palestinians to their territory. Both countries have rejected this and, whatever their financial needs, dread being seen by their own populations as complicit with the US in the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, something which might destabilise their rule.
The same is true of other Arab and Muslim states that have hitherto been entirely ineffective in influencing US policy towards Israel and the Palestinians. While their ruling elites may be self-serving and indifferent to the fate of Gaza, Trump’s endorsement for what will amount to a Greater Israel in the region threatens them all.
Governments in the region will know that the expulsion of millions of Palestinians from Gaza may soon be followed by the forced relocation of all or part of the three million Palestinians from the occupied West Bank. The newly-appointed US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, says that he believes that “there is no such thing as a West Bank. It’s Judea and Samaria. There’s no such thing as [an Israeli] settlement”.
Trump’s statement that the US will somehow take control of Gaza, courtesy of Israel, and turn it into “the Riviera of the Middle East” is in keeping with his other threatened land grabs against Greenland and Panama. But in Gaza and the West Bank, Trump’s bombastic and incoherent neo-imperialism is more likely to turn into reality because his words legitimise what Netanyahu’s government always wanted to do.
The US would hand over to the IDF, which has already destroyed or damaged 90 per cent of the buildings in Gaza, the task of bringing the conflict to an end, something that would mean an even bigger bloodbath.
There is an insane quality to Trump’s plan to “clean out” Gaza, so much so that his senior officials, none of whom are exactly moderate in their views, are attempting to roll back or moderate his more extreme utterances. This process is now being referred to as “sanewashing” by some in Washington.
When Trump said that Palestinians would be relocated from Gaza, his officials claimed their removal would be temporary, only to have Trump contradict them and say explicitly that they would have no right of return.
During his first term in the White House, Trump showed a certain caution, in part because of resistance from within the US government apparatus and from establishment figures appointed by himself. These restraints no longer exist. Meanwhile, Trump appears to have changed for the worse, in that his grip on reality is even cloudier than it was in 2017-21. Re-election has turbocharged his already excessive hubris.
As with other autocratic leaders, notably Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Vladimir Putin in Russia, supreme power has further eroded whatever judgement he ever possessed. Like them, his advisers are for the most part courtiers who echo his most ill-informed and demented views.
Saddam Hussein launched disastrous wars against Iran in 1980 and Kuwait in 1990. Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022, having convinced himself that the Russian army would have a walkover. Millions died because of their mistakes. Trump’s intention to preside over the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank may have an equally calamitous impact, ushering in an era of even deeper chaos and violence across the Middle East.