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A triumphant US President Donald Trump is to visit Israel and Egypt next week to be feted as the peacemaker who brought about today’s ceasefire – a sign of US dominance of the regional political landscape.
The new balance of power has not yet gelled, but it is telling that, according to the Israeli press, the nation’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not want his war to end. Yet he saw no alternative but to agree to the first phase of the peace plan when told to do so by Trump. The Israeli leader may try to wriggle out of keeping to its terms, as he did during the ceasefire, which he unilaterally ended in March, but this time around, he will find his room for manoeuvre and evasion much reduced.
Trump is basking in universal praise for a historic diplomatic achievement, which stands in sharp contrast to his deflated claim to be ending the Ukraine-Russia war. There is, though, less to his success than meets the eye; Israel’s military victories could not have been won without $21.7bn in US military aid and unconditional US political and diplomatic backing.
Washington might have told Israel to stop the war at any time, but did not do so because its actions served US strategic purposes, eliminating or weakening enemies in Lebanon, Syria and Iran. Pro-Israel lobbyists have had a tight grip on the Democratic and Republican Parties, but this counts for less under Trump than it did under President Joe Biden because of Trump’s absolute control of the Republican Party.
A keen sense of weakness
Trump has a keen sense of the weakness of other leaders and knew that he held the high cards in dealing with Netanyahu. “I said, ‘Bibi, this is your chance for victory’,” Trump said of his phone conversation with the Israeli leader to get him to swallow the Trump peace plan. “He was fine with it. He’s got to be fine with it. He has no choice.”
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Trump further explained that Israel had overreached itself in the Gaza war and was isolated internationally.
The winners and losers in the two years of war sparked by the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October 2023 are beginning to become clear. And the principal winner is not Israel or the Palestinians, but the US.
Trump told Netanyahu that he had won a victory, but a purely military one – and a victory won at vast reputational cost to Israel. Trump noted mildly that the country had “lost a lot of support in the world”, but the reality is far starker and more devastating.
By conducting what a UN Commission of Inquiry describes as “a genocide” in Gaza, Israel killed 67,000 and injured 169,000 Palestinians, or one in 10 of the population in Gaza. UNICEF says that between 3,000 and 4,000 children have lost one or more of their limbs. A leaked report of Israeli military intelligence in May disclosed that 83 per cent of fatalities were civilians.
Theatre of cruelty
For two years, Gaza became a theatre of cruelty in which the horrified audience was the rest of the world. As Israeli airstrikes pounded the homes, hospitals and schools of Gaza into rubble, they also pounded sympathy and support for Israel. Today, polls show that more Americans support the Palestinian people than they do the Israeli government. This week some 38 percent of Britons told YouGov they feel more sympathy for the Palestinians, whereas 12 per cent have more for Israel.
Yet Israeli failure goes far beyond international obloquy and isolation. As in past wars with the Palestinians, Israel showed great tactical military expertise combined with self-defeating political blindness, deluding itself that long term success can be won by force alone: Israelis must have 100 per cent security, even if this means 100 percent insecurity for Palestinians.
The only possible relationship it would consider between the seven million Palestinians and seven million Israeli Jews living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea is what Human Rights Watch calls apartheid, or expulsion. The very great superiority of the Israel Defence Force (IDF) became a liability because it tempted Israelis into convincing themselves that all problems with others can be solved by military means – though this approach has a track record of bloody failure stretching back three quarters of a century.
Israel put great resources into propaganda at home and abroad, but then made the huge mistake of believing too much of it itself. All opponents are demonised as deadly enemies to be physically eliminated. Once this demon was the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) while today it is Hamas, yet if the latter vanished tomorrow it would inevitably be replaced by some other Palestinian movement.
In conscious or unconscious recognition of this fact, Israel’s attack on Gaza was from the beginning a merciless assault on all its 2.4 million Palestinians inhabitants. In the six months since Netanyahu broke the ceasefire on 18 March, a detailed report by the US-based Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED) reveals that nearly 15 out of every 16 Palestinians killed in Gaza was a civilian.
World public opinion has turned
Netanyahu strikes back at charges of genocide by accusing those who make them, or in any way oppose his extremist ethno-nationalist government, of being antisemites. Many American and British politicians echo his words. At her party conference this week, Tory leader Kemi Badenoch described pro-Palestinian marches as “carnivals of hate”. But world public opinion has turned massively against Israel – and is not likely to turn back any time soon.
Understanding that Netanyahu has failed in his rather hazy goals is small comfort to Palestinians in Gaza returning to the ruins of their homes. Their gains are negative: they have survived so far, have not been expelled, and may soon get enough food to eat. But they fear that once the Israeli hostages, alive and dead, are handed over, Netanyahu will either renew the bombardment or evade any parts of the deal he does not like.
Great questions remain unresolved: will Israeli troops and settlers continue to kill and harass the 2.7 million Palestinians on the West Bank? Will Israel go on bombing Lebanon, Syria, Yemen – and potentially Iran? Chronic instability will remain the order of the day.
Netanyahu claims that Israel has achieved its goals, but the war, which may now be concluding, has bloodily disproved his career-long ideological belief that Israelis can enjoy security without making concessions to the Palestinians, whom he said could be safely marginalised and ignored.
Netanyahu deluded himself and deluded Israel. In the event, what happens to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip – in an area smaller than the City of Doncaster in South Yorkshire – became, over two years of horrendous warfare, the great test of the world political order.
Further Thoughts
The assault of American patriotic right-wing populism on the “woke left”, supposedly entrenched in schools and universities, is appalling and occasionally amusing in its crudity and philistinism. Like inquisitors during the Counter-Reformation, the state seeks to sniff out heretical texts, which may be identified by single tainted words.
Richard Sennett has written one of the best accounts of this inquisition that I have read, in a Times Literary Supplement article. Anybody using words like “diversity” or “inequality” in a request for a government grant is automatically rejected. And no word is more damning than “trans” used as a prefix, whatever the meaning of the word as a whole.
Sennett recounts how the US Government recently cancelled National Institute of Health grants to Duke University for all courses that have “trans” in their subject title, such as “disease transmission”, “translations”, “signal transduction”, and “transgenic material”.
Applicants for any government grant must now comb their applications in case the accidental use of some forbidden word might blight their careers.
Beneath the Radar
President Donald Trump is receiving lavish and obsequious praise for his ceasefire deal in Gaza. What he did was simply what the US should have done long ago, which was to tell Israel to stop the war. Had an enfeebled President Joe Biden acted as Trump has done now and posed as a peacemaker, he might have won the presidential election.
Leaders worldwide are profuse in their effusions towards Trump because of the relief that they will no longer have to pay a political price for their cowardly complicity in the Gaza horrors. Another, less visible reason is probably because their embassies in Washington are telling them alarming stories about the deteriorating mental condition of the 79-year-old Trump, who may well be heading in much the same direction as Biden.
Biden’s close aides took elaborate precautions to conceal his decline into senility, reducing to the minimum occasions when he interacted with the world outside the inner sanctums of White House. By way of contrast, Trump gives frequent speeches and interviews, and holds what appears to be a never-ending press conference.
Signs of any deterioration cannot therefore be hidden away, because Trump’s staff talk about it in a way that Biden’s aides never did. As with Biden, the mental dislocation is episodic, and nobody knows when it will strike. Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh writes that after his unhinged 71-minute rant to 800 top military leaders hastily assembled at Quantico, Virginia, on 30 September, “some of his close aides in the White House understand it to be yet another sign of his increasing mental disorganisation and inability to focus at high-level meetings”.
No wonder world leaders worry that his focus on Gaza may waver, destabilising what is already a rickety peace plan.
Cockburn’s Picks
I am reading Keir Starmer: The Biography by Tom Baldwin to find out why such an able and experienced man is proving to be so politically inept as prime minister.
Baldwin quotes rather too many of his interviews with worshipful friends of Starmer, but overall, the book is far superior to the great majority of the biographies of contemporary politicians because of the depth and detail of Baldwin’s research.
Though published before Starmer took office, it is essential reading about a rather strange man in a very strange period of British history.
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