Any visit by an Israeli leader to the White House is expected to be consequential – both for relations between these two countries and for the entire Middle East. But the meetings earlier this week between President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were only almost consequential. Despite expectations for a breakthrough, no ceasefire deal has emerged.
Both leaders hold a strong belief – mainly independent of one another, at times in tandem – that they are transformational leaders in the process of entirely reshaping the region, if not the world, and for good. Although they are mutually suspicious, they also believe they know how to play the other to their advantage.
In a telling example, Netanyahu presented his host with a letter of nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize, stating that the American president is ‘forging peace as we speak, and one country and one region after the other.’ The ‘surprised’ Trump’s reply – ‘Coming from you in particular, this is very meaningful’ – was telling about the nature of the relations the two have forged. Both are receptive to flattery, and both are prone to talking up their own self-proclaimed personal and leadership qualities.
Summits create expectations, especially when the stakes are extremely high. But a third meeting between the two leaders since Trump returned to the White House yielded very little. Trump, notoriously unpredictable, was reluctant to exert public pressure on Netanyahu to move with a sense of urgency towards a ceasefire in Gaza. Instead, there was a vague comment from Trump that he thought that talks to end the war in Gaza have been ‘going along very well,’ stating that Hamas is interested in a deal.
Israeli sources poured some cold water on any expectation of an immediate announcement of a deal, briefing journalists that 90 per cent of the deal has been agreed, but informing them that the negotiations required more time.
In these type of talks, nothing is agreed until everything is agreed, and the remaining crucial issues that would determine whether a ceasefire deal can be reached are complex. To agree to the end of war, Israel wants to keep a long-term military presence in the Gaza Strip. It also wants guarantees on how many hostages will be released at any stage. It wants the Hamas leadership to be exiled and the organization disarmed.
This would be hard at any time. But mediators have found an acceptable formula particularly difficult to find against a political backdrop in which the leaders on both sides appear to many to be fighting for their own political survival rather than what best serves their nations.
Wider ambitions
Trump, a self-proclaimed peacemaker, was dragged by Netanyahu into using military force against Iran. This gives him some street credence in a tough neighbourhood as one who is not afraid to use force when the opportunity arises. And as someone who stopped the war between Israel and Iran the very next day.
The president may still harbour ambitions for a grand regional design – one in which Iran returns to the negotiating table and agrees to a deal that both limits its uranium enrichment and subjects it to strict inspections. Trump likely also still wants to extend the Abraham Accords – the signature Middle East achievement of his first term – to Saudi Arabia, possibly Syria and other countries in the Gulf and beyond.
But for all those things to happen it would require a deal to end the war in Gaza, rebuild the shattered coastal strip, and, perhaps, to establish a process that resolves the Israeli-Palestinian conflict along the lines of a two-state solution. There lies the minefield of both Palestinian and Israeli politics. So far Netanyahu can’t deliver a long-term ceasefire despite the fact that most Israelis would rather see all the hostages return home and an end to the war, rather than the elusive ‘total elimination’ of Hamas.
Netanyahu relies on ultra-nationalist-religious-messianic elements within his government to hold his coalition together, and they vehemently oppose stopping the war. Their goals instead are the full reoccupation of Gaza, the rebuilding of Israeli settlements in the territory that were evacuated and destroyed in 2005, and annexing the West Bank.
