The Middle East is one of the few regions in the world that continues to retain persistent features of active colonialism well into the twenty-first century. The term in this context refers to the classical forms of military conquest, domination, occupation, and settlement that have been rendered illegal under the international order that emerged following the end of World War II in 1945. The region has also been one of the most frequently riddled by regional and extra-regional military conquest and intervention, notably by great powers. Needless to say, Israel’s settler colonialism has been a case in point, with major repercussions for the security and welfare of the region as a whole. 

The U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 was one flagrant reenactment of a nineteenth century intervention whereby the empire comes sailing on its fleets to conquer a country thousands of miles away. It was the pinnacle of the U.S. attempt to use its military might to redraw the map of the region, and as a means for reasserting U.S. global dominance under the erstwhile neoconservative project of the American century. Obviously, that attempt failed miserably, ushering an extended period of reduced U.S. military involvement with the Middle East under former President Barack Obama (2008-2016) and President Donald Trump’s first term in office (2016-2020). 

However, that reductive trend has been somewhat reversed starting from the redeployment of troops in Iraq and Syria as a part of the campaigns against the Islamic State organization in 2020. The United States has so far been keen on retaining its military bases in both countries in addition to those scattered across the Persian Gulf, and on using lethal force on several occasions against Iran-backed militias deemed threatening to U.S. personnel. The assassination of Qasem Soleimani in 2020, and the subsequent Iranian retaliation, served as another remarkable re-engagement through military means in the region. But MENA’s vulnerability to outside intervention has by no means been confined to Western powers: Russia’s military involvement in the Syrian civil war since 2015 can be easily fitted into the same colonial pattern.  

I therefore argue that the Middle East’s historical susceptibility to outside military interventions has rendered it prime real estate for the assertion of global dominance through means of force. The region’s specialization in the production and exporting of fossil fuels after WWII and in the heydays of the Cold War provided the context to a long-term involvement of the United States replacing colonial traditional powers like Great Britain. This culminated in the American military intervention in the second Gulf war to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi invaders and hence maintaining a direct military presence in the region. By a similar token, Israel’s settler colonialism opened the way for long-term alliances first with old colonial powers like France in the 1950s and then with the United States in the wake of the 1967 war. Overall, the region has been but a condensed representation of wider global changes to America’s role in the world where military power is gradually overtaking economic mechanisms of influence such as aid, trade and investment.  

Reflecting a Global Trend

The United States has become more rather than less militarily active in the Middle East over the past year-and-a-half, and particularly in the wake of the Israeli war on Gaza. To start with, the United States air bridge has been critical in sustaining Israel’s ability to continue and—later on—expand the war to Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iran. Together with the United Kingdom, the United States has also been engaged against the Iran-based Houthis in Yemen. During the same period, the U.S. government actively dispatched air carriers, strategic bombers, and boosted its military presence in bases around the region in view of deterring Iran and supporting Israeli war activities throughout.      

This increased U.S. military engagement in the Middle East has been part and parcel of a general global trend, as manifested in Eastern Europe, the South China Sea, and the Taiwan Strait. The United States has been compensating for its declining economic weight in trade, investment, and aid by increasingly leveraging its military superiority in different ways. The increasing involvement in the Middle East directly or through the limitless support to Israel under the Biden and the Trump administrations, is but one instance.  Another is the increasing militarization of its technological superiority in previously civilian economic sectors like the semiconductors, artificial intelligence, and machine learning industries. But there are also Trump’s threats to withdraw military protection from Europe and Japan as a means to gain leverage on the U.S. historical allies, or even to directly pay to the U.S..

In a nutshell, U.S. influence in the world is undergoing a major shift, with the Middle East once again the focal point where such transformation is unfolding—thanks in part to the region’s history and present colonial and neocolonial intervention. 

Whereas this militarization is meant to contain Russia and China in East Europe and East Asia, its approach to the Middle East has been more militarily proactive. Rather than just contain a powerful rival or enemy, the United States has since the Iraq debacle of 2003 been trying to reorganize its influence and control. The new American mantra is to provide less money and more bombs in support of Israel, deter Iran and its allies, and push for a security arrangement in the region revolving around an Israel-GCC. For the U.S., this alliance is militarily motivated and of little economic concern. The forging of this alliance—mainly focused on sharing military technology, which has been extensively put to use in the Gaza and Lebanon theater of operations —represents the global trend of the U.S. militarization of trade and investment. It also comes at the expense of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. 

In addition to its geopolitical and international security goals, the U.S. role in the Middle East can also be understood through a political-economic lens. U.S. economic presence through trade and investment in the Middle East (as well as in many other parts of the Global South) has significantly declined in the past two decades, mostly ceding ground to China but also to other regional powers in MENA like Turkey and some of the GCC countries. Militarization has absorbed other areas like trade and investment (technology bans on China and onshoring of chips production) as well as aid (which has become largely reduced to military assistance to allies like Ukraine and Israel between 2022 and 2024). 

Gone are the Days of “Nice” U.S. Hegemony 

However, America’s hegemony over the post-WWII era was not just derived from its overwhelming military superiority but also established on firm institutional, economic, and ideological pillars that ran deep into post-war international security, economic recovery, and development dynamics and determinants. The United Nations and the Bretton Woods Institutions, as well as the dollar-based system it put in place, have all been creations of active U.S. diplomacy. Added to these were tens of regional and bilateral trade, investment, and aid arrangements with Western Europe, Latin America, and the newly independent nations of Africa and Asia. These all integrated the post-WWII world into an order of Washington’s making.      

From a political economy perspective, the centrality of the U.S. economy to the world economic order can be little contested: The United States is a trade partner of most of the nations and regions of the world, the largest sender and recipient of foreign direct investment flows. It is also the country with the currency—the greenback—that has become how the bulk of global trade and investment transactions are conducted.   

Hegemony is not all about consent and exchange, though, as liberals would like to believe. Conversely, it has always contained elements of coercion or even the outright use of violence in order to ensure compliance by the different parties to such a complex order. This mix follows not just philosopher Antonio Gramsci’s political theories but also Max Weber’s ideas about legitimation and domination, which would require the employment of coercion deemed legitimate in a manner complementary to consent. 

My argument, which is in fact derived from well-established scholars and theorists in international political economy and international relations, is that the composition of this hegemony mix has undergone major changes in the past decade. The use of military force, or the credible threat of its deployment, has become much more central to the preservation of U.S. interests in multiple regions of the world. Moreover, economic exchange through trade and investment has been increasingly giving way to weaponization, securitization, and militarization. The U.S. trade war with China, and the increasing subjugation of economic exchange to logics of national security and geopolitical rivalry, are illustrations of this. 

Economic ties with the Middle East are a case in point where U.S. relative weight as a trade partner, investor, and donor has visibly declined, especially if contrasted with that of China. In 2022, China stood as the biggest trade partner to the Middle East in both exports and imports. 

Given the Middle East’s specialization in the production and exporting of oil and natural gas, China came to receive around a half of the region’s total energy exports. In the meantime, China was the source of sixty-seven percent of the region’s total imports of consumption and capital goods. 

Conversely, the U.S. position as a major trade partner to the region came far behind the EU and India in both exports or imports. Part of the U.S. economic disengagement with the Middle East has been due to the decline in the former’s reliance on oil imports from the region over the past decades. However, it is also notable that the U.S. position as a whole has deteriorated when it came to imports. 

The decline in U.S. relative weight as a trade partner has not been confined to the Middle East by any means but is a worldwide feature of its relations with Asia, South America, and Africa over the past three decades.  In South America, once considered the U.S. backyard, China’s share in the continent’s total foreign trade grew from five percent in 2000 to a massive twenty-five percent in 2021. During the same interval, the U.S. share declined from twenty-five percent to fifteen percent. A similar trend could be noticed in Africa, with China climbing up to the position of the continent’s biggest trade partner since 2014, overtaking the United States as well as the former European colonial powers France and Britain. 

More dramatic is the Association of Southeast Asian Nations’ (ASEAN) external trade, given the rising significance of East and Southeast Asia in global trade and industry over the past decades. ASEAN has some of the fastest growing economies in the world, notably the various generations of newly industrialized economies starting with Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand then passing to Vietnam and Cambodia in addition to one of the world’s financial centers: Singapore. In 2023, China was the bloc’s largest trade partner with a share of twenty percent of ASEAN’s total exports and thirty-one percent of its total imports. The United States’ shares were nineteen percent and nine percent, respectively.  

Such regional trends rhyme well with China’s overall ascendency to becoming the world’s biggest exporting economy with a share of fourteen percent in 2022 versus 9.6 percent for the United States. It is, however, nonetheless worth noting that the United States retained its position as the world’s biggest importer (13.2 percent followed by China, 10.6 percent). Needless to say, this disparity between exports and imports further reinforced the United States’ huge chronic trade deficits with the world, especially with China. 

Moreover, not only has the United States’ relative weight as a trade partner been on the decline globally and in the Middle East, but its position as a source of foreign direct investment inflows to the region has also diminished. Indeed, whereas the Chinese estimated the cumulative share of their investments in the Middle East in 2022 to be 273 billion U.S. dollars, those of U.S. investors stood at 80 billion in the same year. 

In terms of foreign aid, the U.S. role as a development donor has also witnessed some noticeable decline, even before Trump’s serious attempts to dismantle the USAID altogether. To start with, the share of foreign aid to U.S. GDP has secularly declined from a massive five percent in 1945 to 0.19 percent in 2024. The same trend is more reinforced than ever with the Trump administration putting an abrupt end to basically all forms of USAID, with Israel standing out as the usual exception. This indicates less willingness to allocate resources in the form of aid, which has been part and parcel of the building up of the United States’ international hegemony since the end of WWII. 

According to a U.S. Congress report in 2023, the MENA region has historically stood out as the single largest cumulative aid recipient between 1946 and 2020, with a total of 372.6 billion dollars. Israel received a massive thirty-eight percent of the total followed by Egypt and Jordan at twenty-one percent each. Notably, however, U.S. aid has become increasingly militarized in the past years with military aid overtaking economic and humanitarian aid. It says volumes that in 2023/2024 the two biggest U.S. aid recipients in the world were Ukraine and Israel, with military aid predominating in both cases. 

The United States is not Going Anywhere, Anytime Soon 

None of the above however indicate that the United States as a great power in both the world’s political economy and security would lose its relevance anytime soon. Two main points of strength stand out in this regard: military superiority and the centrality of the U.S. dollar in global trade and investment.

As for the U.S. dollar, its centrality as a de facto international currency is demonstrated in the fact that in 2022, fifty-nine percent of global foreign currency reserves were in dollars followed by twenty percent in Euros, ostensibly making it the de facto international currency. Sixty-four percent of world debt was denominated in dollars. Moreover, China, the United States’ closest economic rival, is very far from having its national currency replace the U.S. greenback. An international currency like the so-called BRICS currency is even more far-fetched.

However, there is something paradoxical about America’s financial domination, given its declining weight in international trade. The depth of U.S. financial markets owes a lot to the degree of financialization of the U.S. economy, a sign of weakness and volatility (as manifested in the 2008 meltdown that exposed the inherent instability in a financialized economy and had devastating impacts on the real economy) after decades of de-industrialization, which  in turn has led to staggering income inequality and exacerbated the crisis of democratic institutions. In 2023, financial services constituted the single biggest sector in the U.S. economy. Estimated at 20.7 percent of U.S. GDP, it was followed by professional and business services (13 percent), government (11.4 percent) and finally manufacturing (10.3 percent). Conversely, in China in 2023, financial services stood for merely eight percent of GDP and came third following industry (31.7 percent) and wholesale and retail (9.8 percent). 

As for military superiority, even in 2023, amid the war in Ukraine and the escalating tensions with China, total U.S. military expenditure was more than double of the expenditure by China and Russia combined. The United States is likely to remain ahead of its rivals  for some time to. The strategy of investing in the United States’ military superiority has been an element of consensus so far within the circles of U.S. elites, be they liberal or conservative. It has historically overlapped with high-tech industries that would later on spill over into civilian uses, with the internet, space, and aviation standing as prominent examples. Interestingly enough, with the United States’ competitiveness eroding (mainly vis-à-vis China), the pendulum is moving in the opposite direction from the civilian to the military. Indeed, external trade, aid and investment have been the aspects getting securitized and militarized. This has been manifested with regards to microchips production, electric vehicles and the Tiktok ban where national security concerns gained primacy over the logic of free market exchange. In a similar vein, Trump declared a national emergency to impose universal tariffs against most of the world’s nations in April before having to suspend them for 90 days. 

In short, the U.S. stick is getting longer, its carrots fewer and smaller. U.S. re-engagement with the Middle East reveals the transformation underway, whereby the U.S. role in the world will pass through more bombs, bombers, and air carriers rather than through trade and investment in peaceful endeavors.

These days, it is hard to walk a block or drive more than five minutes through Amman without some mention of Palestine. Cafes print the flag on their coffee cups, “Free Palestine” punctuates fast food receipts, and billboards display an outline of the map in the middle of bustling intersections. Palestine and the Israeli war on Gaza set the stage for the 2024 U.S. presidential election in Jordan. It was a potential moment for change.

In the days leading up to President Donald Trump’s inauguration, many Jordanians deemed him the “lesser of two evils”. They believed that Trump had a better chance of ending the war than then Vice-President Kamala Harris, who they accused of being complicit in the Gaza genocide. Support also stemmed from Trump’s socially conservative values and anti-woke attitude which aligns with broader Jordanian society. However, plenty of Jordanians condemned what they said were his discriminatory position against Arabs and Muslims, his anti-immigration sentiments, and an inherently pro-Israel bias that exists with any U.S. president.

When the ceasefire in Gaza came on the eve of his inauguration, many Jordanians thanked Trump for the deal, despite Biden also claiming credit. In their eyes, Trump accomplished what Biden couldn’t; this was what Jordanians prioritized for the incoming American administration. 

Initial excitement over the end of the war fizzled when Trump froze aid to Jordan. Then it turned to anger when Trump pressured King Abdullah II to absorb millions of Gazans. The final straw was two months after the inauguration, when the U.S. cleared Israel to resume its attacks on Gaza. 

Now, Jordanians are unified in their disillusionment with U.S. foreign policy. Even long-standing allies like Jordan, and their citizens’ livelihoods, are not immune to Trump’s disruptions of the world order. They don’t expect that the next four years will depart from the history of American involvement in their region—a pattern of war, destruction, and dehumanization. 

A History of the United States in Jordan

Since 1958, the U.S. has been Jordan’s main ally after replacing the Hashemite Kingdom’s relationship with the British, and has since provided billions in aid. The United States is the country’s largest provider of bilateral assistance. Between 2023 and 2029, Jordan will have received $1.45 billion per year. 

In return, Jordan ensures cooperation and collaboration for their military ally and provides a stabilizing role in the region. The 2021 US–Jordan Defense Cooperation Agreement further solidified Jordanian and U.S. economic and military ties, ensuring Jordan $425 million per year for logistical, training and counter-terrorism cooperation. The agreement is yet another example of the U.S.-Jordanian military and economic interdependence. 

Jordan became an even more important U.S. ally after declaring peace with Israel in 1994. The late King Hussein and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin shook hands with former U.S. President Bill Clinton at their side. This was a historic moment, marked by 10,000 colorful balloons and a 21-gun salute.

“The long conflict between the two states is now coming to an end,” the Wadi Araba Treaty wrote. “In this spirit the state of belligerency between Jordan and Israel has been terminated.” 

Jordan and Egypt were the only two Arab states to have formal peace with Israel before the Abraham Accords in 2020—which normalized Israeli relations with Bahrain, the UAE, and eventually Morocco and Sudan. 

That strong Jordanian commitment to the peace deal—and regional stability—was on full forced display on the night of October 1, 2024, when many from the capital Amman and beyond gathered on balconies, sidewalks, and rooftops to watch what almost looked like fireworks, or perhaps a cloud of shooting stars. One by one, Jordan intercepted Iranian missiles en route to Israel for the second time that year. 

However, Israeli-Jordanian relations are currently at their coldest, a sentiment that reflects the opinion on the street. Israel has never been popular in Jordan, long before the Gaza war, mainly because the majority of the population is of Palestinian descent.

Jordan is often seen as a beacon of stability in the Middle East, especially now in comparison with its neighbors—mass civilian casualties after the fall of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, Israeli ceasefire violations in Lebanon, and resumption of war in Gaza. Although the Hashemite Kingdom has not seen war on its soil in the 21st century, it has not been immune from American intervention. Fluctuations in the Levant region have put Jordan in a politically and economically precarious position. With clear dependence on the United States, Jordan had an existential stake in the outcome of the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election.

Pre-inauguration: Cautious Optimism, Expected Disappointment 

In the buildup to the November 5 U.S. elections, many Jordanians summarized their opinion of a potential Trump presidency with the same sentiment: Every American administration is the same for us—a disaster.

“He hates us, but at least he’s honest,” Khaled, a 26-year-old software engineer, said, brushing off the most apparent criticisms one may have of Trump’s attitude toward the Middle East. 

Khaled grew up in the Al-Hussein camp, one of Jordan’s 13 Palestinian refugee camps. Israeli militias forced his family from Bayt Mahseer, Palestine, during the Nakba 75 years ago. Khaled and his family only left the refugee camp in 2010, generations after his grandparents fled Palestine. 

When challenged about Trump’s pro-Zionist actions during his first term, like moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and recognizing it as the capital of Israel, endorsing the 2020 Deal of the Century, and cutting aid to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), Khaled leaned forward to make sure his words were clear. 

“True, he moved the embassy, but it is not the same as killing 50,000 people,” he said, referring to the actions of the Biden Administration, and by extension, Harris. She is more ideologically Zionist than Trump, Khaled said, which is a problem. He supported Trump over Harris because he felt Trump was “more peaceful”. 

“Not because he’s a good guy,”Khaled clarified, but because he’s a businessman, not a politician. And war costs money.

In 2016, there was more room for Jordanians to care about Trump’s internal policies and his racist rhetoric. But now, there is no room to care about anything other than Gaza. His priority for an American administration was simple. “He can say mean things on Twitter, I don’t care,” he said, “just end the genocide”.

Khaled added, “I would rather have an American president who outwardly says that he hates me and is xenophobic towards me, than someone who says ‘I love Arabs’, and then kills thousands of them, you know?” 

Khaled and his family believe that Democrats dislike Arabs more than Republicans. His U.S.-based family in Michigan, New Jersey, and NYC, all voted for Trump. “My family follows the common Arab way of thinking: Trump might be more racist but he will harm us less in the real world.”

Yusuf, an Arabic teacher, agreed with Khaled. In a short break between classes, he paused to explain his opinion on Trump. Yusuf, who is originally from Nablus, Palestine, says Gaza was the most important issue in this election, overshadowing even the Jordanian economy. He sees the difference between Biden and Trump as one of principles. The Biden administration is ideologically Zionist, while Trump is an opportunist—and a wild card, Yusuf explained. This means there’s a chance that Trump could depart from the presidential tradition of support for Israel if it benefits him.

“Even if it is only a 1.5% chance, there’s a chance,” Yusuf said.

Ghadeer, also an Arabic teacher of Palestinian descent, agreed at the time. She prefered Trump to any other American president because of his unpredictability, which she calls “madness” or junun in Arabic. She believed he would “focus the spotlight” on the United States and leave the Middle East alone. 

Trump will stop the war in Gaza, she said, but she worried about how and when.

Since October 7, 2023, most Fridays after prayer, hundreds and sometimes thousands of Jordanians gather at the Grand Husseini Mosque. Some wrap their faces in keffiyehs and others hold posters of martyrs in Gaza. They chant for an end to occupation as they make their way through downtown Amman, even in the face of police barricades or, in some cases, tear gas. 

“Palestine is the priority,” Nidal said on what ought to be the prime concern of American politics. A lawyer born to a refugee family with Nablusi origin, he emphasized the significance of the Palestinian issue for the Jordanian people. 

He is not alone. More than half of the Jordanian population is of Palestinian descent—and even more in Amman.

Nidal, like many around him, saw no difference between Trump and Harris’s Palestine policy at the time of the election—except that the former is more “blunt” about their regional ambitions. 

While some may appreciate this “transparency”, Nidal worried that Trump would expedite Israel’s plans to annex the West Bank that would have moved slower under Harris. Not surprisingly, days after Trump’s election win, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich instructed his staff to begin planning for West Bank annexation, illegal under international law. 

The Hashemite Kingdom has long feared a third round of mass expulsion of Palestinians into Jordan—a country already struggling to support hundreds of thousands of refugees from Syria, Sudan, Iraq, Yemen, and Somalia. Jordan absorbed hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees in 1948, with the establishment of the Israeli state, and then in 1967, when Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In Jordan, 1948 is referred to as the Nakba—Arabic for “catastrophe”—and 1967 the Naksa—or “setback”. Today, 2.4 million Palestinian refugees are registered in Jordan with UNRWA. Over 600,000, the majority of whom are Gazan refugees who arrived after 1967, still do not have Jordanian citizenship.

“At the end of the day the central problem in our region is the Palestinian-Israeli conflict,” Nidal said, adding that the United States has never been fair to Palestine—specifically citing U.S. vetoes of United Nations resolutions that hold Israel accountable to international law or call for a ceasefire in Gaza. Since 1970, the United States has used their veto power 49 times against UN resolutions on Israel. “Nothing justifies killing tens of thousands of people,” he added.

Maya, a researcher at a development organization in Amman, saw the Biden administration as responsible for the war in Gaza through their military and ideological support. She herself is the daughter of a Palestinian refugee.

“Both Trump and Kamala are evil, but I didn’t want Kamala to win because of her involvement in the genocide”.

In 2020, the popular opinion was clear, Maya said, Jordanians wanted Biden over Trump. This year, however, they did not like either candidate, but they really didn’t want Harris. 

Maya added that she appreciated the relative quiet in Jordan and the Middle East during Trump’s first term—the first American president in her lifetime who did not launch or incite a war in the Middle East. That is Maya’s main priority for an American administration, to “fix their own issues and leave the rest of the world alone”.

Like many of her peers, Maya said, wars in countries surrounding Jordan, often waged by the United States, defined her entire life. 

“People underestimate how difficult it is to live in a region that’s been always on fire,” she paused before continuing: “As long as I’ve lived there’s been a fear of war. There has always been blood. There’s always a fear of instability in Jordan.”

An Appeal to Conservative Values

Arab American support for Democrats dropped by 18 points from the 2020 to 2024 U.S. presidential election, according to a survey conducted by the Arab American Institute. This translated to the polls. In Dearborn, Michigan, the largest Arab American-majority city in the U.S., Trump beat Harris 42.5 percent to 36 percent. Yet four years ago, Biden won nearly 70 percent of the vote and the swing state altogether. 

The Uncommitted National Movement gained traction as another alternative to Harris—a group born out of the “Listen to Michigan” campaign that encouraged Democrats to vote “uncommitted” if Biden did not denounce the genocide and work to protect civilian lives. And as the war raged on through election day, Harris not only lost Michigan, but all seven swing states to Trump. 

Biden reaffirmed his support for the war two weeks before leaving the White House, when he informed Congress of a planned $8 billion weapons sale to Israel, on top of the $17.9 billion spent on military aid to Israel in the year after October 7.

For many Arab-Americans, a vote for Trump was a vote against the Biden administration’s support for genocide in Gaza, and the war in Lebanon. For some, a vote for Trump was also a vote to protect conservative values. 

On November 26, 2024, the Jordan Media Institute hosted Dr. Alia Hatoug-Bouran, Jordan’s first female ambassador to the U.S., to discuss the incoming Trump administration’s potential consequences on Jordan. She explained how Trump leveraged fears of liberal cultural shifts—such as gay rights, open immigration, and affirmative action. A clear example was a campaign advertisement that falsely claimed schools were facilitating gender-affirming surgeries for children without parental consent. 

This attitude shaped many Jordanian views on Trump. 

“Our society is conservative and we respect our traditions,” Yahia said as he jerked his steering wheel to the left. We swerved around Sports City Circle, one of the many roundabouts that defines Amman’s topography, perhaps even more than the rush hour traffic we crept through. Originally from Hebron, Palestine, he criticized Trump’s Islamophobic rhetoric. However, he said that the president’s social values align more with Jordanian society than Harris’s.

But, I asked, does Trump’s appeal to “conservative values” triumph over his Islamophobic and anti-Arab rhetoric? What is the greater personal threat to Jordanians?

In a different pocket of the city, sipping an iced latte at a trendy cafe in Jabal Amman, I posed this question to 22-year-old Nadeem. While he grew up in Jordan, he holds U.S. citizenship and recently graduated from a university in Massachusetts. Nadeem explained this as a similarity between Arab and Republican principles. The two groups see eye to eye on gender and sexuality, for example. 

But, he added, these parallels shouldn’t blind Jordanians to Trump’s discrimination against Arabs.

Nadeem didn’t vote in this election, but he would have cast his vote for a third party candidate such as Jill Stein. His Arab family members in New York, however, all voted for Trump. 

A few years older than Nadeem, Rajai also lived in the U.S. as an International Monetary Fund (IMF) youth fellow in D.C. after he graduated from the Jordanian Princess Sumaya University for Technology. Currently, Rajai is based in Amman, working in entrepreneurship to alleviate youth unemployment. 

Rajai explained that Trump “might be racist, but he speaks to Jordanian values”. He specifically agreed with Nadeem that Trump appealed to Arabs through his “family values”, anti-LGBTQ+ policy, and “non-woke agenda”. 

Rajai posited that Jordanians support Trump mainly because they desire a charismatic leader in the region. Jordanians want someone who is action-driven and will end the Gaza war. But, he added, people are “uninformed” and don’t understand the consequences of a Trump presidency on Jordan or Palestine. 

Under democratic leadership, he explained, Jordan-U.S. relations are economically and politically stronger. While he saw people around him supporting Stein, he felt it would be impossible to elect a U.S. president who bases their campaign entirely on Palestine and an end to the war in Gaza. 

Anti-immigration Sentiment

Some Jordanians feared that a Trump presidency would threaten their chances to work, travel, or live in the U.S. given that Trump promised mass deportation and a crackdown on immigration, as well as a revitalization of the “Muslim Ban” before he took office. Currently, the Trump administration is considering travel restrictions on 43 countries—although nothing has been implemented. While Jordan did not make the list, nearby Muslim countries such as Syria, Sudan, and Libya are three of the 11 “red” countries banning all travel to the U.S. 

Sitting next to Rajai, Hamza, 23, speculated that it would be more difficult for Jordanians to acquire U.S. visas under a Trump administration. Hamza said that as a Christian, it is generally easier for him to get a visa to the United States, but it was still more difficult under Trump’s first term. 

“But an Arab is an Arab,” Rajai interjected. Maybe in the past it was easier to get a visa as a Christian, he said, but all Arabs are the same to the Trump administration regardless of religion.

For Syrian refugees in Jordan, a U.S. visa was a ticket to a new life. Samira fled from her home in Homs, Syria, 14 years ago. She currently lives in the underserved East Amman town of Marka, home to some of the 660,000 Syrian refugees in Jordan. On the morning of December 8, Samira, her husband, and three sons sang songs of Syrian liberation as they stayed up watching the Assad regime fall—the regime that had destroyed their country, imprisoned their family, and sent them into exile. 

“Before I was worried that Trump would make it difficult for Syrian refugees to be resettled in the U.S.,” Samira said. “But now, we’re free.”

Still, she hopes that Trump will support the political transition and reconstruction of her country. A huge part of this equation is lifting U.S. sanctions on Syria, where nine out of 10 people live in poverty. On March 21, U.S. State Department Spokesperson Tammy Bruce said that, to this point, there are “no plans” to grant Syria sanction relief. 

When ex-diplomat Dr. Hatoug-Bouran spoke at the Jordan Media Institute, she set realistic expectations for the next four years. The Middle East—including Samira’s home country Syria—was not a priority for American voters and will always be last on the list of U.S. foreign policy priorities, she said, far behind NATO and other European alliances.

But, in terms of Jordan, she reassured her audience that—with 99 percent certainty—American funding would not be jeopardized under the new administration. “We’ve dealt with Trump before,” she said, and although this administration will bring different challenges with a new, Trump-loyalist cabinet, Jordan will maintain strong diplomatic ties regardless of democratic or republican leadership. 

Post-inauguration: The Reckoning

“Alhamdulillah”—praise be to God—Samira jubilated. “Trump stopped the war!”

She was among the many Jordanians who expressed gratitude for Trump’s negotiating team convincing the Israeli government to halt hostilities on the eve of the presidential inauguration. Despite the Biden administration claiming credit for the ceasefire, many Jordanians praised Trump for the deal because of its timing with the inauguration. 

What started as jubilation, however, turned to anxiety with Trump’s unprecedented freeze to USAID. With Executive Order 14169, Jordan lost 2 percent of its GDP and with its programs that provide food, water, shelter, healthcare, and infrastructure.

Ahmad, 27, is a researcher with a focus on social inclusion and gender equality. He was furloughed this past month alongside 35,000 people working on USAID-funded projects in Jordan. Ahmad had been offered a job at a $40-million project that strengthened civil society organizations, but frozen funds forced them to lay off their staff with a single month’s notice. Ahmad is grateful that he has savings to fall back on, but he stressed that many of his colleagues do not have the same financial safety net and have children to provide for at home.

“You can only imagine the economic repercussions that USAID cuts will have not only directly on employees and their livelihoods, but on the companies and civil society organizations that are their grantees and are supplied with tens of thousands annually to operate and implement local projects to benefit their communities,” Ahmad added. 

This move affirms what American and Jordanian political analysts alike speculated before Trump took office—that he would sideline Jordan in his coming term as he did in his first term. They expected the administration would continue to prioritize Israel and the Gulf States, specifically Saudi Arabia, as they push for its normalization with Israel in the reinvigorated Abraham Accords. 

Soon after, Trump proposed that Egypt and Jordan absorb 2 million Palestinians from Gaza—another hit to the initial excitement for a ceasefire. Once considered a hypothetical fear in anticipation of a second Trump term, the ethnic cleansing and forcible transfer of around 2 million Palestinians into Jordan has become an imminent threat. 

On February 13, thousands waved Jordanian flags in front of the Marka Military Airport, welcoming King Abdullah II home from his trip to the United States where he met with President Trump. Teachers cancelled class and took their students to join patriotic crowds cheering for what many considered a successful public rejection of Palestinian displacement by the King. 

A few weeks later, on March 4, Arab leaders met in Cairo for an emergency summit, approving an alternative to Trump’s expulsion of Palestinians and construction of his “Riviera of the Middle East”. The plan requires $53 billion to rebuild Gaza while Palestinians remain on the land. The United States and Israel rejected the Arab League proposal immediately.

“Now, nothing makes sense,” Nidal said in response to Trump’s displacement plan. “110 out of 100 people I know are against expelling Palestinians.”

Ghadeer, the Arabic teacher of Palestinian descent, is also shocked by Trump’s desire to ethnically cleanse Gaza and build a beachfront atop rubble and mass graves. The President illustrated his vision through a highly-criticized AI-generated video, originally created by a source unaffiliated with the White House that he shared and later reposted on his social media platforms. Among the scenes, Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanhayu lounge shirtless on the “Trump Gaza” beach. 

American allies such as France, Germany, Italy and the UK voiced support for the Arab League Gaza reconstruction plan, joining Saudi Arabia, and other U.S.-allied Arab countries, in rejecting Trump’s displacement ambitions. 

“Trump’s meeting with the King showed that the U.S. does not care about losing their allies,” Ghadeer said. “American politics are declining under Trump, not just in the Middle East, but around the world.”

The last straw for Jordanians came on March 18, when Israel killed over 400 Gazans in airstrikes with a green light from the White House. The ceasefire came to a fiery end a mere 123 kilometers away from Amman, the distance between New York and Philadelphia. The Israeli attack marked the deadliest day in Gaza since the first months of the war in 2023.

Khaled admits that after the first months of his presidency, Trump turned out to be worse than he expected. 

“He has no idea what he is doing,” Khaled lamented. “I think I overestimated his intelligence. He just wants to leave a mark on history whether it is negative or positive.”

“Trump just wants to be remembered.”

Despite the world growing more multipolar during the last two decades, the U.S. elections remain the single most important nonviolent political event every four years. This time around, the stakes are very high with active conflicts and sites for atrocities in Ukraine, Palestine, Sudan, and more. The re-election of Donald Trump has brought with it a whirlwind of changes, tension, and media extravaganza. Will U.S. foreign policy keep up with the erratic president, or will there be certain constants driven by the establishment?

As part of their ongoing conversation on issues from East to West, and from Africa to the United States, Cairo Review editor Omar Auf invited historian of West Africa Mark Deets to a discussion on the U.S. elections and Trump’s second term. Deets is the director of Prince AlWaleed Bin Talal Bin AbdulAziz AlSaud Center for American Studies at the American University in Cairo. He is also the author of A Country of Defiance: Mapping the Casamance in Senegal. 

The following Q&A was recorded in two parts to illustrate the rapidly changing developments in the political landscape. The first took place before the elections, and the second after Trump was announced president. The transcript has been edited for clarity. 

The U.S. elections are coming up.

MD: Nearly upon us, yes.

What do you think, in general?

As the director of American Studies, I need to be careful to keep my own personal opinions out of it. But I do think that it’s a very interesting time, and it’s a very consequential election. We say that about every single election. Every single time that there’s another presidential election, then that is the most important election in history. But I think that one could make the claim that this one is up there because of things that are going on in the world stage right now, like with Gaza and Lebanon and the Palestinian issue, and like with Ukraine. And so many of these conflicts, they get crowded out of the front page. The conflict in Sudan is still going on. It’s horrible. Scenes sort of rekindled in Darfur that were reminiscent of 2004. 

So these are very consequential issues. We’ll see how much any of those things change if Donald Trump is elected. Of course, that has been one of his arguments, is that the world is on fire now because of the lack of leadership of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

A very populist appeal. 

It is a very populist appeal. And, you know, it assumes that somehow American leaders can control other international leaders, as if those other leaders don’t have their own ideas and their own agency. But I think there is a recognition that the United States is a very influential country, that it has a lot of power. Whether you like it or not, that’s just the way it is right now on the international scene.

And those are very important issues. Unfortunately, for the average American voter, they don’t vote on those issues. The average American voter is not going to vote on U.S. policy toward Africa or the Middle East. They’re going to vote on domestic issues. Some of them will vote on a number of issues, but some of the key issues right now—if you look at the polling—abortion is a big issue. That’s kind of back on the ballot because of all of the things, especially with the overturning of Roe v. Wade under the Trump administration. So for a lot of women, and a lot of men too, actually, the issue of reproductive rights is very important. But the main issue that is really going to drive votes is the economy.

And out of all the countries on the face of the planet that went through COVID, the United States probably came out the best in terms of its economy. There was horrible inflation going on at the time, and the United States brought that inflation down. The economy has actually continued to grow. The unemployment rate has gone down. So if you just look at economic indicators, it sounds like this has gone quite well for the Democrats, like the economy has done well.

And I remember the phrase James Carville said with the Clinton campaign in the 1990s,, “It’s the economy, stupid.” And I think we’re kind of back at that point now. I mean, one could argue that it’s always the economy to some extent. What do people feel when they go to the grocery store and have to pay for food, and have to pay for diapers, and have to pay for equipment, or whatever the case may be? And so, yeah, that’s going to be the driving issue. And it’s going to be a knock against Kamala. Now, people argue that the most inconsequential position in the U.S. government is that of vice president—you have very little power unless it’s breaking a tie in the Senate. So it’s not as if this is all Kamala’s fault, but because she was with the Biden administration, of course, the Trump campaign has been trying very much to tar her with that reputation.

And so I think that’s going to be really tough for Kamala to overcome. And she’s had to be very diplomatic about how to establish herself as a Democratic candidate without completely trashing her boss. Because there was this interview last week—you may have seen it or heard about it—where the journalist asked her, like, “What are you going to do different from Joe Biden?” And she had kind of a hard time. She said some things in general, but she had kind of a hard time answering that in detail. And so I think that’s tough for her.

And even though the inflation numbers have come down, the perception people have still is that things were a lot better under Trump. And so it almost seems like it’s coming down to, okay, do you want the political circus that you have under Trump with a really strong economy and people able to afford things at the gas pump and at the grocery store? Or do you want this more progressive candidate who has some strong policy proposals in terms of trying to stop price gouging by various stores? 

She’s got a plan to enable new homebuyers coming from middle-class and lower-class backgrounds to help them purchase homes and things like that. So she does have solid policy proposals. But those are the kinds of challenges the Democrats face. 

The issue of Kamala being a woman of color—I know there’s been some things in the news lately about former President Obama kind of jumping on the case of Black men to get them to turn out and support Kamala and get over the fact that she’s a woman. I just don’t know that it’s that. I might be ignorant here, I might be sitting here in my white male privilege. But I just don’t think it’s that big a deal to the people who are going to vote for Kamala or not.

You know, it’s always interesting to see what all this polling data and all these projections say before the election, and then to see what actually takes place on the day of the election, when each individual man or woman walks into that voting booth, in the privacy of that voting booth, and marks a certain candidate.

We’ll see.

What about foreign policy when it comes to Africa? You said there’s a crowding out effect of some issues, and I think for Africa at large—which is not a monolith—that is the case. Can you enlighten me on U.S. policy regarding the African continent historically speaking and the differences between Democrat and Republican?

I don’t see things changing a whole lot vis-a-vis Africa policy, regardless of who gets elected. In general, usually when a Republican gets elected, then there’s more pro-business kinds of policies, more kinds of free trade kinds of policies, things that are viewed as being good for business, and that if there’s any kind of concern about human rights or democracy or anything like that, then that’s usually coming from a Democratic administration, although there have been exceptions, right? Like the administration of George W. Bush focused a lot on democratization, not only in Africa, but also in the Middle East, and some would argue with disastrous consequences.

But anyway, I don’t think that there’s going to be a huge change in African policy, and I think we’re going to continue to see efforts from the BRICS countries to balance U.S. power, and so China is not going away. China views Africa as a very important zone for its imperial action and for its investment and for its international power and clout, and that’s going to continue. And I think there’s going to continue to be a certain kind of alliance bundling, if you will, between China and the Russians and the Iranians, to some extent. And South Africa is also part of this, right? South Africa is a majority country, run by the majority, like it doesn’t always follow U.S. policy like it did during the apartheid days. 

So I think that there has been a desire to balance American power around the continent. I don’t think that America is necessarily withdrawing into some kind of isolationism, but I do think that there’s been a certain amount of sort of questioning, like, where is it actually in the U.S. interest to be involved and how? The thing that I think, in addition to these BRICS countries, has gotten a lot of attention, at least for me, and especially because I work on West African history, but it’s been this series of these rolling coups in West Africa and in the Sahel. And some of those regimes, whatever you want to call them, that have taken power in these countries, like Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, they have told the United States to get out, right?

Niger is, I think, the most famous case of this lately. The United States had to have special forces that are conducting various kinds of military training with the host nation, and the United States also had drones that they were flying in West Africa out of that location and to interdict and to conduct surveillance on the various armed extremist groups that the United States government is concerned about because they create instability in these countries. And so you have a number of these countries, and especially these few in West Africa, that have actually left ECOWAS, who’ve told America, we don’t need you anymore. Like, move on. We’ve heard your story about our need for democracy and our need for development and all these things for years and years and years, and you promised development and it hasn’t come, and we’re done with you. And so I think that the U.S. is kind of having to figure out how to deal with that.

I mean, of course, we have to leave. If a sovereign country tells us to leave, we have to leave. So in the case of Niger, we’re doing that. We’re packing up all the drones, packing up all the military supplies, and all that stuff. And yeah, the United States is going to leave, but I don’t think that means that the United States is completely withdrawing from the region or that it’s not going to continue to monitor what’s going on in the Sahel with some of these Islamist groups that are driving some of this conflict. That’s one area that I just don’t think that whether it’s a future President Harris or whether it’s a future President Trump, I don’t think it’s going to change that much in terms of U.S. policy toward Africa.

Now, that doesn’t mean that both sides won’t try to use what’s going on in international events to try to criticize the other side or to try to make their case that they’re somehow better at dealing with these things, which is exactly what the Trump people have been doing lately, pointing at all the problems in Ukraine and Gaza and Lebanon and the West Bank and all this stuff with Palestine. And Iran and North Korea and Russia, like all these people that the United States is concerned about, they’re still going to try to say that it’s the fault of the Biden administration. 

The rest of the Q&A was recorded after Trump was elected president. 

From what we’ve seen so far, how do you think U.S. foreign policy will differ under Trump? How does he perceive what U.S. interests are, and how does he go about pursuing them? 

This is a great question. I mean, in the big scheme of things, I still stand by what I said before, that there aren’t going to be huge changes. But I think that there’s a lot of people who are thinking that if you thought that Biden was really pro-Israel, then just stand by and see what Trump is going to be like.

Partly, I think there’s an assumption that because of the influence of his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who’s Jewish, and also because of the influence of the Christian evangelical right, they’re going to be looking for an even more favorable approach to Israel. But it’s hard to imagine how it can get much more favorable, but I’m sure that Trump will show us how that can be done. He has already, during his last term. 

But one of the things that I think is so interesting—there’s a certain amount of this kind of shuffling between every administration, especially when it’s changing parties from Republican to Democrat or Democrat to Republican. People are really interested to see how this is going to change the policies and the outlook and the approach. I do think there are going to be strong differences. But one of the things that has been really interesting to me is the movement that we’ve seen already before Trump took office. In the old days, there used to be a certain amount of deference between the different administrations. Of course, people anticipate that things will be new with a new administration, but there was a little decorum between the parties—”we’ll let you finish your term, and then we’ll come in and start doing what we’re going to do.” But it seems like Biden has just been ineffective and weak.

So everybody, even more so than in the past, has been acting like Trump has already been president, even though he’s not going to be inaugurated until tomorrow. And that’s one of the strange things about the American system—the long time between the election and the inauguration. I’m told this results from the technology available in the 19th and early 20th centuries. If a guy from the Midwest won the election, he needed a month or so just to get to Washington, D.C., to take office and move his personal effects.

Thankfully, we’re no longer depending on horse and buggy, but this bizarre legacy in American politics remains. Biden has definitely been a lame-duck president. And another thing that has really tarnished his legacy, it seems like he spent most of his time pardoning people, including his son. The level of corruption with some of these pardons has been gross. I know a certain amount of this goes on at the end of every administration, but it seems worse this time. It seemed like the only thing Biden could do effectively at the end of his term was issue these pardons, which look dirty and corrupt. Even though nobody contests that, under the Constitution, he has the power to do these things.

The jury is still out on whether this ceasefire in Gaza will actually hold. It’s been really interesting to see Trump essentially taking over as president before his term. I kind of think that Hamas and Hezbollah couldn’t care less about threats from the U.S. president. In fact, they would probably welcome it—it gives them attention and makes their cause the focus. And I don’t think anybody really believes the U.S. will start bombing or invading Gaza or Lebanon.

So when Trump says they better work out a deal or there’s going to be hell to pay, what does that actually mean? Drone strikes? Airstrikes? Boots on the ground? What does that mean in practical terms? It’ll be interesting to see how the region reacts to all this. You know, he comes up with these blustery kind of statements. There’s a lot of speculation that all of this bluster was just to distract from his cabinet nominations. Right now, they’re starting the confirmation hearings for positions like Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, and in the Department of Justice. Some think he created a media storm to shift the focus away from these appointments.

Anyway, we’ll see what happens. But those are some key factors moving forward. 

It’s a lot to think about, especially since he has been very active on different fronts. My last question to you is regarding the West African states such as Senegal and the Alliance of Sahel States. What can we expect on the economic dossier, especially regarding these states that are more socialist in orientation, like Senegal?

Yeah, they may be ideologically incompatible, but at the end of the day, there are businessmen in Senegal who want to do deals. Part of the attractiveness of the Chinese to African governments and businessmen is that they come in and say, “We don’t care about your human rights record. We want to do business.” There will probably be more of that with Trump. He can’t completely discard American policy for years and some State Department institutions that deal with these things, but in general, I expect him to be a very pro-business president with a pro-business administration. African governments can expect that, regardless of how socialist they are.

Senegal is very much a social democratic, Western European brand of socialism. I don’t see Senegal joining the axis or going in the direction of welcoming the Russians and the Chinese at the expense of Western investment. They’re already doing it somewhat with France, kicking out the French, but they still want Western investment. I can’t imagine Senegal turning down investment from France, the United States, and other NATO countries. That will continue.

The Senghorian model of socialism is very much democratic socialism, very Western European. I have friends like Sheik Babu at the University of Pennsylvania who talk about the Jacobin tradition of Senegalese politics. There’s a brand of Marxism—it’s not really Marxism, it’s this sort of European socialism—that goes along with that French Jacobin approach and will still be salient in Senegal. Even though Faye has been complaining about the presence of the French battalion in Senegal and has basically kicked them out, that culture and those institutions will not completely go away.

Trump’s transactional nature—the guy who’s always willing to make a deal, who’s always pro-business—will continue, and that will work well with leaders in West Africa who are also very pragmatic. Even though they’ve invited in the Chinese and the Russians, they’ve done it to make deals, not because they’re real Marxists. I don’t think they care about that political and economic ideology. How far are we from the end of the Cold War now, anyway?

I don’t think West African countries working with the Chinese and the Russians are doing it out of loyalty to Marxism. They’re doing it because they think it’s in their interest to make deals with people bringing capital, development, and what they think of as security. I would argue that the mercenaries Russia has brought into West Africa have made it less secure rather than more secure. But pragmatism wins the day, and Trump’s transactional nature lends itself well to this situation.

West Africa isn’t huge in the U.S. foreign policy sphere, but when there are opportunities to make deals, Trump will take them. The new generation of young African leaders appreciates that.

On January 30, 2025, two Israeli laws banning UNRWA in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) entered into effect. While initial indications were that their implementation is slow, the second half of February 2025 saw first steps towards the forced closure of a number of agency installations in East Jerusalem. The laws could cripple UNRWA’s humanitarian operation despite its significant expansion following the recent ceasefire. Gaza is largely destroyed and even with a lasting ceasefire, the UNRWA ban could lead to the collapse of education and health care for thousands in the Strip, as well as in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. 

The first law—Law to Cease UNRWA Operations—resulted in the abrogation of the Comay-Michelmore agreement, which since 1967 has regulated the operations of the agency and its privileges and immunities in Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. The law further stipulates that Israeli authorities “shall not have any contact with UNRWA or anyone acting on its behalf”. The second law—Law to Cease UNRWA Operations in the Territory of the State of Israel—contains a specific ban on UNRWA activities “within the Sovereign territory of the State of Israel”, targeting UNRWA’s operations in East Jerusalem, which contrary to international law Israel considers part of the country. 

While the implementation of the ban will have dire consequences for UNRWA and the Palestinian refugees that it serves in the OPT, the exact effects are difficult to predict. This is both because Israel has not clearly indicated how the ban will be implemented and because the situation on the ground is volatile; the Gaza ceasefire, which went into effect January 19, 2025, significantly changed dynamics in the Strip. If fully implemented, the ban would amount to a first ever forced eviction of a UN agency by a UN Member State. Implications will vary across UNRWA’s “fields of operations” and the program sectors the agency operates in. 

The timing of the ban is particularly unfortunate because UNRWA continues to face a serious financial crisis, Thus, while adapting to a new legal and political reality, UNRWA may at some point during 2025 be faced with the prospect of being unable to pay staff, limiting their ability to pull the agency through the storm. This combined challenge is exacerbated by Trump’s return to the White House which is likely to accelerate ongoing U.S. efforts at undermining and possibly dismantling the agency.

We recently conducted a preliminary study on the consequences of Israel’s ban of the agency in the context of the ongoing financial crisis, looking at possible scenarios, and their humanitarian, political, legal and gender implications. In this article, we discuss some of our pertinent findings, complemented with an assessment of the impact of the ceasefire in Gaza and the position of the Trump administration on UNRWA’s future. 

Trump’s Return to the White House

The Biden administration’s approach to Gaza was an absolute disaster for the Palestinians. His secretary of state practically admitted as much when he defended his legacy in a New York Times interview by stating that the administration’s goals had been to free the hostages, secure a ceasefire, limit civilian suffering and stop the conflict from spreading. For fifteen long months all of these goals failed to materialise. When it came to UNRWA, the Biden approach was paradoxical. On the one hand, the United States pulled out as a donor in response to the allegations that twelve UNRWA staff had participated in the October 7 Hamas attack. On the other hand, the United States asked Israel not to implement the UNRWA ban. By then President Joe Biden was a lame duck and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could simply wait him out, knowing that the UNRWA ban could be implemented under a Trump administration. 

Trump, unlike Biden, has made no pretence of wanting to preserve UNRWA. On the contrary, the previous Trump administration explicitly sought to destroy UNRWA. Based solely on that experience we can expect a hard anti-UNRWA line. In 2018, Trump personally triggered UNRWA’s financial crisis as he blocked funding to the agency, and his “peace plan” was based on the premise that the Palestinian refugee issue was taken off the table. As expected, Trump blocked further U.S. funding to UNRWA even before the law barring U.S. aid to UNRWA came to an end. For UNRWA, this means that it will be stuck with a double crisis of perpetual underfunding and the implementation of the Israeli ban. As a consequence, UNRWA might collapse in the OPT, with ramifications also for its mandate in the other areas of operation, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan.

Trump’s statements show that he will pursue an openly more aggressive line toward Palestine in general. Most famously, this includes his claim that unless the hostages are released by his inauguration then “all hell will break out”. Similar statements have been made following Israel’s decision to block all aid entering Gaza. While this was obviously a threat aimed at Hamas, Trump’s appointed envoy also pressed Netanyahu to agree to the ceasefire agreement before he entered office. Trump was seemingly a prime mover for getting the ceasefire over the finish line, but we should also remember the wider picture of how Trump’s team views Palestine. 

In his first presidential term, Trump agreed with the Israeli position that Jerusalem is Israel’s undivided capital and he took the point of view that the settlements are not to be considered illegal. His current administration clearly follows this model. Both his appointed ambassador to Israel, Mike Hukabee, and his pick as UN ambassador, Elise Stefanik, belong to this camp. The danger is therefore very real that the Netanyahu government might move to annex parts of the West Bank without Trump opposing it. 

Trump went much further than anybody had expected when, during Netanyahu’s visit to the White House in February 2025, he outlined a plan for ethnic cleansing of Gaza. According to his plan, Gaza would be emptied of Palestinians who could move to Egypt, Jordan, and other unnamed countries. The United States would then take over the Strip and make it into the “Riviera of the Middle East”. While both Egypt and Jordan, as well as Palestine and many other countries, have strongly opposed the scheme—not to forget that it is practically impossible to foresee the United States sending the amount of boots on the ground required to secure such an operation—there is a very real danger that this greenlights the worst Israeli ambitions.   

Since a core foreign policy ideology of the MAGA-movement is that the United States should not be encumbered by the restraints of the international system, we should take for granted that the international order will be targeted, both with regards to Palestine, but also beyond that. As such, UNRWA is a perfect target. We have already seen how the United States voted to sanction the International Criminal Court for having issued an arrest warrant against Netanyahu. We can also expect a targeting of the UNHCR if, as a fallout from the UNRWA ban and the agency’s potential collapse, it becomes involved with the Palestinian refugee question. 

The only potential damage reduction with regards to Trump’s Palestine policy can stem from his desire to conclude an agreement with Saudi Arabia. However, it is extremely unlikely that the Kingdom will entertain a path toward the Abraham Accords after Trump’s Gaza plan.

UNRWA and the Israeli Ban: a Brief Overview

Since October 7, 2023 Israel and pro-Israeli organisations have extensively accused UNRWA, in various ways, of being infiltrated by Hamas. During fall 2023, dismantling UNRWA became official Israeli policy, and one year later, events culminated in the legal ban. On January 26, 2024, on the same day as the International Court of Justice (ICJ) order in the South Africa v. Israel ‘genocide’ case was issued, UNRWA made public allegations against twelve of its staff who Israel had accused of being involved in the October 7 attack. As a result, the United States and 16 other donor countries immediately froze aid to UNRWA. The allegations gained traction in the United States, the EU and most importantly within Israel, and subsequently served to trigger the UNRWA ban.

In the OPT, UNRWA operates in a dangerous and unstable context, where it has been documented that both Palestinian militant groups and the Israeli army have violated the inviolability of UN infrastructure. In Gaza, Hamas has ruled since 2007 impacting UNRWA, both as a “host government” and as part of the societal fabric. Compared to the large number of staff in Gaza, the number of alleged Hamas members amongst UNRWA staff in Gaza is low, with conclusive evidence lacking. Membership in violent political organisations is incompatible with employment in UNRWA, as a UN organisation. Accordingly, since the early 2000s, UNRWA has been increasingly concerned with developing and implementing mechanisms aiming to safeguard the neutrality of the agency and its operations. A report coordinated by former French Foreign Minister Catharine Colonna recommended improvements of internal control mechanisms, but also stated that UNRWA has more neutrality-related controls in place than any other UN organization. 

Allegations of staff involvement in terrorism have served to undermine and discredit UNRWA, which appears to have been a key aim. This is not, however, a new policy. The legal ban comes after many years of demonizing UNRWA. This is mainly because of a deeply held view that UNRWA artificially perpetuates the Palestinian refugee issue, the unresolved ‘original sin’ at Israel’s birth in 1948, when two-thirds of the local Palestinian inhabitants were displaced. The perpetuation claim is factually wrong but is a view increasingly held in Israel. Hatred for UNRWA escalated with Israel’s current extreme right-wing government, and reached unprecedented levels after October 7. While UNRWA has been a main target of Israeli legal, political, and physical attacks, other UN agencies, as well as local and international NGOs, have also been targeted. Indeed, the “securitization” of both international and local NGOs and human rights organizations, with terror claims among other accusations, is a familiar phenomenon in this context. Similar tactics were also used against the Palestine Liberation Organization in the past and continue to be used to suppress Palestinian civil society. 

Israel’s ban on UNRWA needs to be interpreted in context, and as part of the political program to extend Israel’s control over all of Palestine from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, erasing Palestinians from the land, promoted by current Israeli government Greater Israel idealogues. Moreover, the legal ban forms part of the wide array of Israeli measures in Gaza since October 7, such as limitations on humanitarian aid, and systematic destruction of Palestinian civilian infrastructure including hospitals and schools in Gaza. 

Immediate implications

In order to understand the implications of the UNRWA ban we have to break it down into three geographical areas: Gaza, the West Bank (excluding East Jerusalem) and East Jerusalem.

Assessing the likely effects of the law in East Jerusalem is more straightforward, both because the applicable law is stricter—UNRWA operations will be prohibited—and because the number of registered refugees is lower than in Gaza and the rest of the West Bank. Effective the entry into force of the ban, UNRWA’s international staff were withdrawn and the West Bank Field Office, which has also functioned as part of UNRWA HQ, was closed. On February 18, 2025, Israeli forces and personnel from Jerusalem Municipality evicted one of UNRWA’s vocational training centers and ordered the closure of three agency schools in East Jerusalem, affecting 600 students. We expect the ban to be eventually fully implemented in East Jerusalem, with closure of additional UNRWA schools and clinics in the city and in two refugee camps in “Greater Jerusalem”, Shufat and Kalandia. The same goes for the cessation of other UNRWA services including waste management in the two camps. Upon full implementation, in all likelihood, Palestinian refugee students will be transferred to the Israeli school system for Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem. Plans are underway to transform the UNRWA Field Office into an Israeli settlement. The political consequences are extremely grave as Israel will further consolidate its hold over the city, practically expelling the UN and further ‘israelizing’ Palestinian education. 

The law applying to Gaza and (the remainder of) the West Bank does not prohibit UNRWA operations as such, but implies that Israeli government officials cannot engage with the agency or other actors acting on its behalf. This means that the laws are expected to be highly detrimental, but it is unclear exactly how and when they will be applied. At the time of writing implementation has not seriously started. 

In the Gaza Strip, the UNRWA ban, if fully implemented, is expected to dramatically impact humanitarian operations, with one senior UN official describing it as “a train wreck in the making”. UNRWA will no longer be able to coordinate with COGAT (the Israeli coordinating authority in the OPT), international staff will no longer gain access, and UNRWA material will not be allowed to enter the strip. What this means in practice is that UNRWA will no longer be able to provide logistical support to other humanitarian actors and related coordination. This is worse than it initially sounds. On paper, UNRWA’s imports only constitute fifteen percent of humanitarian aid entering Gaza. This gives an erroneous impression, as Israel has restricted UNRWA import. Much of UNRWA’s needs are currently consigned to and imported by other UN agencies, such as WFP and WHO. 

For decades, UNRWA has been the backbone of the entire humanitarian operation in Gaza. Field data illustrates UNRWA’s implementing and logistical capacity on the ground and how other actors compare: UNRWA has 5000 working staff in Gaza since October 7, whilst relatively large actors like the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) has fifty-five and Save the Children has 230. UNICEF has 100-150 staff. As NRC head Jan Egeland noted, UNRWA is a larger humanitarian actor in Palestine than all the other humanitarian organizations combined and is responsible for eighty percent of all humanitarian aid in Gaza. The other humanitarian actors in Gaza depend on UNRWA for their operations. In addition to the UNRWA staff that much of the overall humanitarian operation depends on, UNRWA also administers the warehouses and the shelters which house internally displaced persons (IDPs). Even when other UN agencies initiate programmes, such as when the WHO vaccinated against polio, UNRWA implemented the operation. 

While the UN position against replacing UNRWA has primarily been a principled stance against the illegality of expelling UNRWA, it is clear that even if the UN had decided to replace the agency it would require a long time. Well-informed humanitarian actors we have interviewed have estimated that such a replacement would take two to three years to do properly. Absent such a timeline, there is no time to plan, and the Israelis themselves are not presenting one either.

While the focus on Gaza is primarily the humanitarian consequences of the ban, for obvious reasons, we should do well to remember that UNRWA’s foremost tasks are basic education and primary healthcare. In the context of the ongoing war and scholasticide, no schools are operating, creating an educational gap that only UNRWA—given its longstanding experience, infrastructure and staff—will be able to fill once the war is over. With regards to healthcare UNRWA conducts 17,000 consultations per day. An operation of that scale simply cannot be replaced, and ending it would be disastrous. 

In the West Bank, UNRWA’s international staff are no longer granted visas and UNRWA supplies will not be allowed to enter the territory if indeed the ban is fully implemented. Unlike in Gaza and in East Jerusalem, where the ban will have an immediate impact, we can expect a slower impact in the rest of the West Bank. UNRWA’s extensive education and health services, including ninety-six schools and forty-three health clinics, mainly in refugee camps, might be severely affected by the ban. Scenarios span from UNRWA temporarily being able to continue providing these basic services, to the Palestinian Authority (PA) or other actors taking over, to basic services closing down. The worst case scenario includes a wide and serious deprivation of basic human rights, and potential social and political domino effects leading to the collapse of the PA. The legal ban will play out in an already extremely insecure and volatile situation. Since October 2023, more than 993 Palestinians, including more than 200 children, have been killed in the West Bank. The Israeli military has targeted refugee camps, in particular in northern parts of the West Bank, while the PA has intensified its crackdown on Palestinian militant groups operating in some camps. 

Implications of the Gaza Ceasefire on the Implementation of the Ban

At the time of writing, implementation of the legal ban has been limited, contrary to what was expected. We see three key explanations for this that are not mutually exclusive. One, the ceasefire conditions have been dependent on humanitarian operations being largely expanded, which is impossible without UNRWA; second, behind-the-scenes international pressure has so far limited implementation of the laws; and third, Israel keeps the implementation of the laws as an overhanging threat to UNRWA’ operations and existence, and to the refugees depending on its services, thereby worsening organizational and financial stress and a further weakening of UNRWA in front of international donors and other UN agencies.

The imperatives of the ceasefire agreement between Hamas and Israel may change some of the dynamics with respect to the implementation of the UNRWA ban. The ceasefire deal requires at least 600 truckloads of aid to be allowed into Gaza every day of the initial six-week phase, including fifty carrying fuel. Half of those trucks are supposed to go to Gaza’s north, where experts have warned famine is imminent. 

As compliance by Israel with this requirement is one of the conditions for the weekly release of hostages under the first six-week phase of the ceasefire, this is likely one of the reasons implementation of the ban was delayed until the end of phase one. Further flexibility on the part of Israel may include allowing workarounds, such as ‘rehatting’ UNRWA international staff and/or placing UNRWA’s local employees in Gaza under the control of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. This might be overly optimistic, however, as the Israeli government has blocked all aid entering Gaza and the ceasefire appears to be increasingly prone to collapse. Moreover, should the ceasefire hold and the second stage begin, Israel might still simply insist that as long as enough trucks enter Gaza it is up to actors on the ground—absent UNRWA—to figure out delivery.

Obviously, in the absence of hostilities, it will be safer for trucks and workers to move around Gaza, and the need for deconfliction will be greatly reduced as long as the ceasefire lasts. As the ceasefire takes hold, and is hopefully prolonged, it is vital that UNRWA be allowed to restart education. The ban will make that extremely difficult, if not impossible, creating long-term gaps in Palestinian education and a lost generation of children.

Violations of International Law

The two new laws breaches Article 105 of the UN Charter, the Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the UN, and UN Security Council resolution 2730 of May 2024 on the protection of humanitarian and UN personnel. As a Member of the UN, Israel also continues to be required, pursuant to Article 2, paragraph 5, of the UN Charter, to give UNRWA every assistance in any action it takes in accordance with the relevant resolutions of the UN General Assembly (UNGA). Israel cannot invoke the provisions of its internal laws, including the recent legislation against UNRWA, as justification for its failure to perform its obligations.

Moreover, the laws defy the ICJ’s opinion on the unlawfulness of Israel’s presence in Gaza and the West Bank, including eastern Jerusalem, and the subsequent UNGA resolution calling for Israel’s withdrawal from these areas by September 2025. As noted by the ICJ in its advisory opinion, although Israel’s occupation is unlawful it remains an Occupying Power subject to relevant international humanitarian law (IHL), international human rights law (IHRL) and general principles of international law. Nothing in these laws permit Israel, as an Occupying Power, to expel directly or indirectly, the agency from the OPT. On the contrary, Israel is obligated under the Fourth Geneva Convention to facilitate the “relief schemes” provided by UNRWA (Article 59), among other things. The fact that UNRWA has been providing services and assistance to Palestinian refugees in the OPT does not absolve Israel from its obligations to ensure that the necessary services and assistance are facilitated. In the event that UNRWA is compelled to cease its activities in the OPT, Israel would remain under obligation to ensure that the necessary services and assistance are provided.

By adopting these laws, Israel also violated the provisional measures issued by the ICJ in South Africa v. Israel in May 2024, which urged Israel to cease all its actions that create conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of Palestinians in Gaza (the group protected by the provisional measures order) and to allow for unhindered and appropriate humanitarian aid into Gaza. As UNRWA is the principal lifeline to the civilian population, banning UNRWA in Gaza can be seen as an integral component of Israel’s genocidal campaign to erase the Palestinians as a people.

Implications for the International Refugee Regime

The second law passed by the Knesset seeks a cessation of UNRWA operations in de facto sovereign Israeli territory, East Jerusalem. As Israel is a party to the 1951 Refugee Convention, this would automatically trigger the application of article 1D2 with the result that Palestinian refugees in East Jerusalem “shall ipso facto be entitled to the benefits” of the Convention. As the OPT is under effective Israeli control, UNRWA’s cessation will similarly trigger the application of Article 1D2 with respect to Palestinian refugees residing in Gaza and the remainder of the West Bank. Application of the 1951 Convention to Palestinian refugees in the OPT will entitle them to the benefits of the Convention which are similar to the protections they already enjoy under IHL and IHRL. Should any of these refugees need to seek protection in other States that are party to the 1951 Convention, they automatically qualify for refugee status in those respective countries.

Similarly, the cessation of UNRWA’s ability to assist and protect Palestinian refugees triggers the responsibility of UNHCR, the global refugee agency, with respect to these refugees, in line with article 7C of the UNHCR Statute and article 35 of the 1951 Convention. This does not mean that UNHCR must take over or replace the services that UNRWA has hitherto provided. UNHCR’s mandate toward refugees worldwide is very different from that of UNRWA. Contrary to UNRWA, UNHCR typically does not provide direct services to refugees; it makes use of implementing partners—host governments, other UN agencies, international or local NGOs—to provide humanitarian support. 

UNHCR’s involvement with Palestinian refugees in the OPT will nevertheless be important in three possible ways. Firstly, it will enhance the efforts to protect Palestinians in the OPT by adding a “refugee protection lens”, i.e. UNHCR will approach protection concerns of Palestinian refugees the way it does with respect to other refugees. Secondly, involvement of UNHCR will, at least theoretically, overcome the durable solutions gap faced by Palestinian refugees. Contrary to UNHCR, UNRWA does not have a mandate to pursue durable solutions for Palestinian refugees, leaving them as the only group of refugees without an institution to help them to bring an end to their plight as refugees. Thirdly, UNHCR’s involvement allows for the deployment of the ‘toolbox’ to address large scale refugee situations, including protracted ones, as set out in the New York Declaration on Refugees and Migrants and the Global Compact on Refugees, including the potential development of a so-called comprehensive response framework for Palestinian refugees.

Legal Challenges to the Ban

On December 19, 2024, the UNGA adopted resolution A/RES/79/232, initiated by Norway, in which, referring to Article 65 of the Statute of the Court, it requested the ICJ to give an advisory opinion to answer the following question:

“What are the obligations of Israel, as an occupying Power and as a member of the United Nations, in relation to the presence and activities of the United Nations, including its agencies and bodies, other international organizations and third States, in and in relation to the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including to ensure and facilitate the unhindered provision of urgently needed supplies essential to the survival of the Palestinian civilian population as well as of basic services and humanitarian and development assistance, for the benefit of the Palestinian civilian population, and in support of the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination?”

Although the question does not specifically make reference to UNRWA, the remaining text of the resolution makes it clear that the request for an advisory opinion was in fact triggered by the Israeli ban on UNRWA. In his Order dated December 23 2024, the President of the ICJ set February 28 2025 as the time-limit within which written statements by UN Member States on the question may be presented to the Court, after which the President will decide on the further procedure. Some 40 states and international organizations have submitted written statements and it is expected that oral hearings will take place in the spring and that a ruling will be rendered during the second half of 2025.

A second legal challenge to the ban was made with the highest Israeli court. On January 16, 2025, Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, petitioned the Supreme Court against the two new aforementioned Israeli laws that seek to shut down UNRWA. The petition was filed on behalf of ten Palestinian refugees who will be severely affected by the passage of the laws, along with Gisha, the Legal Center for Freedom of Movement. The petitioners argue that the laws violate fundamental human rights and Israel’s obligations under international law, and will have catastrophic humanitarian consequences. They seek an urgent interim injunction to delay the implementation of the laws, which came into effect at the end of January 2025. The Supreme Court denied the request for an interim injunction and ordered the state to submit a preliminary response to the petition by March 2, 2025. Based on prior case law, the chances that the Court will eventually overturn the ban are minimal.

Protection of Refugee Rights

It is important to note that the question of the status of the refugees and their rights and historical claims are not dependent on UNRWA’s continued ability to provide services in Gaza and the West Bank; they flow from the illegality of Israeli practices and policies in Palestine during and following the Nakba—as affirmed by the UNGA in Resolution 194—as well as the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination, recently reaffirmed in no uncertain terms in the ICJ’s advisory opinion. 

Regardless, UNRWA will continue to update its Palestinian refugee registration records, including with respect to refugees in the OPT. In 2022, the e-UNRWA application was introduced, a mobile platform that allows refugees to access and update their records remotely. The application, through which currently over ninety-eight percent of registration requests are processed—including from refugees in the OPT—is similar to medical insurance apps for its efficiency in enabling document uploads and submissions. While Israel could implement a geo-block on that app there are ways around it such as using VPN, which was used for e-UNRWA registrations in Syria. UNRWA will also revise its registration instructions, which have not been updated since 2009.

During the current war, the agency removed thousands of hard copies of key registration documents dating back to 1948 from its Gaza HQ (and also from the West Bank) to Amman. Thanks to the dedication of UNRWA staff, the agency’s registration database is now fully digitized and stored in safe digital spaces around the world. The preservation of this backbone of refugee culture and identity will be a source of collective comfort to the Palestinian refugees. The database will assume a pivotal significance if refugees decide to pursue their rights and historical claims to which they are entitled under international law. Even if this isn’t feasible immediately, UNRWA’s fully digitized database can enable this in the future. 

The Way Forward for UNRWA and the International Community

In many ways, UNRWA stands as a test to the world’s commitment to uphold the international system. Failing to protect one UN agency will not only detrimentally affect the Palestinians, but also make other institutions and the groups they are made to protect more vulnerable. Continuing to stand up against the UNRWA ban is therefore paramount. At the same time, it is vital that all states and organizations involved in the Middle East work to ensure that humanitarian aid is distributed to those in need in Gaza and the West Bank, and that funding and support to UNRWA continues. This must be done while heavy diplomatic pressure is applied to ensure that the Gaza ceasefire holds and is expanded on. As one of us has argued in the Cairo Review before, UNRWA’s future beyond October 7 cannot be considered in isolation—a comprehensive, multi-stakeholder approach, with displacement issues at its centre, is now necessary.

While the international debate around the Israeli ban, for valid reasons, focuses on the humanitarian prospects in Gaza, it is extremely important that we also highlight UNRWA’s health and educational role, making sure that their role is protected with regard to rebuilding and reinstituting the basic education and primary health care system in Gaza once the war ends. This also extends to education and health services in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

Together with the rest of the UN humanitarian and human rights system, UNRWA must place the protection of the Palestinian refugees’ identity, rights, and claims at the center because, contrary to service delivery, no other organization can take over this function. UNRWA’s registration system is critical in this respect. It has the potential to become the central archive and repository of evidence of the refugees, especially once the registration system gets harmonised and synchronised with the historic records of Palestinian property losses assembled by the UN Conciliation Commission for Palestine. The latter would connect property loss and damages in 1947/1949 to individual refugees and their families and descendants. 

The future governance of Gaza is still, at best, unclear and uncertain, as is the prospect for reconstruction after the massive destruction the Strip suffered under Israeli attack. Trump’s statements that the United States will build a completely new Gaza are detached from reality, and are premised on ethnic cleansing in flagrant violation of international law. Any viable reconstruction must encompass the desire of the Palestinians, in line with their right to national self-determination. 

UNRWA’s wealth of expertise is critical here, too, as discussions with respect to reconstruction of Gaza are coming to the fore now that a ceasefire has been reached. The agency played a key role in reconstruction and rehabilitation of damaged housing and infrastructure in the aftermath of the five earlier Gaza wars since 2008, and this experience—along with that garnered from camp improvement and rehousing efforts in Lebanon (Badawi camp), Syria (Neirab camp), the West Bank (Jenin camp)—is invaluable. Rather than top-down solutions made in the West, it is critical that reconstruction taps into and is driven by local actors, expertise and resources. 

It is crucial that donors step up and both increase their funding and shift the timing of the funding forward, to ensure that UNRWA is not hit by the double crisis. The longer term perspective that must be kept in mind is that the only way to legally replace UNRWA is to provide a political solution to the Palestinian refugee issue by fulfilling Palestinian self-determination. 

When I opened TikTok on the morning of January 19, I was met with a message I expected: “Sorry, TikTok isn’t available right now.” I was also met with one I didn’t: “We are fortunate that President Trump has indicated that he will work with us on a solution to reinstate TikTok once he takes office.”

The relationship between TikTok and the U.S. government has long been tumultuous. As TikTok’s presence in the

United States has grown, so have the concerns expressed by lawmakers about TikTok’s access to and use of American users’ data. It has also been shaped by the political tides: in July of 2020, a TikTok ban was first proposed by then-President Donald Trump as a means of retaliation against China for a perceived mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

American social media users have prepared for an internet without the popular app for years. In 2020, Donald Trump issued an executive order in August 2020 requiring ByteDance, the Chinese company that operates TikTok, to sell its U.S. operations to a local buyer. In April of 2024, bipartisan legislation was passed setting a deadline of January 19, 2025, for the sale.

The ban turned out to be short-lived. Hours after it came into effect, TikTok’s U.S. operations were incrementally reinstated after then-President-Elect Trump posted on TruthSocial that he would pass an executive order affording ByteDance more time to sell its operations after his January 20 inauguration. On his first day in office on January 20, he made good on his promise by signing an executive order extending the sale deadline by 75 days.

The debate over the app’s future is no coincidence: TikTok is one of the world’s largest social media platforms. Datareportal, a social media analysis firm, estimated in October 2024 that 1.69 billion people used TikTok worldwide. Though TikTok is the fifth-largest platform, users spend longer on it than any other application: on average 34 hours per month in August 2024. In America, that figure is higher: 42 hours.

TikTok isn’t only popular for scrolling—it’s also an engine for a massive creator economy. The United States also represents TikTok’s second largest advertising audience (users who self-identify as over 18), just behind Indonesia, at 138 million users. Almost 50 percent of all TikTok users say they use the app for brand research, and 22 percent follow influencers. Business Insider recently shared estimates from its sister company, Emarketer, indicating that U.S. ad revenue from TikTok generated a staggering $12.34 billion in 2024.

Given the extension of the sale deadline and new goodwill with Trump, it looks like creators can count on accessing TikTok through at least early April. Yet, during this period, Americans are questioning the role that TikTok will play in a second Trump administration. The most likely possibilities highlight a growing enmeshment between the White House and Silicon Valley that is perceived differently by the political Left and Right.

Scenario 1: Operations May Shift to one of Big Tech’s Major Players

Under the terms passed by Congress, TikTok’s U.S. operations will need to be purchased by an American company or individual in order for the app to remain operational within the United States. But, a partial purchase would also satisfy congressional requirements. “My initial thought is a joint venture between the current owners and/or new owners whereby the U.S. gets a 50% ownership in a joint venture set up between the U.S. and whichever purchase we so choose,” Trump wrote in his January 19 post on TruthSocial.

Several American celebrities have put their names forward as potential buyers. Kevin O’Leary, an investor who stars on the TV show Shark Tank (where he is called “Mr. Wonderful”), former Los Angeles Dodgers owner Frank McCourt, and internet celebrity Jimmy Donaldson (better known by his alias “Mr. Beast”) have all made comments expressing interest, Newsweek reports. Bloomberg reported on January 13 that the Chinese government was considering selling to X, SpaceX, and Tesla mogul Elon Musk, though a TikTok representative called the speculation “pure fiction” in comments to Variety days later. 

However, some users are concerned that TikTok could be bought by what the Atlantic calls the “broligarchs”—male tech magnates that have become close with Trump. The Atlantic cites Musk and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, while Vox includes Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. All four are billionaires. Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg are also—in order—the first, second, and third richest people in America according to Forbes’ 2024 “400 list,” which identifies the country’s 400 wealthiest (Thiel, whose net worth is a paltry $9.2 billion to Musk’s $244 billion, is 116th).

Tech and money were—literally—front and center at Trump’s January 20 inauguration. Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Apple CEO Tim Cook, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman attended Trump’s January 20 inauguration, as did TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew. All were seated prominently on the dais of the Capitol Rotunda, just next to where Trump himself was positioned. They sat closer to Trump than many of his Cabinet nominees, including now-confirmed Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., or “RFK”.

It’s possible that one of these billionaires, who have both the money to purchase TikTok’s operations and experience running large social media organizations, may step in as a buyer. If they do, a new TikTok may align with the loose content moderation policies favored by the Trump administration and adopted by some extant platforms. In January, Meta announced that it would end fact-checking on its platforms by third-party fact-checkers, though users would be allowed to add context to posts. X and YouTube recently did the same. Meta and X have also rolled back measures restricting hate speech targeting the LGBT community. 

It’s notable that Meta began its fact-checking program in 2016 after the company came under fire for misinformation on its platforms during Trump’s first election. Some users see the policy flip-flop as politically motivated: they point to Zuckerberg’s inauguration attendance, the $1 million donated by Meta, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI each to Trump’s inaugural fund, and the $277 million spent by Musk personally on Trump’s 2024 campaign. Others, however, feel that Meta’s former,  stricter moderation rules were themselves a product of political pressure. In August, Zuckerberg told Congress that the Biden administration had pressured Meta to “censor certain COVID-19 content”.

If a sale is not made and TikTok goes dark for good, these platforms could also represent potential homes for former users. Even if a sale goes through, an outcome with which users aren’t happy, could also prompt platform migration.

The American tech ecosystem has already fashioned competitor products mirroring TikTok’s functionality. The biggest, Reels—which is available through Instagram and Facebook—stands to gain as a ready-made analog that most social media users already have on their phones. 

Additionally, Meta products have proven attractive to TikTok users in particular: Datareportal indicates that 80.1 percent of TikTok users also use Instagram, and that 81.6 percent use Facebook. Facebook ads reach 71 percent of American adults, and Instagram ads 58 percent. 

Emarketer knows this, and estimates that Meta could see an influx of between $2.46 and $3.38 billion in ad dollars following a TikTok ban. They indicate that other platforms, like YouTube and Snapchat, could also benefit. But, as of the time of writing, YouTube, Snapchat, and X lack products mirroring the function of TikTok in the way that Threads does. 

Scenario 2: Users Might Switch to Smaller, “Protest” Platforms

Since the inauguration, some have expressed concern over the ties between Trump and some tech magnates. Trump has developed a particularly close relationship to Musk, who he announced in November would lead a new government agency called the Department of Government Efficiency (cheekily called “DOGE,” a reference to “dogecoin”: a joke-based cryptocurrency, or “memecoin”, that Musk has vocally supported).

Musk’s status within the government is ambiguous. He was appointed as an unpaid “special government employee”, a designation that allows for quick hiring for short-term appointments that NPR reports have often been used for private sector professionals. Special government employees do not require congressional confirmation, but do receive an ethics briefing and must disclose conflicts of interest. But, following inquiry from the press, a White House official said on February 25 that DOGE is formally run not by Musk but by former Health and Human Services official Amy Gleason.

What is clear is the significant influence exerted on Trump by Musk. Through DOGE, Musk has advised Trump with an eye to downsize the federal government, curtail federal spending, and dismantle regulation. This has included the dismantling of some agencies wholesale: the Trump administration put all employees of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which Musk once called “a criminal organization”, on administrative leave as of February 7 and took down its website.

Fourteen states lodged a lawsuit against both Trump and Musk on February 13, alleging that the power exerted by the latter is both undue and unconstitutional. “Although our constitutional system was designed to prevent the abuses of an 18th century monarch, the instruments of unchecked power are no less dangerous in the hands of a 21st century tech baron,” the lawsuit reads, as reported by ABC News.

Those concerned include some on the right. One user on the Trump-owned social media network TruthSocial, @ChristianAmericanPatriot,  said in a reply to a conversation about Musk’s potential purchase of TikTok: “MAGA is about giving power and choice back to the We the People, not creating a monopoly for Elon or anyone else.”

Tech has thus become political. Some see the prospect of a TikTok ban as blatantly partisan. “Since 2020, TikTok has served as a major hub for progressive speech and activism,” wrote Taylor Lorenz for User Mag on January 18. “The ban will deplatform thousands of progressive content creators and skew online discourse toward conservative ideologies.” 

Indeed, Lorenz writes, citing Pew Research statistics, “TikTok is the only platform where left-leaning news influencers outnumber right-leaning ones:” Twenty-eight percent of Pew respondents who specialize in creating news-driven content on TikTok self-identified as left-leaning in September-October of 2024, outnumbering the 25 percent self-identifying as right-leaning. 

Some users thus see the TikTok ban as a dangerous example of the censorship of a growing progressive movement. Others are frustrated with the dominance of progressive causes. “TikTok has almost made me conservative due to all the toxic leftist content,” posted Reddit user @ishutdoorzzzz on the r/AskALiberal subthread in October. In the post, the user explained that he felt targeted by content he encountered denigrating Black males, his identity as stated in his post. 

But, the inverse is also true. “None of these are progressive views or representative of progressives,” posted user @SuperSpyChase in response. “I actually deleted tiktok because it essentially tried to radicalize me into White Nationalism,” said user @seanie_rocks: “I’m liberal af, but I’m into motorcycles, whiskey, metal, and guns. I was gradually fed more and more anti-mask, anti-vax, anti-immigrant, pro-Trump nonsense that I deleted the app years ago and haven’t missed it. It’s funny that for all the complaining about censorship that right-wingers do, there’s plenty of content being pushed out there for them on social media.”

Frustrated, some TikTok users shifted to Chinese platforms during and before the January blackout. Reuters, using Similarweb data, reports that the app RedNote gained almost 3 million users in one day in the week preceding January 19. They say that Lemon8, which is also owned by Bytedance, gained 600,000 U.S. users ahead of the ban.

Most American users shifted back to TikTok once it came back online (partially due to the restoration of access and partially due to experiences with censorship). But, the migration underscores a popular animus toward the prospect of a banned TikTok. 

It’s possible that a homegrown alternative will be created. Within the past five years, several applications mirroring popular platforms have sprung up in direct opposition to leadership decisions perceived as political. In 2022, for instance, TruthSocial was developed as a haven for users frustrated with then-Twitter’s moderation policies after Trump was banned from the platform. More recently, Bluesky has welcomed progressive users disaffected by a new lack of content moderation on X and Meta.

Public interest foundation “Free Our Feeds” says it seeks to “billionaire-proof” social media by creating “an open and healthy social media ecosystem that cannot be controlled by any single company or billionaire”. 

It aims to do this by leveraging the Authenticated Transfer, or AT, Protocol: technology which is also used by Bluesky. In a blog post published during Bluesky’s development, Bluesky described the AT Protocol as a federated network, meaning that users can choose to host their profiles through various data servers, including their own. In layman’s terms: the AT Protocol disaggregates user data from one corporate owner and affords users the opportunity for self-ownership. “A person’s online identity should not be owned by corporations with no accountability to their users,” the blog post reads.

Despite using Bluesky-developed tech, Free Our Feeds describes itself as independent. An open letter launching the initiative says of Bluesky: “they remain a commercial company, and despite their best intentions they will come under the same pressures all businesses face: to maximise return to their investors.”

Free Our Feeds is run by a team of nine tech professionals. Two hail from the Mozilla Foundation, and another two from New_Public. The open letter was signed by sixty supporters, including journalists, actors, academics, and entrepreneurs. Notably, they include Mark Ruffalo (“Hulk Democratize,” I suppose), the founder of Wikipedia, and politicians currently and formerly associated with the UK House of Lords, the European Parliament, and the Taiwanese Ministry of Digital Affairs. 

Despite its star-studded scroll of supporters, Free Our Feeds will be grassroots-funded. To get up and running, it’s sourcing $4 million USD in individual contributions through GoFundMe.

Throughout his career in politics, U.S. President Donald Trump has made his unpredictability an asset. One never quite knows if he will come across as an isolationist, calling for an end to “forever wars”, or a belligerent interventionist, threatening enemies with dire consequences. Some see him mostly as a “deal-maker”, ready to talk to friends and adversaries as long as there is a good bargain to be had.  This would suggest that Trump is a “transactional” and pragmatic politician behind all the bluster and rhetorical excess. One thing is fairly clear, however: Trump does not bother with grand strategic concepts. He is not particularly well informed about international affairs and has little patience for endless rounds of diplomatic bargaining. He engages with other leaders with the promise of quick results, but may then lose patience or interest when the bargaining drags on.

Although many in his own Republican party have flirted with a “neo-conservative” view that the United States can only assure its preeminence in the world if it manages to export democracy and liberal values—while at the same time maintaining vast global military power—Trump does not share that frame of mind. In his first term, he was eager to court North Korea’s leader, Kim Jun-un, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and any number of other non-democrats. It often seemed as if he preferred to deal with them more than with his NATO allies, most of whom were democratically elected.

In his first term as president, 2017-2021, the closest he came to a consistent policy was in his unwavering support for Israel. During those four years, he favored large aid packages for Israel, agreed to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, recognized Israel’s annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights, restricted dealings with the Palestinian Authority, and tried to promote a series of bilateral Israeli deals with Arab countries such as Morocco, Sudan, the UAE, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. The resulting “Abraham Accords” offered nothing to the Palestinians.  

Trump’s other notable policy in his first term was to withdraw in 2018 from the carefully negotiated Joint Comprehensive Plan Of Action (or JCPOA) with Iran, which was designed to limit its nuclear capabilities in return for relief from economic sanctions. The agreement had been supported by all the permanent members of the UN Security Council, as well as the European Union. But it had weak support in the U.S. Congress in large measure because of Israel’s strong opposition to it. Trump’s successor, Joe Biden, chose not to rejoin in January 2021 when he became president. As a result, Iran has been seen by both Republicans and Democrats as one of America’s primary adversaries. During her brief presidential campaign in 2024, Vice-President Kamala Harris identified Iran as America’s most dangerous enemy.

A rather different set of international issues from those he faced in 2017 has confronted Trump in his second term. The war between Russia and Ukraine has entered its third year, and Trump has signaled that he wants to bring it to an early end. His explosive meeting with Ukraine’s president Zelensky in late February 2025 indicated that he is no longer willing to pour in large amounts of military aid to Ukraine and is hoping to pass on more of the responsibility for helping Ukraine to the Europeans.  

While Trump has implied that he will quickly settle the Ukraine crisis, his dramatic encounter in the Oval Office with Ukrainian President Zelensky raised more questions about next steps than it answered.  Obviously the chemistry between the two leaders is at an all time low, and Trump appears to be signaling the possibility of ending the large amounts of military support that has been going to Kiev.  

In the Middle East, Trump has thus far shown remarkable support for Israel’s continuing campaign to crush Hamas, while keeping up some diplomatic efforts to lower the temperature in Gaza, encouraging the exchange of hostages and prisoners, but refraining from exerting any real pressure on the Israeli government. With respect to Iran, there have been mixed signals, with Trump signing on to tough sanctions while publicly expressing some ambivalence about doing so. Where he will come out on policy toward Iran remains an enigma, but he may take some cues from Saudi Arabia, the one Arab country that he seems to pay attention to. Thus far, he has given few hints of what policies he might adopt toward other regional powers such as Turkey, Egypt, and the new regime in Syria.

As for the ongoing crisis between Israel and the Palestinians, Trump has delegated the task of lowering the temperature of the conflict in Gaza and facilitating the exchange of hostages and prisoners, but has also raised widespread concerns by floating dramatic suggestions of transferring Palestinians from Gaza and radically rebuilding the area as a high-end tourist destination—just what one might expect from a real-estate magnate. Whether behind this ridiculous rhetoric there is any real intention of trying to find a viable political path to Arab-Israeli peace remains a very big unanswered question.  

In true Trump style, he has given mixed signals about Iran. On the one hand, he has maintained harsh sanctions on the country, while expressing some ambivalence about doing so. He has also enlisted his new “best buddy”, Elon Musk, to open a discreet channel of communication to the Iranians. As for the evolving crisis in Syria, Trump immediately posted his thoughts on December 7, 2024: “THIS IS NOT OUR FIGHT. LET IT PLAY OUT. DO NOT GET INVOLVED.” With more than 1000 American troops in Syria, that may be easier said than done.

Then there is the challenge of dealing with China. Many American strategic thinkers believe that China represents the major challenge to American power in the future. It has great economic strength, growing influence in many parts of the world, a powerful military—including nuclear weapons—and has, under President Xi Jinping, adopted a newly belligerent stance toward Taiwan. Trump has met with Xi on several occasions; instead of favoring diplomatic engagement with China, he seems to think that his first priority toward Beijing should be to impose tariffs on Chinese exports to the United States, an action which is as likely to harm American consumers as it is to affect China’s economy. Perhaps Trump will rethink his fondness for tariffs if he listens to Musk, who has publicly described himself as “somewhat pro-China”—no surprise, given his huge economic stake in the Chinese economy. And Trump has also given signals that he is willing to meet soon with Xi Jinping, so diplomacy is still a realistic option for his dealings with America’s most significant adversary.

Finally, Trump will have to devote some attention to European allies. Many of them are wary of his apparent skepticism about NATO and the European Union. With recent developments in the Ukraine crisis, it is increasingly possible to imagine a significant divergence between most of Europe and the United States over significant international issues, a major change in the post-world War II international system if it does take place.

All the President’s Men and Women

One of the surprises in the immediate aftermath of the election on November 5 was how swiftly Trump began to announce his choices for key positions in his cabinet and in other influential positions. The speed with which he started to assemble his government is understandable—because of the nature of the American political cycle, Trump has about two-years in which to carry out his most ambitious projects. He will have the advantage of a House and Senate under Republican control, but he must be aware that midterm elections in 2026 could change that balance significantly. And since Trump will not be able to run for a third term, by 2027 he will enter the “lame duck” phase of his presidency, a period that is rarely marked by new initiatives or major successes. In short, if Trump is to make his mark on both domestic and international affairs, he must choose his priorities carefully and move quickly.

For Secretary of State, he named Marco Rubio, a senator from Florida since 2011, with strong views on Cuba, Iran, Israel and China, but little real experience in the conduct of foreign policy. For Secretary of Defense, he selected Pete Hegseth, a TV personality with some military experience, but nothing that would suggest he will know how to manage the enormous bureaucracy of the Pentagon and its huge budget. He named Tulsi Gabbard—a former Democratic Congresswoman from Hawaii, who earned some notoriety for meeting with Syrian President Bashar al-Asad in 2017, and for sharing Trump’s interest in trying to cooperate with Russian leader Vladmir Putin—as head of National Intelligence. In addition, his Vice President, JD Vance, is apparently being given a larger role in foreign policy than one might have expected, as was demonstrated by his active participation in the humiliation of Ukraine’s president on February 28.

John Ratcliffe, a former Texas Congressman with intelligence experience, was his choice for Director of Central Intelligence. A surprise nomination for the United Nations position was Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, an ardent supporter of Israel. Other strong pro-Israel voices are Mike Huckabee, his choice to be Ambassador to Israel, a former Governor of Arkansas, and an outspoken advocate of the Greater Israel agenda. Trump also named Steve Witkoff, a businessman with close ties to Israel, as his envoy for Middle East diplomacy, and apparently a trusted envoy for other missions as well. And we can expect Trump to rely on his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to deal with the Saudis and Emiratis, and his son Donald Jr. to keep his father’s political and financial interests at the forefront of policy concerns.  

There will doubtless be other individuals who play important roles in Trump’s inner circle on foreign policy, such as Mike Waltz, a former Florida Congressman whom the president has chosen to be his National Security Adviser. Waltz is outspokenly hawkish on China, but less so on support for Ukraine. He and his National Security Council staff will have the advantage of proximity to the President, but that is no guarantee of influence. We know from Trump’s first term that he is quite ready to replace people who do not suit his idiosyncratic style. He had four different National Security Advisers in his first term, an unusually high rate of turnover.

Likely First Decisions

From the brief overview presented here, there is no certainty about the direction Trump’s foreign policy will take. But let me make a few guesses based on indicators that we already have. First, Trump will try to bring the war in Ukraine to an early end, but his dramatic clash with Ukraine’s president suggests that it will take some time to get any kind of diplomatic effort on track. What is clear from Trump’s early actions is that there will be no effort to prolong the war as a form of pressure on Russia. In fact, Trump seems to be eager to meet with President Putin in the near future and even to begin long-overdue talks on nuclear arms reductions.

A second priority will be to engage with China on a wide range of issues. Economic pressure may be one tool, but will certainly need to be reinforced by effective diplomacy. For the moment, there is no one in Trump’s entourage other than Musk who might play a role in easing tensions. But Trump is enough of a realist to see that a one-dimensional policy of economic pressure on China will not produce good results, and could also be costly to the United States. So he will, at some point, have to engage in “deal making” directly with President Xi, for whom he seems to have considerable respect as a fellow “strong” leader.

Based on much of what Trump has done and said in the past, one might expect him to adopt a very hostile position toward Iran—and that may, in fact, be what happens. But I suspect that Trump will be hearing from a number of sources, including Gulf Arab leaders, that Iran may be ready for an easing of the extremely hostile relations it has maintained with most of its neighbors in recent years. The current Iranian president has certainly been sending signals of a willingness to engage in some level of diplomatic contacts with the United States, and I would not be surprised if Trump shows some interest. This, of course, would be strongly opposed by his Israeli friends, but there has already been one meeting between Musk and Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations in mid-November 2024 that is suggestive of a mutual interest in defusing tensions.

And that leads me to my concluding comments about the U.S.-Israeli-Palestinian set of issues.  Trump has certainly established his reputation as an ardent supporter of Israel. But he also apparently wants to see an end to the high levels of violence in the Middle East. This should lead him to try to try to end the current Israeli-Palestinian hostilities and to endorse a broader diplomacy designed to reduce regional tensions. A benefit of such an approach, if successful, might be a lowering of the price of oil. Trump would be happy to take credit for such a development. But there is no indication that he has internalized the need for a sophisticated, complex, multilateral approach to finding a way to resolve the core Israeli-Palestinian issue that was the proximate cause of the October 7, 2023, explosion and its aftermath. This would require statesmanship of the type exhibited by Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Carter, Cyrus Vance, George H. W. Bush, and James Baker, to name a few. Alas, that does not seem to be in the cards, at least as far as I can read them.

Ed note

Ah — the Donald!

Traditionally, journalists, political pundits, and talk show hosts wait just over three months before issuing a report card for a president’s first 100 days in office.

Not this time.

At The Cairo Review, it’s been a mad dash to keep up with President Donald Trump’s first thirty days as he continues to make sweeping changes not only on the domestic front but in all manner of international relations. 

We give him an A—for Astounding. Here’s why.

On Day 1, Trump sent Canada and Mexico into a frenzy by vowing to slap tariffs on their exports, effectively upending trade deals which have marked North American relations for 30 years. The jury is still out on how America’s dealings with its neighbors will change. Both Canada and Mexico have promised countermeasures of their own amid “buy local” campaigns and a wave of nationalistic fervor. American businesses say they will bear the brunt of the impending trade war that Trump claims will make America great again.

Waitaminute! Didn’t mainstream U.S. media promise that Trump was a washout in 2021 when he lost to Biden?

In her brilliant exposé of how the Democrats lost the White House, Diana Carlin, a professor emerita of communication at Saint Louis University in St. Louis, Missouri and expert on political communication with an emphasis on presidential rhetoric, traces their failures back to the campaign trail and televised debates.

“Harris … failed to make the case for Biden’s economic successes. It is not something that can be explained in a 30-second ad, but it could be explained in a debate which is watched by millions. She made a strategic mistake in not directly responding to the first question [about the cost of living in America] in her single debate against Trump,” writes Carlin.

No matter how one looks at his return to the White House, Trump has proven himself a master strategist who can woo even his fiercest critics.

“The Republicans who had disavowed Trump after January 6, one by one began realigning themselves as they started to realize that there was no alternative to him,” writes Gabriele Consentino, American University in Cairo assistant professor and author of The Infodemic: Geopolitics, Disinformation, and the Covid-19 Pandemic.

“Perhaps begrudgingly, or out of calculation, they nonetheless accepted Trump was not a passing fad, or a transient anomaly, but a structural, deeply-rooted presence in the landscape of American conservative politics,” Consentino asserts.

On the same day he returned to the White House, Trump took credit for the Hamas-Israel ceasefire, which had failed to materialize for several months prior. Ironically, former U.S. President Joe Biden also took credit.

In the weeks since the first handful of Israeli hostages emerged to be repatriated in exchange for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners, Trump has several times come close to steamrolling over the ceasefire agreement he earlier took credit for. With the bluster of rapidfire ultimatums, the U.S. president shocked the world when he announced that the United States would take over Gaza and transform it into beachfront property while removing its Palestinian residents to Egypt and/or Jordan. A day later, he vowed the Palestinians wouldn’t be allowed back. The proposition was so removed from reality that even visiting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu couldn’t perform a happy dance.

“This bizarro world solution for the Middle East isn’t going to happen. There is no appetite around the globe for accepting millions of Palestinians from Gaza,” writes weekly columnist and senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington Hussein Ibish.

He says that there is no way for Jordan—even if it were willing to accept still more Palestinian refugees than those already living there—to receive hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from Gaza.

Trump’s plans for Gaza, and the Middle East, are foreboding, writes Palestine Chronicle editor and author. “If he continues down the same path—maintaining blind U.S. support for Israel, as seen under the Biden administration and its predecessors—nothing will change, in fact, things could become even worse,” Baroud says.

There’s just no way to pin Trump down to a consistent policy; he rises and falls with market indicators it seems. But one thing’s for sure—the United States, and the world for that matter, will be dramatically transformed in the next four years.

Cairo Review Co-Managing Editors,

Karim Haggag

Firas Al-Atraqchi

On January 20, 2025, Donald J. Trump became the second U.S. President to serve two non-consecutive terms by defeating incumbent Vice-President Kamala Harris. The first, Grover Cleveland, defeated incumbent Benjamin Harrison; Harrison denied Cleveland a second consecutive term in the prior election. Like Cleveland in 1888 and 1892, the issue of tariffs was a large part of Trump’s campaign rhetoric. Cleveland lost a second consecutive term in 1888 by supporting lower tariffs to protect consumers, and returned to the White House in 1893 as a result of the impact of his predecessor’s reliance on tariffs that resulted in labor strikes and increased consumer costs. Unlike Cleveland, Donald Trump campaigned in 2024 on raising tariffs. They are but one issue from the 2024 campaign that will impact how well he delivers on his many election promises, some of which will have global implications. 

Projections about the second Trump administration and its challenges require an understanding of the campaign dynamics that returned him to office. A historic reality is that candidates who campaign largely on domestic and economic issues ultimately have to deal with international crises that can be their undoing. Trump is not eligible for a third term due to the 22nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that states, “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice”; thus, he does not have to worry about reelection if he fails to deliver. However, he could suffer losses in the midterm elections in 2026 and lose his already razor thin majorities in one or both houses of Congress (the House has a five-vote Republican majority, and the Senate majority is by six), this could damage Republican hopes to maintain the White House.    

What Produced a Trump Return?

The seeds for Trump’s 2024 victory were sown when President Joe Biden decided to run for re-election in spite of the fact that he would be 86 at the end of that term. Biden had not explicitly stated that he would serve one term, but there was speculation that he would due to his age. Many saw a statement in a March 2020 speech as an indication that he would be a transitional president: “Look, I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else. There’s an entire generation of leaders you saw stand behind me. They are the future of this country”. 

As the 2024 election drew closer there was concern that Biden was not fit for a second term due to frequent misstatements and confusion. His 2024 State of the Union Address allayed some of these concerns with sixty-two percent of viewers indicating that his policies would move the country in the “right direction” and he was seen as having “performed well and put up a strong fight”. Trump, who ignored the primary debates and largely campaigned against Biden rather than his Republican opponents, used similar tactics to those in 2020 when he called Biden “sleepy Joe” and questioned his mental acuity. Trump’s relentless attacks on Biden and his penchant for using “alternative facts,” chipped away at confidence in Biden. 

The June 27, 2024 debate between Trump and Biden raised, among the Democratic leadership, concerns about Biden’s fitness to run and serve four more years. It took Biden nearly a month to withdraw and endorse Harris as a way to unify the party and avoid a hurried competition for the nomination before the Democratic National Convention. 

Harris quickly pivoted to the top of the ticket, selected her running mate Minnesota Governor Tim Walz—a folksy former high school football coach and former member of Congress, oversaw a successful convention, and hit the campaign trail nonstop until election day. Technically, Harris ran a good campaign, but her message did not resonate with many of Biden’s 2020 supporters. Harris had seven million fewer votes than Biden in 2020, and she lost ground with key constituent groups such as Black men, Latinos, Arab Americans, young voters, and suburban voters especially in battleground states. 

Harris’ campaign messaging missed the mark in understanding that it “was the economy, stupid” that was the primary issue for many of the voters she lost. In fact, the economy was by far the most pressing issue for voters in every poll taken before and after the election with as many as ninety percent rating it as extremely or very important in a Gallup poll. She did not sufficiently address the concerns that many Americans had over the cost of groceries, gasoline, and housing, and that some causes of inflation were long-term pandemic effects which Biden mitigated. The Biden economy was strong on most indicators and inflation was going down, but record stock markets don’t help the average worker, and low unemployment does not mean a living wage for many who are employed. Exit polls showed that “Some two-thirds (sixty-seven percent) of voters said the condition of the economy was “not good/poor”, and only thirty-two percent thought the economy was “excellent/good”. The media acknowledged, in the final days of the Biden administration, that they did not give his economy the credit it deserved, leading to the perception that things were worse than they were. The Washington Post headline on January 9, 2025, read: “Surprise! The Media Just Discovered that Bidenomics Works. Trump is getting a strong economy. If only the media had explained the Biden economic achievements” . 

Harris, however, needed to, but failed to make the case for Biden’s economic successes. It is not something that can be explained in a 30-second ad, but it could be explained in a debate that is watched by millions. In her only debate against Trump, she made a strategic mistake of not directly responding to the first question. Moderator David Muir asked: “I want to begin tonight with the issue voters repeatedly say is their number one issue, and that is the economy and the cost of living in this country. . . . When it comes to the economy, do you believe Americans are better off than they were four years ago?” Harris directly ignored the question and launched into her background and “opportunity economy”, with only a passing comment about the cost of housing and goods for young families. She did not explain, for example, acknowledge that a major cause of the high price of eggs—avian flu—is out of the president’s control, or that four years ago there was an expanded Child Tax Credit and Economic Impact Payments to a large number of households that disappeared after the pandemic waned. Biden’s American Rescue Plan helped families in 2021, reduced the length of the recession, and lowered unemployment. 

Most importantly, Harris did not show empathy for those who have not recovered from the pandemic or struggled before it happened. She needed to start her response with an acknowledgement of voters’ pain rather than with her own story. In reflecting on the election on “Meet the Press” on January 7, 2025, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer admitted that Democrats up and down the ticket did not discuss the economy in ways that appealed to voters: “But all too often . . . we talked about the mechanics of the legislation and the details of the legislation and we really didn’t show the kind of empathy and concern . . . to average working families who didn’t realize how much we had done and how much we care for them”. 

Throughout the campaign, the achievements of the Biden administration and Congress were not sufficiently emphasized, nor were the factors beyond the president’s control highlighted. Democrats have played identity politics in the past few elections, and they often appear to be a party of the elite. Hillary Clinton’s 2016 description of half of Trump’s supporters as a “basket of deplorables” did not help the image. While she went on to say that the other half “feel that the government has let them down” and are “desperate for change … Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well”, she didn’t connect with them and neither did Harris. Biden was more relatable with his blue-collar background and labor advocacy but that relationship was lost in 2024.

Harris also overplayed the abortion card because ten states had amendments or referenda related to the issue, and she expected it to boost women’s turnout. Her strategists wrongly believed that those who supported abortion rights would also support her campaign. That was not the case and should have been obvious from previous votes on the issue such as in Kansas, a red state, that defeated an anti-abortion amendment by 18 points in 2022 during a primary election in which voters without a declared party could vote on the amendment alone. In many of the states where pro-choice measures passed such as Missouri, Nevada, Montana, and Arizona, Trump won. It was possible for voters to protect abortion rights and vote for the man who said he would lower their cost of living. During the final days of the campaign, Harris sent her husband to Florida—a state she was unlikely to carry—to campaign on their proposed abortion rights amendment rather than to a swing state to talk about the economy.  

Harris had other crucial factors working against her, too. Biden put her in charge of the border—a key issue with seventy-two percent of voters listing it as extremely or very important in the Gallup poll. This was a no-win situation for Harris. Biden relied on Congress to fix the border and immigration issues, but they didn’t. In 2024, a bipartisan bill was defeated when Trump instructed Republicans to vote against it so that he would have a voting issue at the polls. If Biden had issued his Executive Order tightening the border earlier than June 4, 2024, some of Trump’s arguments against Harris’ failures would have been mitigated. Harris also suffered from the fate of most sitting vice-presidents in American history who made a run for the presidency—they can’t escape a president’s negatives. When George H.W. Bush went from second in command directly to the presidency in 1987, he was the first sitting vice-president since Martin Van Buren in 1837 to do so. Harris lost votes among Arab and Muslim Americans as a result of the war in Gaza, especially in the key state of Michigan, where some turned to Trump and others to third party candidates. The war in Gaza alienated many younger voters as was witnessed by campus protests. While foreign policy, which included the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, was ranked highly by only four percent of voters in exit polls, it impacted results for specific groups who made a difference in states such as Michigan. 

Harris also faced misogyny. Some Americans were simply not ready for a woman candidate and Donald Trump worked especially hard to turn out the male vote. The misogyny factor also played out in the desire for many who supported Trump to look for a leader who would fight for them. Trump’s personal attacks on Harris called into question her intelligence, competence, and work ethic. He called her “the worst”, “slow”, and described her as having “low IQ” and “lazy as hell”; he criticized her for her failures on the border and in foreign affairs. Trump contrasted himself as a fighter and frequently described himself as “the only one” who can accomplish something. His raised hand and defiant pose after escaping an assassination attempt created an iconic image of a fearless man who doesn’t give up. 

Rhetorically, Trump is an anomaly in American politics. He is caught in frequent lies including over thirty in each of his two debates in 2024 and plays into fears that are often baseless (crime, for example, is down and is not fueled by the presence of undocumented immigrants; immigrants did not eat cats and dogs or destroy apartment complexes; and the economy was not worse than it was when he left office). He was sentenced on January 10, 2025, on thirty-four felony counts—the only convicted felon to sit in the White House—but he talks about law and order. He insults opponents and heads of state or entire countries and admires strongmen and dictators but says he can better negotiate to protect the country. He uses race-based attacks on immigrants but gets votes from minorities and the Latino community. He has experienced numerous bankruptcies and business failures but is seen as a brilliant businessman who can improve the economy. His rhetoric divides the country while uniting his supporters through the age-old tactic of creating an enemy (in this case, immigrants) whom he blames for the U.S. ‘s problems, and then offers himself as the solution by executing deportations. He is seen as a counter to “politics as usual”, and that is an accurate assessment. The test for the next four years is if that approach can produce the results he promised.

Can Trump Deliver on his Promises?

Trump’s rhetoric is full of hyperbole and bombast but also promises. Many of them were promised to occur on “Day 1” or even before the inauguration. In August 2024, PBS News (U.S. Public Broadcasting System) listed 24 consistent promises—some of which were made in the first term as well but were not entirely achieved. As with most presidential elections occurring after the fall of the Soviet Union, with the exception of 2004, platforms rely heavily on domestic issues because most Americans only focus on their own lives and lack a solid understanding of the interplay between domestic and foreign policy or the interrelationship of nations. 

Whether Trump can deliver on his promises in the long term depends on two major factors: how global events impact the U.S. and whether he can maintain control of Congress for four years. The former requires no more Russian-type invasions or Gazas to distract him from a domestic agenda, and the latter is partially dependent on whether he resolves the pocketbook issues of interest rates and housing, rent, grocery, and gasoline prices. If he doesn’t deliver on the issues that affect his base, his slim majorities will be threatened; all of the rhetoric in the world cannot salvage an angry Republican electorate that either turns on Republican incumbents or stays home as the Trump administration heads into its final two lame-duck years. 

Rather than examine all twenty-four promises, the major ones are considered. They fall into four categories: economics, immigration and the border, crime and safety, and global issues of war and peace. 

The economy was the top issue on voters’ minds with eighty-one percent listing it as very important in their vote according to the Pew Research Center. As mentioned earlier, the Biden economy, in terms of major indicators, was— and remains—in good shape, with inflation cooling to 2.4 percent at election time, although it had been 1.4 percent when Trump left office. The average between the two elections was 5.8 percent, largely fueled by pandemic relief and pandemic shortages that started under Trump. Gasoline prices had fallen by 8.1 percent at election time. However, Trump claimed in his debate with Harris that “We have inflation like very few people have ever seen before. Probably the worst in our nation’s history. We were at twenty-one percent. But that’s being generous because many things are fifty, sixty, seventy, and eighty percent higher than they were just a few years ago”. In actuality, the worst was 23.7 percent in 1920, and it was worse in the 1970s and 1980s than now. Trump may see the inflation rate go down slightly, but external factors affecting the price of eggs or gasoline are largely out of the control of a president, and if he implements tariffs as promised, the cost will be borne by consumers on a wide range of products. Canada prepared a list of possible retaliatory tariffs if Trump still goes ahead and implements the twenty-five percent tariffs on Canadian goods. Some prices in the United States may stabilize, but it is unlikely there will be widespread drops. In fact, many may go up if farm labor is affected by deportations along with tariffs. If inflation declines, Trump may compare the new rate to the mythical rates from the debates through alternative facts. However, he will only convince his followers of his success if their grocery bills and gas prices actually decline. 

Trump promised that on Day One he would “begin the largest deportation operation in American history” and “will terminate every single open border policy of the Biden-Harris administration, and we will seal the border”. There is no doubt that he is currently doing everything he can to fulfill this promise. In fact, Congress is already assisting him despite bipartisan votes on the Laken Riley Act that would detain undocumented immigrants who commit theft as a way of preventing worse crimes. The crime wave that this legislation is meant to prevent is virtually non-existent as undocumented individuals commit crimes at lower rates than citizens, including violent crimes. An analysis of the Act by immigration experts points out unintended consequences that could result in Dreamers, who are currently protected, and legal individuals being erroneously accused and deported. The act is likely to have little impact on crime rates which have dropped for two consecutive years. 

The number of undocumented people in the United States is uncertain but was estimated to be about 10.5 million in 2021; Trump has been promising to deport 15-20 million. It is doubtful that he will reach numbers anywhere close to that, and if he does, he will devastate industries such as agriculture, meat packing, and construction. Midwestern states such as Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa depend on immigrant workers for meat packing plants and one Kansas news service reported that “[m]ass deportations would endanger Kansas’ meat economy: ‘It would be a ghost town’”. Multiple news outlets warn that mass deportations will create a “hole in the labor force,” leading to lost services and higher prices, thus negating one of Trump’s main economic promises and forcing his rhetoric to face reality.

Trump wants to cut government spending to reduce the deficit, but he is on record as saying that he would do whatever it takes to fund up to 100,000 new prison beds and other costs of deportation. Deportation is an example of the interplay between domestic and foreign policy as countries on or near the U.S. border are reacting to Trump’s sending millions their way. For example, President Xiomara Castro of Honduras threatened that a U.S. military base in her country could “lose all reason to exist” and result in “a change in our policies with the U.S.”.

On the issue of crime and safety, Trump will not reduce crime in a significant way with deportations of undocumented immigrants or even those who are here legally but could be deported if they engage in criminal activity. If Americans have a fear regarding their safety, it is gun violence, and one of Trump’s promises as outlined by PBS was protecting Second Amendment rights. In other words, do not expect mass shootings to decline or for Americans’ fears about their children’s safety to be relieved. 

When it comes to war and peace, Trump claimed in the debate with Harris that neither the invasion of Ukraine or Hamas’ attack on Israel would have occurred if he had remained president. He also promised in regard to Gaza that, “I will get that settled and fast. And I’ll get the war with Ukraine and Russia ended. If I’m President-Elect, I’ll get it done before even becoming president.to end both wars expeditiously and even possibly before January 20.” The Gaza ceasefire was announced before the inauguration but it was the result of negotiations started by the U.S. months before Trump’s team joined the discussions. Both Trump and Biden are taking credit. 

Instead of addressing  those two fronts publicly before the ceasefire announcements, Trump’s major foreign policy focus was on taking over Greenland, the Panama Canal, and considering Canada as a 51st state. The last was assumed to be added for humor, although Canadians do not seem to have taken it that way; however, Trump declared in his announcement of tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China that without the trade surplus with the U.S., “Canada ceases to exist as a viable country [and] should become our cherished 51st state.” 

He is serious about the other two. He sent Donald Trump, Jr. to Greenland before the inauguration to test the waters and threatened to use force to retake the Canal. In his first two weeks in office, however, Trump has refocused his policies on Gaza suggesting that Egypt, Jordan and other Arab countries take in the Palestinians, the U.S. take over the Gaza strip, and Palestinians and be displaced en masse. The suggestion was roundly rejected in a statement by “top diplomats from Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, as well as Hussein al-Sheikh, a senior Palestinian official who serves as the main liaison with Israel, and Arab League chief Ahmed Aboul Gheit.” The diplomats noted that Trump’s plan had potential to further destabilize the region. 

There is legitimate concern among European allies that the aid the Biden administration sent to Ukraine will end and “that Trump may try to reverse his predecessor’s decisions [on Russian sanctions] simply because they were made by Biden, without much thought to the consequences of such steps for European allies”. Despite Trump’s claims that he can end the conflict in Gaza suggesting that both sides are ready for him to broker a deal, the Palestinian Authority is said to have “fears that US President-elect Donald Trump is amenable to sidelining the PA’s current leaders in a future post-war Gaza Strip in favour of the United Arab Emirates and its Palestinian allies” which have “led the PA to launch a bigger raid on the city of Jenin as opposed to a smaller operation in the Tulkarm refugee camp”. Because of Trump’s known unpredictability and volatility, the world is watching his every move and anticipating worse case scenarios. 

Trump’s popularity is based in part on his unorthodox approach to politics, especially his use of threats as a negotiating tool. The anti-government sentiment that has grown in the United States over the past several decades of gridlock and division in Congress also fueled his rise. People want to believe that Donald Trump can “drain the swamp” and put the average person at the center of his policy decisions. His rhetoric makes them true believers, but the test of his ultimate popularity with the MAGA constituency largely depends on what he can do to improve their daily lives, and the realities explained here could make that difficult if not impossible to accomplish.

Unlike typical incoming U.S. presidents, whose policy stances are usually built over decades and slow to change, Trump’s approach to the Middle East, and Palestine in particular, seems constantly in flux. He is returning to office after a significant hiatus and much about him and his administration is already known. Trump’s new team promises to be an amalgamation of war-hungry hawks, Christian fundamentalists, and political isolationists. Add to this Trump’s own unique style of unpredictable, off-the-cuff statements that occasionally contradict the declared platform of his administration and his own previous statements. His first-term policies contributed to regional tensions and outright conflict, and continuing these strategies could significantly impact the future of the Palestinian people, who remain resilient in shaping their own destiny despite these challenges.

The Unpredictability of Trump’s Approach to Palestine

It is difficult to predict with certainty the future Middle East policies of a Trump administration given the inconsistency that has characterized his political style—Palestine being a case in point. For example, Trump offered his take on the Arab-Israeli conflict on February 17, 2016, by stating, “Let me be sort of a neutral guy,” a position rarely presented by a mainstream U.S. politician on the issue. During that speech, he talked about his desire to support Israel but hardly with the same enthusiasm as the likes of Joe Biden. “I don’t want to say whose fault it is. I don’t think that helps. And I don’t want to get into it too much. But I will tell you this: If I’m elected president, I will be very, very good for Israel,” Trump stated. 

His noncommittal remarks became a source of concern for the pro-Israeli lobby, namely the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), promoting this style of media headline prior to their annual policy conference the following months: “Pro-Israel policy conference nervously awaits Trump speech”.

These concerns, however, proved to be unfounded, as Trump discovered that blind support for Israel was the safest political bet for his administration upon taking office in 2017—a practice long embraced by virtually all U.S. presidents since the establishment of Israel in 1948.

Indeed, Trump proved to be one of the most generous and supportive U.S. presidents toward Israel, even compared to George W. Bush’s unwavering support during the Second Palestinian Intifada and Barack Obama’s unprecedented generosity through the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding Between the United States and Israel on Security Assistance.

While former U.S. President Joe Biden solidified his position as one of the most pro-Israeli presidents in American history—funding, defending, and sustaining an unprecedented Israeli assault and subsequent genocide on Gaza—the preceding policies of Trump partly contributed to the turmoil leading to the Gaza war. By normalizing the Israeli occupation, legalizing settlements, moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, legalizing Israel’s illegal occupation of the Golan Heights, and more, Trump forced Palestinians into an untenable position.

In one of many insults directed at Palestinians, who were wholly excluded from Trump’s so-called “Deal of the Century” in 2020, Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, went so far as to describe Palestinians as “hysterical and stupid”. The subsequent events and the outcomes of the Israeli war on Gaza have hardly validated Kushner’s claims. It has become clear that Palestinians are essential to any political process in the Middle East—arguably, they are the most central players in the equation.

Kushner appeared several times during the Israeli offensive only to make infuriating statements before disappearing once again. This included his remarks in a discussion on the YouTube channel of the Middle East Initiative, a program of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where he stated that Gaza’s “waterfront property” is very valuable and suggested that Israel should expel civilians while it “cleans up” the Strip. Will Kushner’s thinking, or ideas similar to it, once again shape the Trump administration’s approach to Palestine?

Will Trump’s Policies Shift in a Second Term?

If Trump builds on the legacy of his first term—such as pushing for further normalization between Israel and Arab states without addressing the basic aspirations of the Palestinian people—Palestine is likely to erupt in conflict once again. If he continues down the same path—maintaining blind U.S. support for Israel, as seen under the Biden administration and its predecessors—nothing will change, in fact, things could become even worse. 

U.S. foreign policymakers must recognize that the region has reached a breaking point and they are left with little room to maneuver if they continue       supporting Israel unconditionally. The entire region teeters on the brink of outright war. Applying Trump’s “maximum pressure” approach to a landscape already stretched beyond its capacity will only exacerbate tensions, potentially inviting a wider conflict. If Trump is truly serious about preventing World War III, as he has claimed, he must adopt a more balanced stance and immediately decouple U.S. interests from those of Israel.

But is Trump capable of exerting such pressure and will an administration filled with pro-Israeli figures allow Trump to stray far from the established paradigm?

The Key Players in Trump’s Administration

The Trump administration is set to include some of the most hawkish figures in U.S. foreign policy, many of whom hold an affinity for Israel and, in some cases, exhibit Islamophobic views grounded in deeply entrenched religious ideologies. The United Nations ambassador will be Elise Stefanik, who has reportedly received nearly one million dollars from pro-Israel lobby groups and stated that pro-Palestinian slogans, such as “from the river to the sea”, are equivalent to “advocating for the murder of Jews”. Christian Zionist Mike Huckabee, who refuses to use the words “West Bank” and calls the occupied territory “Judea and Samaria,” was Trump’s choice as ambassador to Israel.

Meanwhile, Congress, wary of a new Middle Eastern war that may embroil the United States, has worked to dissuade the administration from igniting yet another war front. The lack of enthusiasm in Trump’s first term in office to follow Israel’s keen interest in a U.S.-Iranian war was summed up by Branko Marcetic, writing in Jacobin Magazine on Oct 17, 2024. Marcetic compared the political sentiment in the U.S. during Trump’s administration to that of the four years that followed:

“Under Donald Trump, Congress moved swiftly to block a president from starting a war with Iran. As Joe Biden allows the country to be dragged into such a war, criticism is nearly nonexistent.”

This claim was demonstrated two months later when Trump, though indirectly, railed against Netanyahu by posting a clip to Truth Social featuring economist Jeffrey Sachs, who accused the Israeli prime minister of manipulating American foreign policy and orchestrating “endless wars” in the Middle East. Other instances of the separation between Trump and Israel include a recent meeting with an anti-Zionist rabbi, Aaron Teitelbaum, in the White House in recognition of his support during the election.

On the one hand, these events can be interpreted as typical contradictions or opportunism on Trump’s part. Yet, they could also be seen as coded messages that Trump is indeed serious about crafting a foreign policy in the Middle East that caters to the interests of the U.S. interests, not Israel. Whether Trump can or will create this distance remains to be seen, though the legacy of his first term offers little reassurance.

The Problem with U.S. Foreign Policy in Palestine

The historic problem with U.S. foreign policy toward Palestine lies in the principle that what is good for Israel is good for America. There is some truth to this claim, as both countries share a history of violent founding on the ruins of indigenous populations who were either completely exterminated or nearly extinguished through religious and biblical discourse. Israel’s claim to “chosenness” and the U.S. idea of “manifest destiny” allowed both nations to eliminate any obstacle in their path, including, in both cases, the “demographic threat” posed by indigenous populations.

While America continues to grapple with the legacy of its violent founding—expressed through racism, violence, and the marginalization of certain groups—Israel remains in a perpetual stage of settler-colonialism, having repeatedly attempted to ethnically cleanse Palestinians. This includes      the Nakba of 1948, the Naksa of 1967, and an ongoing process which      Israeli historian Ilan Pappé refers to as incremental genocide. In the most recent war on Gaza, Israel has used a combination of ethnic cleansing and genocidal tactics, accompanied by violent rhetoric from Israeli ministers openly calling for the annihilation of Gaza.

While the United States has supposedly come to terms with its violent and racist past, due in part to the struggles and successes of minority groups, it continues to support Israel’s attempt to erase Palestinians—physically in Gaza, and culturally and linguistically elsewhere. Washington does so in the name of the so-called “unbreakable bond” that unites it with Israel. Not only does it fully back, finance, and sustain the Israeli occupation of Palestine, but it also prevents the international community from taking any measures to end the occupation or hold Israel accountable.

It is unlikely that the United States under Trump will take responsibility for its shameful legacy—particularly regarding the Gaza genocide, which may be remembered as one of the most disgraceful episodes in U.S. foreign policy. With Trump’s pro-Israel legacy and conflicting signals, expectations of a real and lasting change in U.S. policy toward Palestine, Israel, and the Middle East should remain modest at best.

Trump has already proven that any hope that he will create lasting positive change should be heavily restrained through his strange and chaotic statements regarding his intention to “take ownership” of Gaza. While his administration’s top officials have scrambled to lessen the impact of his claim, he has insisted on doubling down on his stance. Meanwhile, Arab diplomacy has been galvanized in full and utter rejection in any attempt to ethnically cleanse Gaza. In one of several statements issued by Egypt, for example, echoing equally strong messages sent by Saudi Arabia and others, Cairo insisted on the “full Arab consensus” on rejecting the displacement of Palestinians from their land. 

Despite this most recent debacle, one can still hope that at least a process of slowly delinking U.S. interests from the extremist policies of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government could take shape, especially if Trump realizes that Netanyahu’s militaristic goals are aimed at involving the U.S. in Israel’s wars—particularly against Iran.

Conclusion: The Future of U.S. Policy on Palestine

The early Israeli euphoria after the U.S. election, exemplified by Israeli news anchors drinking champagne on air to celebrate Trump’s win, has gradually dissipated in the weeks that followed. This may partly be due to the reportedly stern message conveyed by Trump’s envoy to Israel, Steve Witkoff, that the war on Gaza must end before Trump’s arrival to the White House. And indeed, the war ended, or more accurately, a ceasefire has begun in stages, with the first stage commencing on January 19. Despite last-minute haggling by Netanyahu, he finally agreed, though some ministers in his government rejected the deal outright. Among them were National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, whose party, Otzma Yehudit, quit the coalition altogether on that very same day, and equally hardline Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who voted against the ceasefire but remained in the government, insisting that Israel must return to war on Gaza and must not honor the second phase of the agreement.

Whether the Trump administration would allow Israel to resume its devastating war on the Strip remains to be seen, with the contradictions of Trump complicating matters. Though Trump continued to take credit for supposedly ending the war, he has also doubled down on his intent to displace the Palestinians in Gaza, as discussed above. Trump went as far as reading from prepared remarks during a joint press conference with Netanyahu at the White House on February 4. “The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do a job with it too,” he said.

Still, Trump is unlikely to support Israel’s return to war, a claim that could simply be explained by the fact that U.S. presidents typically do not like to inherit the wars of previous administrations—much like Obama’s withdrawal from Iraq in 2011, which he described as “wars of choice”. Thus, Trump’s position on the Gaza war does not necessarily signal a fundamental shift in U.S. foreign policy. More time is needed to determine the U.S. stance on Israel and Palestine during Trump’s second term.

However, judging by the fact that Israel has failed to achieve any of its goals in Gaza, despite total and unhindered U.S. and Western support for Tel Aviv, other factors must be considered regarding the future of Palestine. The resilience of the Palestinian people, which has proven unbreakable despite unprecedented levels of U.S., Western, and Israeli arms, is a crucial variable that Washington must take into account. The peoples of the region are not puppets to be controlled from afar—they are agents capable of shaping political realities against seemingly impossible odds.

In the early 1970s, at the beginning of his career as a real estate developer, working alongside his father Fred, Donald Trump already demonstrated the penchant for bending reality to impose his preferred narrative, a trait that would become the defining feature of his political persona. Faced with a lawsuit by the Justice Department for allegedly discriminating against African Americans applying for housing in the Trump company’s real estate projects, he hired notorious New York lawyer Roy Cohn, former aide of Joseph McCarthy in the “red scare” era and legal advisor to prominent bosses of organized crime. Cohn, who was to become his mentor for over a decade, advised Trump to deny all the allegations and to countersue, accusing the Justice Department of defamation. It was a brazen strategy: not only did the Trump organization not discriminate, the counterlawsuit argued, but the company’s reputation had been unjustly tarnished. The Trump company eventually settled, but never admitted to any bias against black applicants, despite the trove of evidence to the contrary collected by the prosecutors. Trump claimed victory, and walked away with some of the most important of Cohn’s advice: never apologize, always attack, and use the media to project a successful image. 

By the early 2010s, Cohn’s advice had helped Trump survive through four decades marked by great achievements and spectacular downfalls, by global expansions and bankruptcies, by legal disputes and sexual scandals. These were the hallmarks of a tumultuous business career and personal journey, one that landed him on the cover of tabloid magazines and on millions of TV screens as the host of the reality tv show “The Apprentice”. It was around that time that Trump found the perfect platform to impose his vision on millions of Americans: social media. On Twitter, Trump reinvented himself once more, and found an ideal outlet to stay in the public eye and to allow his erratic personality to connect with the most volatile segments of the American public opinion. Only this time the stakes were higher: Trump was not anymore the billionaire playboy, the maverick businessman or the savvy entertainer, willing to forego marital fidelity, to skirt the law and host a T.V. show to salvage his finances. In an era of widespread public unrest that was triggered by the 2008 financial crisis, Trump gradually started to position himself as the bellicose champion of voters disaffected with the political establishment, unafraid of picking quarrels and of hurling insults at politicians or celebrities, of once again breaking the rules and bending reality to suit his ambition. In the matter of a few years, with the help of Twitter, Trump styled himself as the perfect demagogue for the social media era, and as the most audacious exploiter of the populist sentiment sweeping across most Western democracies.

Shift in Mediated Politics

Political discourse in the 2010s was also changing around what was going to become a recurring element of current political conversations: conspiracy theories. Trump was quick at recognizing this cultural and political trend, and tapped into the growing paranoid attitude of Americans to advance his political agenda, increasingly defined by a willingness to upend the political consensus and break with norms, protocols and sensitivities. The opportunity came in the form of the so-called “birther” conspiracy, alleging that then U.S. President Barack Obama—the first African American to serve as president—was not born on American soil and thus didn’t meet the requirements to sit in the Oval Office. It was, of course, an obvious lie that had emerged from the fringes of Twitter and other social media, carrying not-so-subtle racist undertones. It eventually died out despite the vocal championing by Trump, who had frequently amplified it via his account. The conspiracy theory, however, persisted in the news cycle long enough to pressure Obama to show his birth certificate in order to settle the matter once and for all. Reality didn’t bend at Trump’s will, just as it didn’t when he sued the Justice Department four decades prior, but circulating a conspiracy theory had forced a sitting president to publicly address it, thus somehow making it sound less outlandish. Joining the “birthers” had also helped raise Trump’s political profile among far-right and nationalist circles, giving him enough of a popularity boost to convince him that he was on the right track. People were indeed eager for someone that, at least rhetorically, would take their side and act as a raucous and reckless mouthpiece for their disaffection with politics as usual, for the constraints of political correctness, and for the dogmas of neoliberal globalist economy.

Trump’s now famous descent from the golden escalator in the Trump Tower, when he announced his intention to run for president in the 2016 election, officially marked the opening of a phase of dramatic changes in politics and political communications, labeled by some scholars and commentators as the “post-truth era”. While theoretically a bit fuzzy, post-truth is nonetheless a useful catch-all concept to identify a cultural and political context in which emotional appeals and personal opinions have a greater influence in shaping public opinion than objective facts. Trump embodied the post-truth ethos when in his speech railed against “Mexico sending people with lots of problems” and “rapists” to the United States, effectively conjuring up a distorted version of reality that captured the imagination of millions of Americans. The actual data about immigration of course paint a completely different picture: migrants are less likely to engage in criminal activities than native U.S. citizens, crime rates in the United States dropped while immigration was on the rise, and migrants have an overall beneficial effect on the American economy. However, in the post-truth era—a complex phenomenon related to a plurality of cultural, political and economic factors, compounded by the communicative logics of social media—facts and data don’t hold much sway. Emotional storytelling, sensational stories, lurid details, no matter if fabricated, fare much better. 

When Trump was elected president in 2016, his casual relation with facts and his endorsement of conspiracy theories was perceived as an aberration of the established norms of public discourse. Post-truth was considered a temporary epistemological crisis that could be remedied by promoting media literacy, investing in fact-checking initiatives and enforcing stricter regulations on social media platforms. At best, the political and cultural establishment in the United States and Europe accepted Trump’s brand of populism as a sort of necessary warning signal needed to fix some parts of the liberal democracy apparatus that had been left a bit loose, especially with respect to the impact of technology on society and politics. Indeed, technology companies started to face more scrutiny after 2016, and responded with implementing more robust content moderation and fact-checking of their content. The widespread consensus at the time was that Trump represented a passing ailment, a short-lived intrusion into the otherwise healthy body of American institutions. This perception of Trump as an interference was reinforced by the discovery that hostile State actors, such as Putin’s Russia, had weaponized American social media in an effort to alter the electoral process, to further polarize American society and to amplify the most radical voices, above all that of Trump himself.

The Rhetoric of Division

Studies and publications emerging during the first Trump campaign and presidency mostly focused on his divisive rhetoric, on his unpredictable and aggressive personality, on his unorthodox approach to politics and government, and on the forms and formats that he had imported into the political arena from his previous experience as a businessman and reality tv personality. Aside from his circles of fervent supporters, Trump was seen as little more than a snake oil salesman that had bluffed and blustered his way into the most powerful position of power in the world. Reality, the assumption went, was eventually going to catch up with him and expose him as an utter fraud. And it did, at least at first. Most of his campaign promises from 2016 – above all, the border wall that Mexico was going to pay for – never materialized. The so-called “Muslim Ban” and the Zero Tolerance Policy on immigration proved to be either too poorly conceived or too controversial to be implemented in their original form. Prominent newspapers such as The New York Times routinely debunked misinformation and disinformation pushed by Trump, exposing his lies and empty rhetoric. And when the Covid-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, Trump and his administration were found grossly unprepared. Trump underestimated the threat posed by new disease, and even promoted controversial or hazardous remedies, such as injecting disinfectant. It was most likely the mishandling of the pandemic—with its enormous human and economic toll on American society—that cost Trump the presidency in 2020. When he refused to concede and instead mounted a legal and political challenge against the outcome of the election, it seemed that Trump had become irreversibly separated from reality. His final, desperate attempt to bend it in his favor by spinning the “Stop the steal” disinformation campaign and inciting supporters to storm Capitol Hill on January 6th 2021, was widely considered as the last chapter of his political career.

A common criticism about Trump is the notion that he is thin-skinned and can’t handle disappointments. While it is true that he is easily offended and doesn’t respond well to criticism, Trump has demonstrated throughout his career an uncanny ability to bounce back from failures, to fight against overwhelming odds and to perform near seamless shape shifting from one embodiment to another: businessman, media personality, politician. Trump has internalized the lessons of his most influential mentors and associates: his father, who taught him how to survive in the cut-throat, zero-sum-game world of New York real estate, the already mentioned Roy Cohn, and Roger Stone, a ruthless Republican political operative and lobbyist, who was the first to suggest to Trump the idea to run for president, already in the late 1990s. Most of all, Trump is someone that, by his own admission, thrives in chaotic and volatile contexts, and who once said: “When bad times come, I can get whatever I want.” And no period of his long career has been worse for Trump than the past four years, except maybe the early 90s, when several business failures had left him “poorer than a homeless man”, as he confessed to his daughter Ivanka. In the years after the tragic events of January 6 2021, Trump was embroiled in several investigations, and was regarded by many, including in his own Republican party, as a political pariah, someone who had committed the capital sin of attacking the very foundations of American democracy. Trump was done.

A Party Transformed

And yet, he was not done. By the time the 2024 election cycle came around, it gradually became apparent that Trump had irreversibly altered the Republican party around his own image. The MAGA movement—the embittered, loyal and almost messianic base of Trump supporters—had become the real core of the GOP, sidelining more moderate politicians and voters. The Republicans who had disavowed Trump after January 6, one by one began realigning themselves as they started to realize that there was no alternative to him. Perhaps begrudgingly, or out of calculation, they nonetheless accepted Trump was not a passing fad, or a transient anomaly, but a structural, deeply-rooted presence in the landscape of American conservative politics. The pinnacle of this process was one of the most egregious examples of reality bending that Trump has conducted in his political career: the rewriting of January 6th from a seditious attempt by dangerous extremists at subverting the democratic process, to a legitimate act of resistance by true patriots against a conspiracy concocted by the ‘deep state’ to steal the election from him. January 6th had been “a day of love”, as Trump claimed on several occasions. A conspiracy theory wasn’t just accepted as the basis for violent political action, it was sublimated to a morally pure and noble sentiment. The bending of reality was nearly complete.

To finish the staggering transformation of American politics and society around his own cynical and self-centered vision that he had started in 2015, Trump had to enlist the most powerful propaganda machine ever invented: social media. The technology that had jump-started his political career a decade before –  and that almost derailed it after 2016 when technology executives reluctantly responded to government pressure to moderate users and verify content – had to be tamed and brought into the fold. To complete this process Trump found an unexpected ally in Elon Musk, a visionary billionaire attuned to the same political vision: socially and fiscally conservative, anti-immigration, ethno-nationalist and fundamentally anti-democratic.

Musk had charted his own path from business to politics, similar to that of Trump, over the course of the past four years, as Trump was waiting for his moment to step back in the limelight after the 2020 debacle. Musk, also an avid and savvy Twitter user, and a self-proclaimed free speech absolutist, had signaled repeatedly his antipathy towards content moderation on social media, and promised to allow back Trump—together with other controversial figures that had been deplatformed from Twitter—once he had completed the acquisition of the platform. Musk eventually bought Twitter in late 2022, rebranding it to X and implementing drastic changes to the content moderation policies, while also taking a much more active political stance in support of far-right politics. The trajectories of the two men, who also share similar egomaniac tendencies and conspiracy-theory prone mindset, finally overlapped in 2024, when Musk openly supported Trump for president and donated over 250 million dollars to his successful campaign. To the dismay of researchers and citizens concerned with the impact of social media in public life, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg has announced the intention to scrap his platform’s content moderation policies, to better position them in a political and business environment dominated by the likes of Trump and Musk.

If one should single out the most significant difference between the Trump campaign in 2016 and that of 2024 is that the notions of misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theories have transformed. They are not, as they say in the tech lingo, a bug but a feature of contemporary political discourse, and under the second Trump administration they are going to inform policy making, and influence both domestic and international politics. Trump has successfully bent political reality in America to align with his own reckless, chaotic and radical view of the world. A vision that sadly benefits the wealthy few and gravely threatens the poor, the minorities and marginalized—as seen in the gutting of USAID—and that could upend the democratic order in the US and compromise an already strained global security architecture. Furthermore, the conspiracy theories mindset is encroaching into the private sphere, threatening people’s health and safety. Trump has nominated Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, who despite raising important questions on overmedication and chronic diseases, has nonetheless circulated health misinformation and is a notorious vaccine skeptic. His appointment could turn into the most serious assault on public health in recent American history. And in the even more dangerous realm of defense and security, Trump has chosen people with extreme views and dubious democratic credentials such as Pete Hegseth and Tulsi Gabbard, to respectively lead the US military and the national intelligence. The bending of reality is complete. In doing so, however, Trump has pushed it to the point where reality as we know it might soon break, with potentially dramatic consequences for America and for the whole world.

Trump’s first victory in 2016 could be considered an aberration; his resounding return in 2024, however, indicates a more permanent change in American politics and policy. Meanwhile, the Middle East itself has experienced profound changes in the past year and a half. How will these two dynamics interact in the four years ahead?

Trump came back to the White House on January 20, 2025 with vastly more governance and policy experience than he did in 2017. In foreign and Middle East policy, he is better acquainted with the regional developments and players and has had time to express his preferences on key issues.

In the first term, Trump’s team was composed mainly of foreign policy and defense veterans. As he learned his way through foreign policy, he often deferred to his team. This time around, he comes equipped with more self-confidence; the team around him is well aware that their job is to implement his policies rather than push back against them. His political mandate, as he sees it, is to double down on his America First bilateral and transactional approach to foreign policy, and to—even more than before—“Let Trump be Trump”.  

His foreign policy team and his political supporters may be united in their support of, or fealty to, Trump, but they bring different approaches to foreign policy issues. His vice president and other members of his team and base are largely foreign policy isolationists, opposing major military or political entanglements abroad and wanting to focus on securing the border and socio-economic development at home.  

Others, like his secretary of state and those in the old wing of the Republican party, are traditional hawks; they interpret America First as America Dominant in the world. They decry the image of weakness that Biden projected during his term and favor the use of American power to confront opponents or seek advantages in foreign policy. Meanwhile, his evangelical base sees the world in Christian messianic terms, which is relevant especially in issues related to Israel, Palestine, and the holy land.

The team Trump has assembled so far represents the broad spectrum of these foreign policy approaches. And even though it will be Trump who will be calling the shots—in this term even more than the last—it is instructive to review the team he has assembled so far. Of course, his members will have to survive serving with Trump, who has a penchant for firing and replacing associates at a dizzying pace.  

For secretary of state he has selected Marco Rubio, the senator from New York; Rubio has extensive foreign policy experience in the Senate and can be described as a traditional republican hawk. His focus will most likely be centered primarily on China and Ukraine, as well as South America. For secretary of defense he has selected Pete Hegseth, a military veteran and Fox News commentator who falls into the fairly radical evangelical and messianic wing of the party; Hegseth would not hesitate to use force. He is a strong supporter of Israel on supposed Biblical grounds and a harsh critic of Iran. As national security advisor Trump has named Michael Walz, a strong hawk known most for his hard line on China, but also an avid supporter of Israel and critic of Iran. Other team members fall into similar camps, including the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Elise Stefanik, the director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard (whose appointment is still awaiting senate confirmation), and the head of the CIA John Ratcliffe.  

His Mideast team generally has a similar bent, including U.S. ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee (awaiting senate confirmation) and U.S. special envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff. Of a different cloth one would count Eric Trager, who is heading the Middle East team at the National Security Council; Trager is a think tank and D.C. veteran who will likely take a more pragmatic and analytical approach to Middle East policy issues. Massad Boulos is a family relative by marriage to the Trumps and has been named advisor to the President for Middle East Affairs; he is a Lebanese-American businessman and would likely counsel a practical and even-handed approach to the region.

Of course, at the end of the day, it will be Trump who calls the shots among these different camps of Republican foreign policy. Trump brings several of his own idiosyncrasies to the equation. He has little regard for democracy, rule of law, or human rights and seems to prefer dealing with authoritarian leaders, who certainly abound throughout the Middle East.  

He prides himself on projecting U.S. power, menace, and unpredictability, and wants to use these factors to U.S. advantage. Unlike Biden and previous Republican leaders, he does not see his role as preserving the U.S.-led post-World War II order, but rather sees himself as a disrupter, breaking out of old alliances and patterns and finding new ways to advance American interests; this might partly explain his affinity for tech titans like Elon Musk and others who see their task as disrupting the old economies and technologies and building new ones. 

In recent weeks, Trump has emphasized a particularly troubling aspect of his abandonment of the post-WWII order by stating plainly that the United States, due to “national security interests”, should consider taking over the Panama Canal and seizing or “buying” Greenland; he has also argued that the United States should encourage Canada to abandon its independence and become a U.S. state. Of course, this flies in the face of the basic rules of international law and order enshrined in the United Nations that the United States has defended for the past eight decades. But it would be music to the ears of Putin, Netanyahu, or others who are doing the same.  

The mixed bag of the Republican camps, combined with Trump’s own unpredictable character and rapidly changing positions (which he prides himself on), make it clear that the second Trump presidency will certainly be impactful, but potentially chaotic.  

The unpredictable nature of Trump’s approach revealed itself in spades when Trump made the surprise announcement on February 6 that the United States would take over the Gaza Strip, displace its entire Palestinian population, and redevelop it to become the “Riviera of the Middle East”. His announcement came as a shock to the Arab and Muslim states, who almost unanimously rejected the proposal. It even took Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu aback: he had come to Washington to seek U.S. support for an Israeli strike on Iran. Trump made clear that he did not support a strike but rather favored a deal with Iran, and threw the Gaza proposal on the table. He also said cryptically that he would make an announcement on the West Bank soon. True to form, Trump has barged into Middle East politics with a high level of impact and a high dose of unpredictability.

An Especially Turbulent Time in the Middle East

The Middle East itself is in a very different place than when Trump took office in 2017.   Back then, the Palestinian issue was largely off the regional agenda. Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and siege of Gaza, partly enabled by cooperation with the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and what Israel presumed was a tacit understanding with Hamas in Gaza, appeared largely stable and sustainable. Based on that assumption, the Trump administration proceeded with normalization agreements between Israel and four Arab countries without having to grapple with the Palestinian issue or the fate of the West Bank and Gaza.   

Meanwhile, Israel and Iran appeared to be in a situation of sustained balance of power and mutual deterrence. This particularly applied to Israel and Iran’s main militia ally, Hezbollah; the mutual deterrence established after the 2006 war appeared to be durable. The same scenario seemed to apply to Israel’s relationship with Hamas after the latter took over Gaza in 2007. In both cases, Israel calculated that these armed groups might harass Israel but would not risk an all-out war and that Iran was only interested in defensive deterrence and would not risk major offensive action. This was proven wrong on October 7, 2023, when Hamas launched its major cross border incursion, and on October 8, when Hezbollah opened a second front from Southern Lebanon.  

These developments have caused profound changes in the Middle East. On the one hand, the Netanyahu government and much of Israeli public opinion has moved further to the right, supporting a long war of devastation in Gaza and an escalation of violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. On the other hand, the ferocious Israeli response over the past year has inflamed Arab and Muslim public opinion (in addition to significant shifts in public opinion in Europe and sectors of the United States) and has made ignoring the Palestinian issue in any future regional diplomacy virtually impossible.

On the Israeli-Iranian side of the ledger, Iran moved first to abandon the defensive deterrence model when its allies moved to offense in October 2023; Iran and its allies perhaps figured that Israel was divided and hence vulnerable, and that the Biden administration was also weak and would not put up a robust response. Over the ensuing months, Israel completely turned the tables on this false calculation with strong support from the United States. Israel not only wiped out most of Hamas, but also undertook the largest devastation of Palestinians since the Nakba of 1948.   

Additionally, Israel ended almost two decades of a presumed balance of power and deterrence with Hezbollah by undertaking a stunning series of attacks against the armed group that wiped out its top leadership, killed and wounded thousands of its fighters, destroyed a large portion of its arms, and displaced over a million Lebanese from towns and villages that Hezbollah claimed it existed to defend. 

By neutralizing Hezbollah, Iran’s main deterrent against Israel and the United States, Israel had achieved a strong imbalance of power in its favor. Iran itself became vulnerable, as demonstrated by Israel’s direct attacks on Iranian air defenses that were undertaken in October of last year. Geopolitics, by nature, abhors power imbalances, and the current Israeli-Iranian imbalance is only temporarily on pause; unless dramatic diplomacy intervenes, another conflict is likely to break out with Israel pressing its military advantage. 

In the last weeks of the Biden administration, another transformative event struck the region with the melting away of the Assad regime in the face of an opposition attack led by the Turkish-backed and former al-Qaeda affiliate HTS. The fall of the Assad regime was partly the result of Israel’s weakening of Hezbollah and Iran, but also the result of Moscow’s distraction in Ukraine and the internal dynamics of the Syrian civil war and the many missteps of the Assad regime. In any case, the fall of the Assad regime was another staggering blow to Iran and Hezbollah and a victory for Turkish (and Qatari) influence. Globally it was a blow to Russia and an unexpected potential boon to the United States. The trajectory that Syria takes in the coming months will cast a long shadow on all its neighboring countries, including Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Israel and Turkey.

The Trump Trajectory in the Middle East

How will the incoming Trump administration deal with these challenges and opportunities in this turbulent Middle East? As mentioned above, Trump has started with a major announcement that no one expected, declaring that the United States would take over the Gaza strip. Although it is not clear how the United States could actually follow through on such a plan, Trump has doubled down on his statement and both Arab governments and Israel are in the process of trying to figure out how to deal with it.  

The unknown element in this equation is what will Trump announce vis-a-vis the West Bank? There are two scenarios: either he makes an equally pro-Israeli-right-wing announcement that includes large scale annexation by Israel of its settlements and more displacement of Palestinians, or he pivots from his Gaza announcement (that greatly satisfies the Israeli right wing) to propose something different for the West Bank in order to secure the much sought after deal with Saudi Arabia. 

The Kingdom has made it clear that normalization with Israel will require a solid pathway for some kind of Palestinian statehood. Trump might give the Israeli right wing its wish in Gaza, but in exchange he may propose a sharing of the West Bank with a Palestinian entity which might have the nomenclature of a state without real aspects of state sovereignty. This would be similar to the “Deal of the Century” that he put on the table in 2020, but minus Gaza. The tripartite deal between the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Israel would not only complement the string of Abraham Accords that he achieved in his first term, but would also cement Saudi Arabia in the American camp in the global contest against China.

In Lebanon, the Trump team is insisting that the ceasefire agreement be implemented by February 18, with a full withdrawal of Hezbollah north of the Litani river and a strong presence of the Lebanese army and UNIFIL in that area, as well as a full Israeli withdrawal. The election of the head of the Lebanese army, General Joseph Aoun, to the presidency on January 9, and then the election of an independent and respected international judge, Nawaf Salam, to the post of prime minister are both positive steps in that direction. The Trump administration will also press for the ensuing disarmament of Hezbollah, but this will be a much harder goal for Lebanon to achieve. At the end of the day, the full disarmament of Hezbollah is a decision that will most likely have to be taken in Tehran and might come about only as the result of a combination of maximum pressure and tough negotiations with Iran. 

Iran will be another complex issue that the new administration will have to tackle. The scenario favored by Israel would be a U.S.-supported Israeli large-scale strike (or strikes) on a vulnerable Iran that will set back its nuclear program many years, shake the stability of the regime, and, at a minimum, force the Islamic Republic to serious talks and concessions. Many members of the Trump team would favor this option, except that Trump ran his campaign on keeping America out of new wars, especially in the Middle East. Since he reassumed power, he has reimposed strong sanctions on Iran, but he has made clear that he does not favor war, but rather a negotiated outcome. The most likely scenario is an extended no-war, no-negotiated-breakthrough with Iran. This will not be a comfortable situation for Israel, but it might not be able to go against Trump’s wishes.

The continuing attacks by the Houthis on Red Sea shipping are also hanging over the region. A Trump administration will want to take action to try to neutralize this threat, but there are no easy military options. If the United States and Iran end up in talks, defusing the Houthi activities will be high on the U.S. agenda.

Vis-a-vis Syria, the Trump administration welcomed the fall of the Assad regime as a loss for Iran, Hezbollah, and Russia, and an indirect “win” for the United States. Trump has good relations with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and does not mind the strong Turkish influence in the emerging Syria. The United States will continue to use its enormous leverage on the issue of lifting of sanctions to push the new HTS-led government in Damascus to implement an inclusive transition and stay well away from the radicalism of its early al-Qaeda days. A key decision Trump will face in 2025 is whether to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria or not. He will certainly favor pursuing a U.S. withdrawal soon, but might use the leverage that the presence of troops grants him to gain advantage and avoid an embarrassing withdrawal like that of Biden from Afghanistan.

Setting these conflict areas aside, Trump is first and foremost a businessman whose mandate is to bring back American prosperity. In that vein, his interests in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf will be front and center. His first foreign visit during his initial term was to Saudi Arabia; it might be so again this time. The centrality of economic interests related to energy, trade, investment, technology, space, and other future economic sectors will be core issues for Trump.

It is said about the Middle East that one must always expect the unexpected; the same can be said about Trump himself. How these interests, conflicts, and attitudes sketched out above will evolve and interact in the months ahead will be something to watch closely. As Donald Rumsfeld once remarked, there are known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns; in trying to predict Trump’s decisions and actions in a fast changing Middle East, the third category might be the most relevant. 

Donald Trump represents a remarkable phenomenon in global politics. He was the first U.S. president since Dwight D. (“Ike”) Eisenhower to assume office without prior political experience. Trump is the second American president who will be serving two non-consecutive terms in office. And he is the first president ever to be criminally indicted. In January 2025, Trump became the first convicted felon to serve in the White House as a convicted felon. Despite his dubious reputation, Trump won the 2024 presidential elections comfortably, beating his Democratic rival Harris by a significant margin. As Trump begins his second term in office, the “Trumpism” phenomenon is unfolding in real-time, offering insights as it develops.

In recent months, Trump pledged that he would end the Hamas-Israel War and that he would bring the Israeli hostages, held in Gaza, to their loving families. Trump reiterated very clear warnings to Hamas: If the Israeli hostages in Hamas captivity will not be released by the time he takes office, then there will be “all hell to pay”.  At the time of writing, thanks to Trump’s involvement, seven of the hostages were released. Some 90 others are still in captivity. The Israeli public holds high hopes that Trump will abide by his words and ensure that all hostages will return home to their loving families. Consistent polling shows that the majority of the Israeli public perceives the release of the hostages as the highest priority for the Israeli government. 

Trump is a popular figure in Israel also because he promised to maintain unconditional military and diplomatic support for Israel, pledging that no international conditions be placed on American military aid. Indeed, he has already authorized equipping Israel with 2,000-pound bombs in tandem with his declaration that the United States is going “to make Israel great again” and that he will bring real and lasting peace between Israel and its enemies. Trump also opposed international pressure relating to Israeli settlements, generally perceived by many countries as illegal. Time and again, Trump affirmed that the bond between the United States and Israel is strong and enduring. He stated that “We must stop this perilous slide into conflict, hatred, and destruction” through “unwavering American leadership and unquestioned American strength,” which would allow for “the dawn of a new, more harmonious Middle East [to be] finally within our reach”.  

The majority of Israelis preferred to see Trump in the White House. Vice-President Kamala Harris was perceived as a critical voice of Israel. A poll conducted in November 2024 showed that 66 percent of Israelis preferred Trump over Harris. Seventy-two percent of the Jews in the sample thought Trump was better for Israel’s interests compared to only 11 per cent who thought Harris was the better option. 

While Biden is appreciated for the considerable military aid he provided Israel as the country was forced to fight on seven fronts (Gaza, the West Bank, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and Iraq), the superpower of the world under Biden was unable to force a ceasefire and pressure Hamas to release the Israeli hostages. The weaknesses of today’s superpower were exposed time and again. Trump mocked Biden’s leadership and said that with him (Trump) things would have been and will be very different. Indeed, already before Trump assumed office, Israel and Hamas reached an agreement that has evaded the two parties for many months. An urgent conversation between Trump’s Mideast envoy Steve Witkoff and Prime Minister Netanyahu was instrumental in paving the way for an agreement.

Trump is not a specialist in Middle Eastern affairs. While he is aware of some of the complexities surrounding the Arab-Israeli conflict, he does not claim comprehensive expertise. His pragmatic approach to outcomes shapes his approach to Middle Eastern diplomacy and beyond. As a seasoned businessman, Trump is acutely aware of the dynamics of success and failure. He understands the significant distinction between rhetoric and action. Campaign promises, designed to secure electoral victories, do not always translate into feasible policies. Now that Trump has re-entered the White House, he faces the challenge of translating bold ideas into actionable plans. 

This article aims to propose that the Trump administration collaborate with both Israelis and Palestinians to mitigate tensions between the two sides. The Trump administration should advocate for a trajectory of gradual de-escalation. Sustainable non-violent co-existence must be built on strong, practical foundations that are currently absent. While peace remains the ultimate goal—and should be the shared strategy of Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA)—it cannot be achieved through an abrupt “big bang” approach. Instead, progress must be incremental, fostering trust and gradually separating the two sides en route to a two-state solution. 

Fifty-eight years of occupation have led many Israelis to view it as necessary, normalizing the hardships it imposes on Palestinians and the violence it perpetuates for both sides. This article calls for a positive change for both Israel and the Palestinians.

Trumps’ Record 

In his first term in office, Trump proved himself as an ally of Israel. His administration did not even try to play the role of a fair, unbiased mediator. American relationships with the PA were at a low point. Trump’s simplistic and pragmatic approach was manifested in its most striking way when at a joint press conference with Netanyahu, Trump made this casual statement:

“I am looking at two-state, and one-state, and I like the one that both parties like... I’m very happy with the one that both parties like… I can live with either one. I thought for a while the two-state looked like it may be the easier of the two. But honestly, if Bibi, and if the Palestinians, if Israel and the Palestinians are happy, I’m happy with the one they like the best”.

These remarks, delivered with a smug tone, sounded more like pub banter than a carefully considered response during a serious press conference. It revealed a troubling lack of understanding about the complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Two-state and one-state solutions are profoundly different, with ramifications far beyond casual preference. Lumping them together, as if deciding between playing basketball or football, trivializes the issue and undermines trust in the president’s intentions to mediate effectively.

President Trump’s follow-up on settlements was equally nonchalant: “As far as settlements, I’d like to see you [Netanyahu] hold back on settlements for a little bit.”

This mild admonishment—his strongest critique—hardly conveys the gravity of the settlements as a central obstacle to peace. Simultaneously, Netanyahu used the opportunity to request U.S. recognition of Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights. Trump complied.

Almost six decades since the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel is still occupying the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights. While Israel annexed the Golan Heights in 1981 and evacuated Gaza in 2005—leading to Hamas’s takeover the following year—it continues to occupy the West Bank and after the October 7, 2023 Hamas’ horrendous terror attack until the recently signed ceasefire, Israel had engaged in steady destruction of infrastructure in Gaza as Israeli leaders aimed to bring to justice all Hamas members.

The term “occupation” is conspicuously absent from Israeli discourse. Many Israelis live in denial, unwilling to confront the harsh reality they impose on other people—a reality they themselves would find intolerable for even a single day. This collective denial perpetuates a regime rooted in coercion and injustice. In my opinion, supporting the occupation and the Israeli settlements in the West Bank is counter to Israel’s and American best interests. 

Since 1967, Israel has controlled Palestinian life in all vital aspects: civic, economy and security. Israel behaves like a control-freak, motivated primarily by fear as well as feelings of superiority. I also argued that while the occupation is primarily bad for the Palestinians, it is also bad for Israel. The occupation erodes Israeli moral fiber, its humanity and civility, and it also undermines Israel’s position in the community of nations. Israel is paying a very high price for its conduct in the occupied territories, and the price will be dearer as the occupation continues. The occupation has to come to an end, the sooner the better. Israel should strive to strike a deal with the Palestinians so that the Palestinians enjoy freedom and Israel enjoys life that is free of violence and terror.

As long as the occupation continues, violence will continue to dominate the Israeli-Palestinian affairs and the conflict will spill over to other parts of the world, including the United States. 

Relocating the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem

President Trump relocated the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem after appointing an ambassador to Israel who supported this move and who pushed for translating words and wishes into reality. 

I supported relocating the U.S. Embassy—and all other embassies—to Jerusalem. Jerusalem is Israel’s eternal capital, not Tel Aviv. Embassies belong in a nation’s capital. The debate over this move often appears hypocritical. Many countries, including the United States and the United Kingdom, already maintain missions dealing with Palestinian affairs in East Jerusalem. These same countries could situate their embassies addressing relations with Israel in West Jerusalem.

Relocating the embassy does not undermine the concept of a two-state solution, which envisions the division of Jerusalem both de facto and de jure. The city is already divided. A visit to Jerusalem reveals distinct Palestinian neighborhoods that stand in stark contrast to Jewish neighborhoods.

Under the two-state solution, East Jerusalem could become the capital of Palestine, while West Jerusalem would remain Israel’s capital. Alternatively, Jerusalem could be declared an international city, sacred and respected by all faiths, and administered jointly by Israel and Palestine or by the global community. With good will and creative thinking, a viable solution for Jerusalem can be achieved.

The Abraham Accords

Trump’s greatest achievement was the signing of normalization agreements between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan. These agreements have significantly transformed the strategic landscape of the Middle East, fostering positive changes and creating mutually beneficial outcomes for all parties involved. Trump has vowed to advance these Accords by seeking further normalization agreements between Israel and Arab states, first and foremost Saudi Arabia, which Trump perceives as important to Israel’s security and stability. Saudi Arabia has insisted time and again that any normalization treaty with Israel should be preceded by a just resolution of the Palestinian problem. Trump very much wants to see such a treaty materialize and he may find the Saudi insistence firm and unshaken. 

The Palestinians, as they did many times in the past, failed to seize the opportunity and did not try to make the lemon into lemonade. They chose to object and oppose the Abraham Accords, something that yielded them no single achievement. The Palestinians should try to be a party to these agreements and harvest considerable economic gains. The Palestinian objection signalled to Israel that the PA is not ready to see Israel as a legitimate state in the Middle East that has a legitimate interest in being accepted and integrated into the region. The Palestinian objection resulted in generating more distrust and suspicion among the Israeli public. These strong sentiments do not serve the Palestinian best interests well. Deep-seated mistrust on both sides continues to undermine efforts for a resolution.

Iran

Very much in line with Israel’s aims, Trump believes that Iran should not become a nuclear power. He criticized Iran for attacking Israel, arguing that “the World is on fire and spiralling out of control” and that under his administration, “Iran was in total check. They were starved for cash, fully contained, and desperate to make a deal”. Trump declared that Iran is keen to make a deal with the United States and that “I would like to see Iran be very successful. The only thing is, they can’t have a nuclear weapon”.

 

Moving Forward

To move forward, trust-building measures must complement bold political decisions, fostering a climate where solutions for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can become a reality. To break the enduring cycle of violence, a fresh approach and trajectory must be adopted, emphasizing gradual steps toward sustainable co-existence.

Trump condemned terrorism and expressed unequivocal support for Israel. He stated: “So here is my commitment to you on this solemn date: I will not allow the Jewish state to be threatened with destruction. I will not allow another Holocaust of the Jewish people. I will not allow a jihad to be waged on America or our allies. And I will support Israel’s right to win its war on terror—and win it fast”.

Gaza

Gaza needs to be rebuilt, and a new order must be established. Reconstructing Gaza from its ruins is a complex undertaking, and this responsibility should not only be shared by Israel but is also in its best interest. Israel cannot tackle this challenge alone and must work in partnership with others. To achieve lasting stability, cooperation with Arab countries, as well as international stakeholders such as the PA, the United States, the United Nations, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf nations, and any other country with a genuine interest in Gaza’s restoration, is essential. On February 4, 2025, Trump declared that the United States would assume responsibility for the rebuilding of Gaza and the resettling of the Gaza residents elsewhere under an extraordinary redevelopment plan. Trump suggested relocating Gazans to Egypt and Jordan. I am not opposed to this proposal in principle, provided Egypt and Jordan agree to take Gazans to their territories and that Gazans wish to relocate.

Trump, as always, is throwing around grand ideas without much elaboration. What is needed is a careful plan carried out in stages and enjoying the consent and approval of the relevant countries and the Arab world at large.

In the first instance, a certain number of Gazans should be agreed upon between the United States, Egypt, and Jordan. This number should be based on estimates of the number of families who have ties in Egypt and Jordan. The underlying reasons should be family reunification and humanitarian aid. The scheme should be offered in the first instance to Gazans who have families in Egypt and Jordan and who voluntarily sign up to immigrate.

These people should apply to immigrate via the usual immigration channels in Egypt and Jordan. Both countries should scrutinize applications carefully to ensure that the applicants are not Muslim fundamentalists who might obstruct law and order and who might join the Muslim Brotherhood and other anti-government organizations.

The last thing these countries need is a fifth column that would undermine the regimes of Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and Jordan’s King Abdullah II. Egypt and Jordan will decide what status these immigrants will enjoy, as temporary residents for x number of years with the possibility of becoming citizens in Jordan and possibly also in Egypt.

After the first stage of the scheme is complete, lessons should be deduced, and then a further immigration deadline should be offered to new applicants who wish to immigrate on similar grounds, setting another capped quota.

The entire scheme should be sponsored by the United States and executed by Egypt and Jordan. As long as the scheme is based on communication and the consent of all relevant parties, then it is legitimate. Such relocation schemes should not be based on threats and coercion.

Yemen

Since October 7, and until the ceasefire in January 2025, the Houthis in Yemen fired missiles at Israel indiscriminately. Trump is likely to adopt a tougher stance against the Houthis, and expand the scope of American military operations in Yemen, targeting the Houthi infrastructure. He could authorise American forces greater latitude in addressing missile terrorism, with a possible escalation in maritime and air operations while increasing economic sanctions against Yemen. The Trump administration should also work with the Lebanese government, Israel, France and other stakeholders to ensure that Israel’s northern border with Lebanon remains quiet and that the Hezbollah terror organisation remains under check.   

Syria

Syria is also a major concern as its future as a viable independent state is questioned. The Trump administration must engage and be proactive in the building of the Syrian future in a constructive way, one that would enable the Syrian people opportunities to rebuild their lives in peace, free of terror and war.

Additionally, it is crucial to:

Renew constructive collaboration between Israel and the PA on all fronts, particularly security but also civilian and economic matters. President Abbas vowed not to “allow Hamas, which sacrificed the interests of the Palestinian people for Iran and caused destruction in the Gaza Strip, to replicate its actions in the West Bank”.

Here are some figures that show the scale of death and devastation until October 7, 2024: Over 44,000 Palestinians were killed in Gaza and more than 100,000 were wounded. At least 720 Israeli soldiers were killed and 4,576 were wounded. Around 1.9 million Palestinians were displaced (90 percent of the population of Gaza). More than 58,000 Israelis were displaced. Over 120,000 structures in Gaza were moderately damaged or destroyed (66 percent of structures in the Strip). About 92 per cent of primary roads in Gaza were damaged or destroyed. 84 percent of health facilities in Gaza were damaged or destroyed. More than 67 per cent of water and sanitation facilities in Gaza were damaged or destroyed.

Demolishing terrorist spoilers or, at the very least, marginalising Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other terrorist factions, dismantling their weapons. Israel cannot afford another 7 October attack. With the exception of the Holocaust, October 7, 2023 was one of the bloodiest days in Jewish history. The attack sank the Israeli nation into a collective trauma. The aim should be to incorporate Hamas into the PLO under specific conditions and with the PLO’s consent, as Hamas represents a major obstacle to peace.

Insist on holding democratic elections in the West Bank, ensuring that only parties committed to peace, the recognition of Israel as a democratic Jewish state, and the fight against terror and violence are allowed to participate.

Support into Gaza should be monitored closely. Qatar should not be allowed to continue delivering Hamas many millions of dollars.

Israel and Egypt should work together so that the Philadelphi Corridor ceases to be a major transport way to equip Hamas and the Islamic Jihad with weapons and other means to wage their destructive campaign against Israel.

What Israel Needs to Do

Bolster its security: By expanding its manpower as well as its defensive and offensive capabilities, its intelligence and command structure.

Deescalate: Israel has fought on seven fronts, exhausting its manpower capabilities. Israeli leaders should look for non-violent solutions and containment of violence in the region via diplomacy and cooperation with other nations.

Avoid Unilateral Actions: Engage in collaborative, inclusive decision-making to prevent further escalation.

Engage in Dialogue: Initiate open discussions with Palestinian and Arab leaders as well as the U.S. administration on practical steps to reduce tensions.

Develop a Concrete Plan: Collaborate with the Palestinian Authority and other parties to gradually reduce military presence in Gaza and the West Bank, ensuring security via cooperation is maintained during the transition.

Expand Palestinian Autonomy: Increase self-governance and administrative authority for the PA in key areas in Gaza and the West Bank.

What the Palestinians Need to Do

Avoid Unilateral Actions: Work collaboratively with international and Israeli counterparts.

Accept Security Responsibilities: Gradually assume control over security operations from Israeli forces.

Demonstrate Security Capabilities in fighting terrorism: Prove the PA’s ability to manage sensitive security responsibilities effectively in collaboration with Israel, Egypt, Jordan and other parties. Publicly and unequivocally declare that terrorism undermines Palestinian national aspirations for independence and statehood. These words should be supplemented by decisive deeds to prevent spoilers from doing what they know best: spoil. Terrorism sustains and justifies the occupation; combating it is critical to achieving independence.

Engage in Dialogue: Open discussions with Israeli and U.S. administrations to address spoilers and obstacles to peace.

Develop a Shared Plan: Collaborate with Israel, the U.S. and Arab countries on a phased plan for the rebuilding of Gaza and transferring responsibilities to the PA.

Expand Autonomy Transparently: Strengthen PA governance with accountability and transparency to build trust.

The Role of the United States

The U.S. has a pivotal role in mediating peace efforts, learning from past successes and failures.

Draw Lessons from History: Reflect on successful peace negotiations, such as the 1970s Israel-Egypt agreements, and study both positive experiences and missteps, including the autonomy plan proposed by Menachem Begin and the lessons from Camp David 2000.

Implement Incremental, Doable Plans: Relocating the entire population of Gaza is a pipedream. Drawing a scheme of relocating Gazans who wish to relocate to other countries that wish to accept them on the basis of family unification and humanitarian aid, with consent and without coercion is much more sensible.

Foster Trust-Building Initiatives: Encourage actions that reduce friction and tension while laying the groundwork for equitable coexistence.

Encourage Israel’s integration into the Middle East, undermining attempts to delegitimize Israel, and pushing the parties to address the root causes of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

By working collaboratively and incrementally, Israel, the Palestinians, and the United States can chart a new course toward a future of peace and security for both peoples.

Conclusion

Resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict requires courageous leadership and decisive action. As an experienced businessman, Trump understands that high stakes demand significant investment and effort. By pursuing a strategy grounded in fairness, trust, containment of violence and incremental progress, his administration has the potential to make meaningful contributions to peace—a legacy that would truly stand the test of time.

President Trump has the potential to ignite a sense of urgency in Israel and Palestine, fostering trust, goodwill, and security between the two sides. The United States possesses the resources and influence to play a pivotal role by improving economic conditions for Palestinians, enhancing security for both parties and enforcing a policy of zero tolerance for all forms of violence. The U.S. can also pressure Israel to halt the expansion of settlements, provide security guarantees that enable the dismantling of checkpoints, and ease the daily lives of Palestinian civilians. Furthermore, the international community must be engaged in this trust-building process to ensure a collaborative and sustainable approach. Rebuilding Gaza may take a generation. A well-considered and well-executed plan is required.

The journey toward peace is long and arduous, but the potential rewards are immeasurable. With a genuine commitment to achieving peace in our time, President Trump—using his bold and tenacious approach—has the opportunity to help fulfil a long-cherished dream. By fostering a new chapter in Arab-Israeli relations, he could pave the way for a future where children grow up seeing one another as neighbours rather than adversaries, celebrating shared humanity, and replacing conflict with cooperation.

Donald Trump stunned the world, and especially the Middle East, by suggesting that the United States should “own” the Gaza Strip. He thinks that the 2.2 million Palestinians living there—he misrepresented the figure as 1.8 million—should be expelled somewhere else, probably Egypt and/or Jordan. During his press conference with visiting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House on February 5, he went on to explain that wealthy Arab states in the Gulf would pay for this ethnic cleansing and that the United States would then develop Gaza into a Mediterranean “Riviera” with lots of wonderful jobs for the people living there. Those would be “international people” from around the world, for some reason, and, he would allow, possibly some Palestinians as well. Or not. 

The whole proposal was so bizarre and divorced from reality that a grinning Netanyahu, standing next to him at the press conference, was careful not to endorse the plan merely saying Trump was thinking “outside the box” and that this should be carefully considered and studied. But he knew that any direct endorsement would make him look as ridiculous as the U.S. president and the Israeli prime minister does not wield the power of the White House to indemnify the occupant from charges of absurdity or lunacy.

This bizarro world solution for the Middle East isn’t going to happen. There is no appetite around the globe for accepting millions of Palestinians from Gaza. There is no way for Jordan—even if it were willing to accept still more Palestinian refugees than those already living there—to receive hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from Gaza. There is no way to get them from Gaza to Jordan, short of outlandish round-the-clock air lifts or some sort of forced death march through the Negev desert. The only location that makes any practical sense is Egypt, but Cairo is not going to accept the transfer of significant numbers of Palestinians from Gaza into Sinai or anywhere else in their country. This is a policy that dates back to the era of King Farouk, when in 1951 or 1952 it was decided to absolutely not allow the transfer of Palestinians into Egypt from Gaza. There is virtually nothing the United States can offer Egypt (within the realm of reality) that would induce Cairo to change this policy; withholding the current military aid package would certainly not be sufficient to produce that result.

Real Estate Dreams

It’s likely that, at a certain register, Trump knows this. While he may harbor dreams of Gaza as a major real estate development program—as described by his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who previously waxed eloquent about the potential for beachfront property development in this gorgeous part of the Mediterranean coast—Trump probably knows this isn’t going to happen. And he knows there is no practical means for the United States to take “ownership” of this territory, which Israel covets but has been unable to successfully introject or annex in any way since 1967. The Gaza Strip is effectively considered part of the nonmember observer state of Palestine at the United Nations General Assembly. That is why the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court have asserted jurisdiction over crimes in and coming out of Gaza, as a presumptive part of the nonmember observer state at the UN. 

Moreover, Trump hasn’t consulted any Palestinians, and he is certainly aware of that. It’s not just Hamas that has angrily rejected his suggestion, but also the U.S.-aligned Palestinian Authority and Palestine Liberation Organization, and, by every account, virtually anyone who can give comment to journalists on the ground in Gaza. For Palestinians, this proposal is a new and (demographically at least) larger version of the Nakba, or catastrophe, that happened in 1947-48, including not merely the displacement of about 800,000 Palestinians from what became the state of Israel but also the destruction, in a matter of months, of a large and vibrant Arab society and its replacement with a Jewish majority through force of arms. In this case, the depopulation of Gaza would not be as historically determinative as the 1948, or even 1967, ethnic cleansings, but it would be easily the largest removal of Palestinians from Palestine on behalf of Israel in the history of the conflict.

Trump’s press secretary and other officials have tried to walk his comments back by suggesting that Palestinian displacement from Gaza would be temporary and that they would be welcome to return at some future date. But Palestinians and all those familiar with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict know that Israel has never allowed any significant return of Palestinians to what they consider “Eretz Israel” (the land of Israel), which by almost all considerations includes Gaza, since the 1940s. Israel is no more likely to change this policy than Egypt regarding Palestinian displacement. Once they’re removed from Gaza, the Palestinians, and everybody else possibly other than the Trump administration, knows they are never coming back. It is this realization that keeps the Palestinians put in Gaza, miserable as it is and has become in large part thanks to U.S policies, as well as Israel’s vicious war of vengeance and Hamas’ reckless cynicism and brutality. And because of that, Palestinians would have to be physically forced, at literal gunpoint, to abandon the Gaza Strip. It’s essentially a non-sequitur.

So, why is Trump saying these things that he knows, at least at a certain register, are absurd? Here are a few possibilities, ranging from the least to the most likely, significant and ominous.

Domestic Consumption?

First, it’s possible he’s using all of this as a method of diverting attention, particularly in the United States and from the media, away from the flurry of executive orders and preposterous (some would argue dangerous) cabinet appointments. In the three weeks since his inauguration, the U.S president has flooded the zone within Washington in an effort to change the government, at a fundamental level, in short order before the midterm elections loom and his lame-duck status becomes clear to everybody. 

Rarely has a president moved at such warp speed, and never has one attempted to replace the apolitical administrative state with a personalized and apparently autocratic structure. He’s beginning with a massive ideological purge of the FBI, efforts to wipe out USAID, and to fire everybody involved in diversity, equity and inclusion programs, even if they were assigned to those positions as part of their jobs. So, he may be simply using bizarre statements about Gaza to occupy headlines with something else other than his own dangerous machinations inside Washington. It’s definitely a possible scenario.

Second, he may be attempting to strong-arm various Arab parties. It could be a message to Hamas to cooperate with the second phase of the ceasefire that he has compelled Netanyahu to accept, although Hamas appears enthusiastic about that anyway. His real challenge is to get Netanyahu to go along with the second phase. But he may be calculating that this kind of threat, framed as a humanitarian gesture of kindness and empathy, will shock Palestinians into cooperating with the United States and with Israel on Gaza. You want to be recalcitrant about anything, including hostages? Well, we can always threaten to expel each and every one of you from your country, never to see it again. How do you like that? This is possible, but the problem is that threatening Palestinians in Gaza after everything they’ve been through for the past year-and-a-half is a little empty. The United States says it will be “more violent” if there is any hitch in releasing hostages. More violent how? The threat is empty, and both Trump and Hamas know this. Maybe he is calculating that the fear of catastrophe number three, the third displacement of Palestinians after 1947-48 and 1967 could be so terrifying and plausible that this will shake either Hamas or the people of Gaza into compliance.

Third, this could be some sort of ploy designed to pressure Saudi Arabia to reduce the price it is asking Israel to pay for normalization of ties in exchange for a new mutual defense treaty with the United States and a strategic alliance agreement, among other things. Certainly, Israel is not going to agree to commit to the creation of a Palestinian state in almost all of the occupied territories with its capital in occupied East Jerusalem. That’s the current Saudi position. The U.S. task is to convince the Saudis to reduce their demands while increasing the price Israel is willing to pay on the Palestinians to facilitate a tripartite agreement that involves Saudi recognition of Israel and a new U.S. defense treaty with Riyadh. The sweet spot could be that Israel recognizes, for the first time in its history, the Palestinian right to a state in British Mandate Palestine—that is to say between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea—but without committing to any of its boundaries or sovereign prerogatives and restrictions. All of that would be left to future negotiations with the PLO. But Israel would have to end the Gaza war formally, recognize this right, and undertake to enter into a negotiating process in order to establish such a state. That could be enough for Saudi Arabia, even if the Palestinians complain bitterly about betrayal and so on.

The problem for Trump is that Israel is highly unlikely, under its current government or any other plausible administration, to agree to recognize the Palestinian right to a state anywhere in what they consider “Eretz Israel.” This was true before October 7, 2023, and is even more of a governing consensus everywhere except the solidly left of the Israeli political spectrum. No one even near the political center is willing to contemplate Palestinian sovereignty in historical Palestine. Trump may be calculating that these sort of wild suggestions about Gaza, which undoubtedly please the Israeli right, will buy him credit and brownie points to pressure the Israelis in the future to be more forthcoming on the West Bank and allow the establishment of a Palestinian state, surrounded by a greater Israel; this is the mainstay of his January 2020 “peace” proposal entitled “Peace to Prosperity”. 

That plan proposed that Israel would annex an additional 30% of the remaining West Bank, at least, leaving a rump Palestinian entity entirely surrounded in a new, formalized greater Israel, much as Lesotho is surrounded by South Africa. The plan pleased neither Palestinians, who want a real state, nor Israelis, who want no hint of a Palestinian state at all. Trump may be planning to return to this model, but with Gaza left out so that there is no question of a safe passage zone through Israel for Palestinians between Gaza and this rump West Bank bantustan. If so, wild talk about de-populating the Gaza Strip may be designed to soften the blow to Palestinians when Gaza is not included in this Lesotho-like phony statelet in the West Bank. Trump may try to foist on Israelis and Palestinians alike in the name of a “two-state solution.”

The Shifting Sands

But fourth, and most likely, Trump is preparing the groundwork for a major new shift in U.S. policy toward Israel’s putative land claims in the occupied West Bank. Since October 7, the consensus in Israel in favor of annexation in the West Bank has grown enormously, and now may well include Netanyahu. Previously, Netanyahu probably regarded formal annexation as a job for his successor. But now, following his vow on the evening of October 7 of “a mighty vengeance” for the Hamas-led massacre, he may feel that the job is actually his, the crowning glory of a long and storied career as Israel’s longest-serving prime minister—the slayer of any prospect of a Palestinian state, and the father of Greater Israel. Most coverage of the Trump-Netanyahu press conference failed to even note what is probably the most important thing the U.S. president said: that his administration would have an important announcement regarding Washington’s policy toward Israeli land claims in the occupied West Bank in about four weeks. That is chilling and ominous, as it suggests a likely major change of policy. Otherwise, what is there to say?

Why would Trump be doing this? He hinted broadly at the answer, for those who can connect the dots, at the press conference itself. He spoke, especially toward the end, of his enthusiasm for striking a new nuclear deal with Iran, probably including agreements regarding Iran’s support of militia groups in the Arab world like Hezbollah. And he said he was imposing new sanctions on Tehran, a return to the maximum pressure campaign of the last two years of his first term, with great sadness and pain. He repeated endlessly how sorry he was for it, and how much he looked forward to making a deal. The Iranians have been suing for an agreement for almost two years, and particularly since the collapse of Hezbollah in the fall of 2014 and the subsequent downfall of the Assad dictatorship in Syria, the combination of which have left Iran with no forward defense against Israel or the United States. Meanwhile, Israeli air raids have left Iran with virtually no defensive missile systems and no ability to produce solid fuel for rockets for at least another year or two.

The United States and Iran are poised to do the much longer, better deal that Trump promised—completely without basis—when he withdrew the United States from Barack Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran in 2018. But now the only card the Iranians have left to play is their significant nuclear research and development since then, and Tehran desperately needs time and space to regroup, rebuild, and strengthen the Islamic Republic at home and abroad. They are weakened beyond their wildest imaginations, and they need sanctions relief urgently and immediately. They also need an agreement that would provide some assurance of regime stability, and this time they will probably be willing to negotiate voluntary restrictions on support to Arab militia groups like Hezbollah and many others that have proven ineffective. Why not negotiate a failed stratagem? Meanwhile, a sprint toward a nuclear bomb is not really an option, since Tehran knows that Washington has a ready-made plan that only needs to be operationalized to destroy Iran’s nuclear assets with a stream of bunker buster bombs dropped from B-2 bombers that are just waiting for the order to attack. It wouldn’t take more than a week. Iran would be sprinting not toward a bomb, but towards oblivion. So why not negotiate?

But Trump, too, wants to do a deal. He doesn’t want a war with Iran. He wants to be able to say that he has secured peace for some considerable period of time, perhaps 20 years, that he deserves a Nobel prize, and that he is much smarter and better at negotiating than Obama or anybody else. None of this will be true, because the situation is so ripe on both sides for an agreement that it would take absolute buffoonery to fail to secure it. But that won’t matter. The point will be that Trump can claim, at last, to be an international “dealmaker” par excellence. Choosing between that exalted status and hideous morass of a war with Iran is a simple and obvious choice.

But, if he does this, Trump will be greatly disappointing and infuriating the Israeli right, and Netanyahu. His facial expressions during Trump’s comments about Iran were priceless and revelatory. Israel and the anti-Iranian diehards in the United States are appalled, but there is every indication that Trump is moving quickly toward embracing Iran’s overtures, despite the reinstitution of full-on sanctions. So, Trump may well be calculating that he needs to give the Israelis something in compensation to protect his right flank and indemnify himself from severe criticism from pro-Israel forces in the United States. It’s easy to see what that might be: much or all of the West Bank. There is a ready-made plan: Peace to Prosperity, with the major Israeli annexation proposal and little Palestinian Lesotho as the focus. And not only might that compensate the Israelis with large chunks of the West Bank, although maybe not as much as they want, perhaps it could be enough for Saudi Arabia to come around,, especially if the annexation were couched in terms of simply applying Israeli civil law in much or all of the occupied territories. The word “annexation” has rarely, if ever, been used by Israel. The Israelis are masters of de facto annexation while fudging the legal realities. They can do this again, and possibly blur the lines enough to make Saudi Arabia satisfied that a Palestinian state is being readied, even if it is limited along these lines.

But even if this isn’t enough for Saudi Arabia, if the deal with Iran goes through, and Israel can be mollified by gobbling up large parts of the occupied West Bank with U.S. approval, then Trump could at least boast of his massive deal with Iran. And this is, perhaps, the deepest logic behind the weird Gaza proposal: it’s not about Gaza; it’s about the West Bank. It’s not about the United States taking over Gaza, it’s about Israel taking over the West Bank. It’s not about Palestinians being depopulated from Gaza; it’s about Palestinians being depopulated from parts of the West Bank. All of this is entirely within the range of possibility and it could fit easily into Trump’s transactional mentality: take away a war with Iran from Israel, but give the Israelis chunks of Palestine as compensation. No problem. Sorted.

These are the most likely explanations for Trump’s absurd ravings about “owning” Gaza and expelling more than two million Palestinians to some unknown destination. It could be a distraction or pressure play or, in my view, more likely setting the stage for a new and entirely sinister policy regarding the occupied West Bank linked to Trump’s intention to strike a new nuclear deal with Iran, also involving militia groups, that is a fairly easy diplomatic lift under current circumstances. In brief, I see this as an effort to placate Israel for a major change of policy toward Tehran, not a turn to friendship with the Iranians, but a decisive turn away from war and toward an agreement that both sides eagerly want. The attitude toward Palestinians and Palestine expressed in the phony and factitious Gaza proposal fits perfectly with a subsequent practicable and all too real proposal that is apparently likely to come soon enough on the occupied West Bank. 

Watch this space. It’s bad news.

The prospect of a normalization agreement between Saudi Arabia and Israel has entailed high hopes and great expectations since the signing of the 2020 Abraham Accords. While such a deal has yet to materialize, heightened interest in such an arrangement has emerged at regular intervals as a solution for the Middle East region’s most intractable problems. Multiple iterations of this have been seen since the onset of the Israel-Hamas war in 2023; most recently, the January 2025 ceasefire and hostage-exchange deal between Israel and Hamas has been cast as renewing the possibility of a Saudi-Israeli normalization and, with it, the potential of a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians. 

The neighboring Gulf states of Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates signed the Abraham Accords in September 2020, establishing formal diplomatic relations with Israel, later joined by Morocco and Sudan. These diplomatic breakthroughs—so the story went—would usher in a new chapter of Arab-Israeli collaboration, forge a strong regional bulwark against Iran, and advance a durable resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “The dawn of the new Middle East,” in the words of U.S. President Donald Trump, had arrived. 

While casting many of his predecessor’s policies aside upon taking office, President Joe Biden vowed commitment to these normalization agreements and sought to expand the accords to include the region’s long-standing heavyweight: Saudi Arabia. The window for normalization to occur under a Biden presidency has closed, but Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that “much of the heavy lifting for normalization is complete, including negotiations on complex U.S.-Saudi elements of an agreement”.   

The new Trump administration is likely to continue pursuing Saudi-Israeli normalization. At the 2024 Doha Forum in Qatar, former White House Middle East Envoy Jason Greenblatt said, “There’s just no way that President Trump isn’t going to be interested in trying to expand the Abraham Accords.” The incoming National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz, described Saudi-Israeli normalization as a “huge priority”, and the “next phase of the Abraham Accords”. Meanwhile, President-elect Trump said he would build on the January 2025 Gaza ceasefire momentum to expand the accords. 

The primary actors involved in a potential Saudi-Israeli normalization have strong incentives to portray a deal as a paradigm-shifting event with tremendous, transformative potential for the broader region. This normalization agreement is often described as an all-or-nothing opportunity that will emerge triumphantly within a game-changing grand bargain or else collapse spectacularly. There is good reason to consider another scenario more closely resembling the status quo: a Saudi-Israeli normalization that is considerably less encompassing and transformative than envisioned.

A Tense Region  

The Israel-Hamas war that broke out in October 2023 induced a seismic shift in the region’s underlying dynamics and evoked fears over rising instability. For White House officials in the Biden administration, Saudi-Israeli normalization became even more necessary. It offered a potential means to secure a foreign policy win following a messy withdrawal from Afghanistan, end the deadly conflict in Gaza, enhance Israel’s regional integration, and produce a durable solution for Palestinian statehood. Less obvious objectives, like containing Chinese influence across the Middle East, have even emerged as associated policy goals.   

The governments in Saudi Arabia and Israel also appeared keen on striking a deal around normalization. The Saudis stood to play an influential role in the intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict, while simultaneously extracting significant concessions from the U.S. These elements of the deal, which are presumably still on the table, include a strategic alliance agreement establishing Saudi Arabia as a treaty ally, a defense cooperation agreement, civil nuclear cooperation, and deeper trade and investment ties. It was also believed that Riyadh eagerly sought deeper, official ties to Israel, which boasts strong technology and security credentials, deep-pocketed investors, a steady supply of tourists, and proven experience with critical infrastructure like desalination—all useful inputs for the Saudi Vision 2030 transformation agenda led by the ambitious Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. 

Israelis have also viewed normalization through an opportunistic lens. Prior to October 7, Israel envisioned that normalization with Saudi Arabia would enhance its cooperation with the region’s largest economy and serve as a gateway to better relations with other Arab and Islamic countries without making any meaningful concessions on the Palestinian issue. In the wake of the Hamas attack, normalization became a means for addressing new challenges. For Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, normalization offers an opportunity to recraft his legacy after presiding over the biggest strategic security failure in Israel’s history and reaffirm his foreign policy credentials at a time when Israel is facing mounting international criticism. And, with much of Gaza in ruins, normalization could also serve as the pretext for drawing in Gulf actors and capital to shoulder the responsibility for post-conflict security, stabilization, and reconstruction. 

Disconnected Foreign Policy Priorities  

Yet many foreign policy priorities of both Saudi Arabia and Israel now appear increasingly disconnected from normalization. The Saudi crown prince—and de facto ruler of the country—craves global recognition. Mohammed bin Salman wants to represent Saudi Arabia at G20 summits, court tech titans and financiers from the U.S. and Europe, and deepen relations with BRICS countries. As far as the Middle East region is concerned, Saudi officials have pursued a policy of de-escalation, which include reestablishing diplomatic relations with Iran and reducing economic pressure on the Houthis. These efforts to insulate Saudi Arabia from ongoing regional tensions and conflicts are especially important for the continued progress of Saudi Vision 2030—an ambitious social and economic transformation agenda requiring a sustained influx of foreign investors, residents, and tourists. At the same time, Mohammed bin Salman is compensating for underwhelming flows of inward foreign investment by leaning heavily upon government-related entities—from the Public Investment Fund to Saudi Aramco—to fuel domestic development.  

It is difficult to see how an official relationship with Israel can help Mohammed bin Salman advance his global, regional, and domestic ambitions. In fact, it could make some things more difficult, the Houthis being a prime example. The Houthis, which even the U.S. struggles to deter and degrade, control Sanaa and northwest Yemen along the border with Saudi Arabia. Since November 2023, the Houthis have launched repeated attacks on maritime targets in and around the Red Sea, professing solidarity with the Palestinian cause and threatening Israel and its backers. In early July 2024, the Houthis released a video entitled “Just Try It”—a warning to Riyadh against supporting U.S.-led strikes against the group—with drone footage of Saudi airports and ports as well as explicit threats to the country’s economy and stability. Israel and the Houthis exchanged air and drone strikes later that month, marking an escalation in tensions. The group would strongly object to any Saudi steps perceived as strengthening an Israeli presence on its doorstep. Iran poses another potential threat. As Israel weighed retaliatory options after an Iranian missile attack in early October 2024, Iran warned Saudi Arabia that any regional support for Israel could result in the targeting of Saudi oil facilities. 

Meanwhile, Israel’s current foreign policy priorities—and those Israelis view as domestic security issues, such as rising West Bank militarism—likewise extend beyond normalization. The Israeli government and citizens continue to perceive dangerous and immediate threats on several fronts. Reeling from the profound security failure on October 7, Israel’s primary focus is on securing its borders and reestablishing a semblance of deterrence. In Gaza, Israel has been bogged down in a 15-month war against a substantially weakened but resilient Hamas. The Israeli government has demonstrated little willingness to adjust its objectives or provide cogent post-war plans. Although a long-awaited second ceasefire has now come into effect, its continuation is far from guaranteed. Israel is also concerned about Palestinian militancy in the West Bank and has conducted near-daily violent raids since October 7. In late August 2024, Foreign Minister Israel Katz referred to Israel’s expansion of air and ground operations in the northern West Bank as a “full-fledged war”.

Israel’s risky months-long game of tit-for-tat attacks with Hezbollah, meanwhile, transformed into full-on war in October 2024. A U.S.-brokered ceasefire, based on a reinvigorated United Nations Resolution from 2006, took effect in late November. Numerous violations since then, both by Hezbollah and Israel, reveal the fragility of the truce. Tel Aviv has vowed that if the war resumes, Israel would target the entirety of the “State of Lebanon”. Following the election of Joseph Aoun as Lebanon’s new president in early January 2025, there have been renewed calls on Israel to accelerate its troop withdrawal from southern Lebanon. 

And then there is Iran. While the Israeli-Iranian shadow war has lasted decades, manifested through cyberattacks, targeted killings, and foreign proxy groups, both Israel and Iran’s appetite for high-risk actions have increased since early 2024. Israel, mainly with the support of the U.S. and other partners, has largely been able to thwart Iran’s retaliatory missile and drone attacks. Israel’s successful defense against Iran’s attacks, in addition to recent tactical victories against Hezbollah and Hamas, have led a buoyant Netanyahu to push for a new security reality—a new Middle East without the threat of Iran and its militant allies. Following Syrian President Bashar Assad’s surprise toppling by HTS in early December, a direct result of the post-October 7 weakening of Assad’s regional backers, Netanyahu thus proclaimed that Israel was “dismantling Iran’s axis of evil,” creating “new and important opportunities for Israel”.

Nevertheless, even a weakened Iran is likely to pose a threat to Israel. Israel’s trouncing of Hamas and Hezbollah, coupled with the recent fall of Assad’s regime, have sparked fears in Israel that Iran will push to assemble a nuclear bomb. In the aftermath of Iran’s first-ever attack on Israeli territory, on April 14, 2024, Prime Minister Netanyahu spoke of an “Abraham Alliance”—a desired security extension of the Abraham Accords to help counter Iranian threats as part of his “vision for the broader Middle East”. But it is unlikely that Saudi Arabia—like other Arab states—would be eager to fight Israel’s battles. In fact, Saudi Arabia reportedly sought to reassure Iran of its neutrality in the Iran-Israel conflict.

The Gaza Predicament  

The tragic situation in Gaza and what lies ahead further reduces the likelihood of a transformative normalization. Indeed, international affairs expert F. Gregory Gause III wrote in Foreign Affairs that a Saudi-Israeli deal “will remain on ice” as long as the conflict in Gaza continues. Once the fighting definitively stops, the stabilization, humanitarian, and reconstruction needs associated with this conflict will be enormous. For a deep and consequential normalization to materialize any time soon, the Saudis and Israelis must come together concerning the Palestinians. In reality, these two parties hold clashing positions. 

Riyadh has long maintained its commitment to the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative (API), which conditioned normalized relations with Israel on the establishment of a viable Palestinian state. The 89-year-old King Salman bin Abdulaziz, who is believed to pose an obstacle to normalization while still serving as king, has championed the API. More recent normalization conditions put forward by the Saudis involve a ceasefire in Gaza and renewed calls for the establishment of a Palestinian state. In a speech on September 18, 2024 to Saudi Arabia’s governing body, the Shura Council, Mohammed bin Salman stated that his country would not establish diplomatic relations with Israel without a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital.

If meeting these conditions was not challenging enough, other Gaza-related developments have increased friction in Saudi-Israeli relations. Prominent Saudi officials have called for sanctions on Israeli officials involved in the war in Gaza. At an August 2024 meeting of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, the Saudi deputy foreign minister described the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran—the result of an Israeli operation—as a “blatant violation” of Iran’s sovereignty. Prince Turkey Al-Faisal Al Saud, a prominent former government official, described Israel as “not only an apartheid colonial state, but…also a genocidal one,” at the 2024 IISS Manama Dialogue in Bahrain. Shifting gears into a genuine diplomatic embrace of Israel would involve a major pivot of diplomacy.

There is little reason to think Israel will rush into a normalization agreement that necessitates a clear roadmap toward a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the creation of a Palestinian state. Prime Minister Netanyahu and his far-right coalition partners have demonstrated no impetus to make any advancement on Palestinian statehood. Instead, they have worked to further weaken the Palestinian Authority and expand Israeli territorial control in the West Bank through increased settlement construction and legalization of pre-existing settler outposts. Data from Peace Now, a settlement monitoring group, shows that 2024 marked the largest appropriation of West Bank land by the Israeli government since the 1993 Oslo Accords, further complicating the creation of a continuous Palestinian state.  

It would be a mistake to assume that a more moderate Israeli government would make meaningful concessions on Palestinian statehood. Since the outbreak of the current Gaza crisis, the Israeli parliament has adopted two resolutions opposing any creation of a Palestinian state, including through a negotiated settlement with Israel. The last resolution passed in July, which cast the establishment of a Palestinian state as “an existential danger to the State of Israel” and a “prelude to the takeover of jihadist Islam in the Middle East”, received support from Benny Gantz, Netanyahu’s key political opponent. Other lawmakers known to previously favor a two-state solution were conveniently absent for the vote, a testament to their understanding of the public’s stance on this unpopular issue.    

Public Opinion 

Israeli and Saudi public opinion is at odds with an Israeli-Saudi normalization deal. Indeed, Israelis are unlikely to support Palestinian statehood in Gaza and the West Bank as part of a package normalization agreement in the near term. As of late May 2024, almost 74 percent of Israeli Jews opposed a normalization deal that would involve the establishment of a Palestinian state, reflecting the overall lack of public enthusiasm for a two-state solution. Polling by the Pew Research Center shows that, as of May 2024, 50 percent of Israeli Jews preferred that Israel control the Gaza Strip while only 19 percent of Israeli Jews believe that peaceful coexistence with a Palestinian state was plausible—the lowest number since polling began in 2013. With the nation squarely focused on the national trauma experienced on and since October 7, there has been growing indifference to the plight of the Palestinians, including among left-wing, liberal Israelis. As the Israeli historian Omer Bartov wrote in The Guardian in August 2024, while many Israelis continue to recognize the injustice of occupation, this is not what they are focused on; in the perceived “struggle between justice and existence, existence must win out”. 

Post-October 7 polling similarly shows that Saudi public opinion is working against the creation of deep and comprehensive ties between Saudi Arabia and Israel. Saudi Arabia is a monarchy, and its citizens are unable to express policy preferences at the ballot box. But it would be a mistake to believe that the views of key domestic constituencies do not factor into the decision-making considerations of Saudi leadership. The notion that autocratic leaders are not constrained by public opinion is a myth, as Michael Robbins, Amaney Jamal, and Mark Tessler argued in Foreign Affairs. Many Saudis, especially the youth cohort, remain loyal to the Mohammed bin Salman brand of leadership and his associated reform agenda, which has spurred popular social and economic transformations. Yet this support is not guaranteed, and Israel remains an ever-sensitive topic. Many Saudi citizens—along with their counterparts across Arab and Islamic countries—are boycotting American brands because of the war in Gaza. This behavior is a display of consumer activism in a country with limited tolerance for political expression.  

Most Saudis are averse to normalization with Israel. A poll conducted by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) in December 2023 found that 96 percent of Saudis opposed relations between Israel and the Arab world. According to a Doha Institute poll published in January 2024, 68 percent of Saudis opposed Saudi recognition of Israel—the highest level of opposition to normalization recorded since 2016. Even pre-October 7 polling showed lackluster Saudi support for initial steps toward normalization. Another WINEP poll from August 2023 found that 86 percent of Saudis opposed allowing Israeli sports teams to participate in events in their country.    

Previous Normalization Deals  

Despite significant headwinds, there is regional precedent for Arab-Israeli normalization but little evidence of transformative potential, particularly on the Palestinian issue. With conflicts raging across the Middle East, it is also difficult to argue that recent normalizations and other diplomatic agreements have made the region—and Israel’s position therein—a safer and more prosperous one. This does not necessarily mean that normalization deals have exacerbated regional conflicts, though some analysts have suggested that a potential Saudi-Israeli normalization served as a motivation for Hamas’ October 7 attack. 

Past normalization deals in the Middle East and Gulf region offer a useful historical perspective for how a more limited normalization might unfold. Israel’s peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan—signed in 1979 and 1994—led to pragmatic collaboration on economic and security issues. However, widespread public anti-Israel sentiment, rhetoric, and conspiracy theories remain in place today. A poll conducted by the Arab Center Washington DC found that 83 percent of Jordanians and 89 percent of Egyptians oppose recognition of Israel as of February 2024. While both treaties have proven resilient—with the added incentive of U.S. financial and economic and military aid assistance—to repeated challenges over time, bilateral relations remain a far cry from fully “normalized”, and more closely resemble a cold peace.  

The Gulf countries of the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain offer more recent case studies for assessing a prospective Saudi-Israel normalization. Honeymoon periods following the Abraham Accords led to a flurry of memorandums of understanding, boosts in bilateral trade and investment, and largely one-directional flows of tourists from Israel. The Emirates captured much of the initial economic momentum, signing a comprehensive economic partnership agreement in 2022 that envisioned bilateral trade reaching $10 billion after five years, up from around $3 billion in 2023. Much of the commercial collaboration has cooled or become less visible over recent months. Strained diplomatic relations after October 7 did not break, but the deteriorating situation in Gaza has left Abu Dhabi and Manama in uncomfortable positions. The United Arab Emirates appears focused on leveraging its newly formalized relations with Israel and established ties with Egypt to support ongoing humanitarian initiatives for Palestinians.  

The Moroccan and Sudanese cases offer further evidence of pragmatic, but ultimately non-transformative, normalization agreements. Both countries received tangible benefits from the U.S. in return for normalizing relations with Israel. Morocco secured U.S. recognition of its sovereignty claims over the Western Sahara. Many dimensions of normalized Moroccan-Israeli ties—from sales of weapons and defense systems to tourism—had already existed previously behind closed doors. Sudan was removed from a U.S. government list of countries promoting terrorism and received commitments for loans and financing. Sudan’s announcement of formal ties with Israel in 2020 marked a significant departure from the nation’s long-held anti-Israel position. However, ongoing internal political instability has limited the potential for cooperation and effectively put planned normalization on hold.

Ironically, despite years of pressure from Washington to formalize relations with Israel, Saudi Arabia’s most recent diplomatic breakthrough was with Iran (which Israel views as an existential threat), brokered by China (a strategic competitor of the U.S.). Signed in 2023, the Beijing-brokered agreement between Riyadh and Tehran allowed for a resumption of diplomatic ties. The agreement—more renormalization than normalization—helped ease some tensions between the two countries, though it has not altered the foundations of the bilateral relationship nor reconfigured regional dynamics. A diplomatic breakthrough involving Saudi Arabia and Israel probably would not initiate a tectonic bilateral or regional shift either.

Pragmatism and Flexibility  

Some manner of Saudi-Israeli normalization is likely to occur eventually. As Saudi Minister of Foreign Affairs Prince Faisal bin Farhan said in 2020, the Kingdom has always believed in “an eventual normalization with Israel”, though one that would be part of a comprehensive Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Much has changed since 2020, but normalization has not been taken off the table entirely or indefinitely. The important question to consider is what form Saudi-Israeli relations will take over the coming years.  

An eventual Saudi-Israeli normalization deal might include lofty, aspirational language, but the outcomes of such a deal are likely to be closer to the status quo. Both the Egyptian and Jordanian peace treaties used near identical language to call for a just, comprehensive, and lasting “peace in the Middle East”. A durable resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict involving the creation of an independent Palestinian state is one desired outcome of normalization that is highly unlikely. The Saudis can advocate for the Palestinians, but they cannot negotiate in their stead. 

A non-transformative normalization may accomplish a narrower set of Saudi and Israeli interests. Such a normalization deal might enable closer defense and security cooperation—between the Saudis and Israelis as well as the Saudis and Americans. There is also Saudi-Israeli compatibility in the technology domain: cybersecurity, fintech, and agritech present high-priority areas for collaboration under formal relations. Water resource management is another potential area for technology and skills transfer. Those Saudi and Israeli business actors willing to engage across various industries would encounter fewer formal constraints when pursuing these commercial opportunities.

Additionally, Saudi Arabia and Israel would likely establish direct transportation and commercial linkages via air and sea as well as explore other ways to enhance connectivity. Indeed, both countries are critical nodes in the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC)—a nascent transregional initiative. The ties following normalization would likely be flexible, allowing each state and other actors to ramp up or decrease cooperation as needed. For example, while the Saudis may promote certain forms of economic cooperation, they may not rush to offer Israelis tourist visas. 

A gradual normalization would enable key stakeholders to limit associated risks and responsibilities. Such a step-by-step process may even align with the expectations of the Trump administration. In his closing remarks at the 2024 Doha Forum, Greenblatt, one of the architects of the Abraham Accords, suggested that “we don’t even have to set the prize so high at the beginning…I think cooperation between these countries and Israel and America to bring safety and security and prosperity even if there’s no formal normalization would be a big win.”

To be sure, the emergence of a Saudi-Israeli normalization within a grand diplomatic bargain remains a distinct possibility. Until this scenario becomes reality, however, it is worth considering the full range of other options and their likely implications. A complex deal doesn’t necessarily foreshadow transformative results.