The US president wants to be a ‘peacemaker’. He also wants to stay out of a Gaza conflict he says is ‘not our war’.
During his inauguration speech, United States President Donald Trump said the “proudest legacy” of his presidency would be that of “peacemaker and unifier”.
“We will measure our success not only by the battles we win but also by the wars that we end,” he said on Monday before referencing the release of the first Israeli captives from Gaza as part of a ceasefire that was timed to give him an early political victory.
Later that day, while signing a flurry of executive orders in the Oval Office, Trump told reporters that he was “not confident” that the deal he has largely been credited with forcing through would hold.
But, Trump added, “It’s not our war. It is their war.”
Trump made no secret of his desire to see Israel’s war in Gaza end before he took office, and he has won a second term in part on the promise that he would put “America first” and disengage with conflicts abroad. But his early actions as well as his first four years in office leave little doubt about his administration’s unwavering support for Israel, analysts cautioned, even as Trump seeks to project an image of toughness and has succeeded in pressuring Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to agree to a deal he had rejected months earlier.
“All that was needed was a threat,” Diana Buttu, a Palestinian analyst and former negotiator, told Al Jazeera, crediting Trump for using the leverage of his position in a way former President Joe Biden never did. “That said, I think that we shouldn’t be giving Trump all of this fanfare and applause because I don’t think that it was an agreement that came without a reward for Netanyahu and without a cost for [Palestinians].”
Israel’s reward
If a reward was promised in exchange for the deal, Trump’s first hours in office might suggest what that was, Buttu said. Trump wasted no time in lifting Biden’s sanctions on Israeli settlers accused of attacks on Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, and on Tuesday, his pick for ambassador to the United Nations, Elise Stefanik, said during her confirmation hearing that Israel has a “biblical right” to the West Bank. Trump’s pick for ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, has also previously made a biblical reference on the subject when he said: “There is no such thing as a West Bank. It’s Judea and Samaria.”
The actions and statements only built upon what Trump had already done during his first term as president from 2017 to 2021, including slashing funding to UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees; recognising Jerusalem as Israel’s capital despite the occupation of its Palestinian eastern half; moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem; and recognising Israeli sovereignty over the occupied Golan Heights, which is Syrian territory.
On Wednesday, the fourth day of the ceasefire in Gaza, Israeli forces began a raid on Jenin in the occupied West Bank, killing at least 10 people and raising fears that Israel would further ramp up its attacks there. There has been no US pushback because the ceasefire does not include the West Bank.
“There were always going to be big rewards in it for Netanyahu,” Buttu said, noting that she also expected the president to soon crack down on the pro-Palestine movement in the US, another Israeli priority. “Trump gave the Israelis pretty much everything they wanted, and he just said to them, ‘Just don’t keep me up at night.’”
Still, Trump’s hint on day one that the ceasefire might not hold signals that even such rewards might not suffice to keep Netanyahu committed to a ceasefire he has fought against for months for the sake of his own political survival.
HA Hellyer, a political analyst at the Royal United Services Institute in London and at the Center for American Progress in Washington, DC, suggested that Trump may already be preparing to blame others – likely Hamas – for the potential collapse of the deal he has claimed credit for brokering.
“Trump wanted a deal to be able to say that he got a deal,” Hellyer told Al Jazeera, adding that he would be “surprised if we even got through all of phase one, unless we have a lot more intervention from DC”.
He pointed to Netanyahu’s repeated claims that Israel has a “right” to resume fighting in Gaza – and US backing to do so – as an indication there is no true commitment to the ceasefire on Israel’s part.
“Everybody is calling it a ceasefire, but a ceasefire indicates that there is a commitment to not return to war. We do not have that at all as of yet,” Hellyer said. “Statements coming from different Trump administration officials as well as Trump himself also are not great in that regard. Is Trump going to use American leverage to ensure the Israelis complete phase one and go all the way to phase three? The signs aren’t encouraging.”
The ‘deal of the century’
As much as he views the Israel-Palestine conflict as “not our war”, however, Trump may have a real interest in his legacy as a dealmaker, some analysts said.
In his first term, Trump proposed a “peace deal” for Israel and Palestine that his administration billed as the “deal of the century”, and he tried to “normalise” relations between Israel and several Arab states, bypassing the Palestinians in the process. This time, he is widely expected to once again seek a deal that, while cementing his legacy, would also likely benefit his business interests in the region.
But normalisation requires a more inclusive political project than the Abraham Accords, which Trump promoted in his first term, said Matt Duss, executive vice president of the progressive Center for International Policy think tank.
“If Trump is serious about wanting to make peace as he claims, if he is serious about wanting a Nobel Peace Prize, if he is serious about wanting to do what no other president could do in making peace between Israelis and Palestinians and normalising Israel in the region in a real and sustainable way, then getting to a just and reasonable resolution for the Palestinians is absolutely essential for that.”
“The way to get to Trump is to appeal to his sense of his own greatness,” Duss added. “I think the case needs to be made to him that for a peace and normalisation agreement to actually be real and sustainable and not just a set of arms deals, which is what the Abraham Accords were, it’s going to have to have a real, just resolution for the Palestinians.”
It’s a tall order. Israel has shown no interest in anything that might get Palestinians closer to statehood – which many analysts argued has long been a foreclosed possibility anyway – given Israel’s expansion in the occupied territory.
This week, Israeli President Isaac Herzog, who has previously paid lip service to the notion of Palestinian statehood, said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that the October 7, 2023, attacks on southern Israel have been a “wake-up call” about its plausibility.
And then there are Trump’s own at times conflicting allegiances: to a large Christian Zionist political base that is firmly aligned with Israel’s most far-right political elements; to donors like Israeli-American billionaire Miriam Adelson, who backed his campaign to the tune of nearly $100m; as well as to partners in the Gulf like Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who has so far indicated that normalising relations with Israel would be predicated on statehood for Palestinians.
For a president who has said he wants to put “America first”, it’s hard to see how Trump might disentangle himself from the conflict at all.
“I think Trump is genuinely an America first guy. He doesn’t want to have to worry about wars. He doesn’t like to think about them, and he has repeated that over and over again,” Buttu said. “But at the same time, I don’t know who’s going to pull him.”