Trump mixes Gaza ceasefire with West Bank mayhem

Michael F. Brown Power Suits 25 January 2025

President Donald Trump behind a podium and microphone

President Donald Trump veered wildly this week from ceasefire peacemaker to colonizer-in-chief to enabler of violent actors.

CNP

Steve Witkoff, the new special envoy to the Middle East on behalf of President Donald Trump, recently secured a Gaza ceasefire where Secretary of State Antony Blinken had proved insufficient to the task.

The Biden administration failed because it backed the Gaza genocide more than it was willing to put sufficient pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to halt the onslaught. Witkoff was reportedly more insistent.

For the moment, the Gaza ceasefire is largely holding, but now comes the feared quid pro quo of a quiet Trump-Netanyahu agreement carving up or seizing the West Bank. Certainly, Trump’s next expected ambassador to Israel – Mike Huckabee – will offer little to no caution as he talks up Israel in what he terms “Judea and Samaria.”

At best, Trump and Huckabee will inadvertently hasten a one-state solution with equal rights for all. At worst, Israeli apartheid will become even more entrenched for years to come.

Netanyahu and the settlers are poised to run roughshod through the West Bank. Indeed, settlers have already torched parts of Palestinian villages.

Netanyahu and Trump are uninterested in stopping the settlers’ violence. The Israeli prime minister, for his part, has now launched Operation Iron Wall in the occupied West Bank, mainly in Jenin, complementing the settlers’ assaults.

Israeli human rights group B’Tselem says Israel is “merely shifting its focus from Gaza to other areas it controls in the West Bank.”

This should come as no surprise. Israel has consecutively targeted one group or country after another, seeking to avoid too much simultaneous fighting on multiple fronts.

Now, starting on Day One of the Trump administration for the settlers and Day Two for Netanyahu and his apartheid army, it appears it is the West Bank’s turn to be targeted, even beyond the numerous Israeli abuses that have occurred there over the past 15 months.

Israel clearly prefers war to ending apartheid. Netanyahu is certainly no FW de Klerk who, under immense pressure, agreed to terminate apartheid rule in South Africa (and Mahmoud Abbas is no Nelson Mandela).

Trump appears content to let Netanyahu call the shots in the West Bank, perhaps as payback for the $100 million in campaign support from Miriam Adelson.

On Monday, Trump sounded uncertain of the ceasefire’s staying power, saying he’s “not confident” it will endure.

But he also indicated it’s Israel’s war to fight. “That’s not our war,” he maintained. “It’s their war.”

The truth, however, will be in whether he keeps funding Israeli violence, including going above and beyond the typical $3.8 billion in military aid per year as President Joe Biden did.

Trump also commented on the potential of Gaza – reviving the paternalistic notion of “economic peace” from his first term – though he offered no concrete ideas on rebuilding it.

“I looked at a picture of Gaza, it’s like a massive demolition site. It’s really … it’s gotta be rebuilt in a different way. Gaza’s interesting, it’s a phenomenal location. On the sea, the best weather. Everything’s good. Some beautiful things can be done with it. It’s very interesting. Some fantastic things can be done with it.”

After 15 months of effectively being targeted as a death zone, however, Gaza is now a catastrophic environmental wasteland. There is profound danger from asbestos and other contaminants released by the heavy Israeli bombing of Palestinian homes and buildings containing asbestos sheeting.

According to experts, cancer is a very real consequent danger. They say asbestos-related cancer cases could endure for decades.

A massive cleanup is needed of the Biden-Netanyahu disaster area, but Trump is unlikely to want to pay to clean up his predecessor’s cataclysmic mess. If he were to help rebuild, in order to succeed where Biden was a wrecking ball, Trump would presumably want severe restrictions placed on Palestinians’ right to self-determination and seek to extract additional political costs.

Courts are likely to help manufacturers of the bombs and missiles that pulverized Gaza avoid responsibility as they did in the US and France with Agent Orange, which was used to devastating long-term effect in Vietnam. (American troops got partial support, but the people of Vietnam did not.)

Unloose violent perpetrators

Instead of playing a consistent peacemaking role in both Gaza and the West Bank, Trump is loosening the West Bank reins for Netanyahu and his settler allies with the executive orders he signed on inauguration day.

Out went Executive Order 14115 which Biden issued on 1 February 2024 after having determined, belatedly, that “high levels of extremist settler violence, forced displacement of people and villages, and property destruction” had “reached intolerable levels” and constituted “a serious threat to the peace, security and stability of the West Bank and Gaza, Israel and the broader Middle East region.”

The Biden administration weakly applied sanctions to 17 settlers and 16 organizations rather than pursue a tougher overall policy regarding Israeli violations of international law.

For Trump, a man who says he doesn’t want wars, but is also putting himself forward as colonizer-in-chief, Israeli settlers are now at liberty – without US financial consequence – to cause further mayhem.

Of course, it’s also possible that Trump remembers tomorrow that he dislikes Netanyahu and disparages him. But it’s unlikely he’ll completely forget the help of Adelson and the views of his evangelical base which too often sees expansionist war crimes in the West Bank – “Judea and Samaria” to them – as the fulfillment of biblical prophesy.

Trump’s anticipated ambassador to the United Nations – Elise Stefanik – also holds this view.

Fred Kaplan writes in Slate that Trump pardoned or commuted the sentences of some 1,500 people participating in a right-wing mob, including the most troubled violent ones, who stormed the US Capitol building on 6 January 2021 in the false belief that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen. That step and the executive order on Israeli settlers, he writes, “send an ominous message: that acts of political violence are OK, even laudable, as long as they’re committed in furtherance of Trump’s power and preferences.”

Trump’s shielding of accused and convicted war criminals for acts committed overseas is, of course, nothing new.

As the American Civil Liberties Union noted in 2019, the president “pardoned war crimes charges against three US military service members.” Now he’s doing it for violent acts closer to home and simultaneously opening the doorway for similar violence in the West Bank.

Extreme right winger Itamar Ben-Gvir, a supporter of the racist Meir Kahane and a serial lawbreaker who was previously convicted in 2007 in an Israeli court of supporting a terror organization and inciting racism, was thrilled by Trump’s executive order. Until his pique over the ceasefire deal, he served as Israel’s minister of national security.

“I welcome,” tweeted Ben-Gvir, “the historic decision of incoming US President Donald Trump to lift the sanctions imposed by the Biden administration on the settlers of Judea and Samaria. This is a righting of an injustice of many years, in which distorted policies were pursued by the American administration.”

Finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, a self-described “fascist homophobe,” also chimed in with his delight.

“I sincerely thank President Donald Trump for his just decision to lift the sanctions imposed by the Biden administration against settlers and activists in right-wing organizations. These sanctions were a severe and blatant foreign intervention in Israel’s internal affairs and an unjustified violation of democratic principles and the mutual respect that should guide relations between friendly nations.”

Driving home his intent to colonize the West Bank, Smotrich added, “The state of Israel looks forward to continued fruitful cooperation to further enhance our national security, expand settlement across all parts of our homeland, and strengthen Israel’s standing in the world.”

ICC executive order

Trump also issued an executive order rescinding Biden’s executive order that reversed Trump’s own 2020 executive order targeting the US property and assets of International Criminal Court officials investigating American troops for possible war crimes in Afghanistan.

ICC prosecutor Karim Khan – who earlier this month said the court hasn’t “seen any real effort” by Israel to investigate its reported crimes in Gaza – may have been on safer ground had he figured out a way to charge the richly deserving Biden along with Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant.

That would have put Republicans in something of a bind. Do they hate Biden more than they hate international bodies mulling legal action against those individuals carrying out US and Israeli war crimes?

Legislatively, Republicans and Democrats alike have moved in the House of Representatives to sanction ICC officials.

The so-called Illegitimate Court Counteraction Act was championed by two virulently anti-Palestinian Republicans – House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Brian Mast and Congressman Chip Roy – but also received votes from 45 Democrats (along with 198 Republicans) in the 9 January vote.

According to the House Foreign Affairs Committee, the act “would sanction any individual working to investigate, arrest, detain or prosecute American citizens or an official from an allied US country, including Israel.”

Congressman Mast doubts the presence of “innocent Palestinian civilians” in Gaza and seeks to abolish UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestine refugees. Unsurprisingly, he argued, “I don’t care if you are a terrorist in a cave or a lawyer at the Hague, if you get in the way of bringing American hostages home, then you will be given no quarter and you damn well shouldn’t expect to be welcomed on American soil with open arms.”

UN experts pushed back on the legislation which next moves to the US Senate. “It is shocking to see a country that considers itself a champion of the rule of law trying to stymie the actions of an independent and impartial tribunal set up by the international community.”

They added, “We urge US lawmakers to uphold the rule of law and the independence of judges and lawyers, and we call on States to respect the Court’s independence as a judicial institution and protect the independence and impartiality of those who work within the Court.”

The rule of law, however, has long not applied to US criminality overseas. This is simply a new chapter for the US in seeking to protect lawbreaking it happens to favor.

Trump is about to deliver a master class in American presidential arrogance when it comes to the occupied West Bank. Talk of avoiding wars is superb rhetoric – and one wishes him every success in that vital endeavor – but so far Trump appears determined to create the conditions for further violence and entrenched apartheid in the West Bank. His advisers don’t see real people being oppressed and ethnically cleansed by Israel, but rather a Biblical Wonderland where they can leave their mark.

Tags

Add new comment

Michael F. Brown

Michael F. Brown is an independent journalist. His work and views have appeared in The International Herald Tribune, TheNation.com, The San Diego Union-Tribune, The News & Observer, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Washington Post and elsewhere.