Will Trump Keep the Cease-Fire on Track?
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For weeks, Donald Trump has been exerting influence on events in the Middle East. After winning the 2024 election, he dispatched his Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, to the region to help the Biden administration get the Israel-Hamas cease-fire and hostage-release deal over the finish line. Now, a little more than 24 hours into his presidency, Trump has already begun to undo much of President Joe Biden’s decision making from the past four years, including on foreign affairs. I spoke with my colleague Yair Rosenberg, who covers both Trump and the Middle East, about the new president’s goals and approach to the region.
Isabel Fattal: What moves has Trump made on the Israeli-Palestinian front since taking office yesterday?
Yair Rosenberg: Shortly after inauguration, Trump rescinded Joe Biden’s February executive order that erected an entire sanctions regime against extremist Israeli settlers. This order allowed the administration to impose stiff penalties on violent settlers in the West Bank and anybody who supported them, and—as I reported in March—could have eventually applied not just to individual actors and organizations on the ground but also to members of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and the Israeli army.
Biden’s executive order was seen as a sword of Damocles hanging over the settler movement. It effectively cut off some important people on the Israeli hard right from the international financial system, because if you’re under U.S. sanctions, a lot of institutions cannot touch you. The settler movement was so concerned about this that they pressed Netanyahu to lobby against the sanctions in Washington, and some members even took the Biden administration to court in the United States. All of that now goes away: not just the sanctions, but the executive order that created the entire regime. Trump is also reportedly expected to end the U.S. freeze on 2,000-pound bombs that Biden put in place during the war in Gaza, and impose sanctions on the International Criminal Court over its attempted prosecution of Israeli officials—something Biden resisted.
Isabel: Trump told reporters last night that he is “not confident” that the Gaza cease-fire will last, adding that “it’s not our war; it’s their war.” How durable is the cease-fire deal right now?
Yair: Trump is right to be skeptical. It’s not at all clear whether this is actually going to hold. The first of the agreement’s three phases, which we are in right now, is 42 days long. Israel is releasing nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners, including convicted mass murderers, in exchange for 33 women, children, and elderly hostages in Gaza held by Hamas, some of them living, some of them dead. That part of the deal seems likely to continue according to plan.
But partway through this period, the two parties are supposed to negotiate for the release of the remaining male hostages, for whom Hamas is demanding a much steeper ransom than this already steep price. And if those negotiations don’t bear fruit, it’s entirely possible the war will resume, especially because hard-right politicians in Netanyahu’s government have already vowed to press on until Hamas is eliminated.
The question becomes: How committed are Israel and Hamas to actually getting this done? And how committed is Trump to keeping the cease-fire on the rails? From his comments, it doesn’t seem like he knows. He’s speaking like a spectator instead of an actor. So we have no idea what he intends to do.
Isabel: What would it look like for Trump to truly commit to keeping the cease-fire on track?
Yair: It would require his administration to make it more worthwhile for both sides to compromise and stick to the deal rather than capsize it. Most Israelis support the current deal, but the accord’s most bitter opponents are the hard-right politicians in the current Netanyahu government, making the cease-fire harder to sustain as time goes on. But the Israeli far right is also hoping to get many items on their wish list over the next four years, much like they did during Trump’s previous term. Among other things, they seek U.S. support for Israeli annexation of the West Bank, the removal of the sanctions we discussed, and backing for Israel in its ongoing war with Iran and its proxies. If Trump is committed to the continuation of the cease-fire—an open question—he could make clear that some of these benefits come with a price, which is calm in Gaza. And Trump, both in his previous term and in recent weeks, has shown that he is willing to offer incentives that Biden would not.
Hamas is even harder to influence, because they’re a messianic terrorist group. Fundamentally, they don’t seem to care about not just how many of their own fighters they’ve lost but also how many Gazan civilians have been killed in this war. For them, every casualty is either immaterial or an asset in a gruesome PR war against Israel. But they do have sponsors abroad—like Qatar, which hosts some of the group’s political leaders. The Qataris want to be on the right side of the next Trump administration, like any other state in the Middle East. And so Trump has the ability to put pressure on the Qataris, who can then push Hamas to compromise on what they’re willing to accept in the next hostage exchange.
These methods aren’t guaranteed to work. It’s true that the U.S. has some sway over events, but these countries and actors have their own national interests and make decisions based on their own internal politics. Americans on both the right and the left tend to overestimate the U.S.’s role in world developments. Frankly, if there were a magic button here, Biden would have pushed it already.
Isabel: What can we learn about Trump’s second term from how he has handled this cease-fire situation thus far? What does it tell us about how he might relate to the region?
Yair: The thing to understand about Trump’s approach to politics, as I’ve written, is that he has few if any core beliefs, which means that he is both incredibly flexible and easily influenced. Both domestic and international actors know that if they can give Trump something he wants, he might give them something they want. It doesn’t matter if they are a traditional U.S. ally or not. It doesn’t matter if they’re a democracy or not. It’s entirely about whether you are in his good books. So everybody is now scrambling to get on Trump’s good side, to make down payments on the things they hope the most powerful person in the world will then pay them back for. In a real sense, that’s what this cease-fire is—for Israel, for Qatar, for Egypt, it’s all jockeying for advantage by trying to give Trump a win now so he’ll give them a win later.
Expect the next four years to look a lot like this, with international actors such as Saudi Arabia and Israel and domestic actors such as American evangelicals and Republican neo-isolationists all playing this game of thrones, hoping to curry favor with the ruler now holding court.
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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.
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