The art of Trump’s Israel deal He has messianic faith in his bargaining powers

It is tempting these days to think that all reality revolves around the State of Israel, but Donald Trump’s defeat of Kamala Harris was overwhelming enough to discredit explanations that stress any single factor. The psychic shocks of the post-October 7 environment and the failure of liberal institutions to reckon with their own extremists drove a potential record number of Jews to support a Republican for president this time around, but Trump gained in just about every conceivable demographic group compared to 2020 and is on pace to win an outright majority of the popular vote. In surveys, voters repeatedly rated the war in Gaza as a secondary or even tertiary concern.

But the Middle Eastern conflagration is an issue that encapsulates the weaknesses of both the Harris campaign and the administration in which she serves. Since the October 7 attacks, President Joe Biden has pursued an incoherent set of policy aims calibrated to satisfy different elements of an inherently unstable Democratic Party coalition, which is split between supporters and opponents of Israel and whose foreign policy elite is often deferential or admiring towards Qatar, Iran, and political Islam more generally. Weapons transfers to Israel have been authorised and then slow-walked. The administration publicly opposed major Israeli war aims such as the seizure of the Hamas-controlled Gaza-Egypt border and a ground invasion of southern Lebanon only to shrug when Jerusalem finally lost patience and launched both operations anyway. Biden invested supreme amounts of time and diplomatic capital in a deal to free Hamas-held hostages and secure a ceasefire in Gaza, but exerted little real diplomatic pressure on Egypt, Qatar, or Hamas in order to reach one. Perhaps the height of Biden’s Middle East triangulation was the decision to greenlight an Israeli response to Iran’s most recent mass volley of ballistic missiles — but only as long as Israel didn’t attack Iran’s nuclear sites, the regime’s most valuable and dangerous strategic assets.

Harris could never clearly articulate her preferred outcome to the fighting in the Middle East. She met with members of the Uncommitted movement, reportedly telling them she would seriously consider their demands for a US arms embargo on Israel. Whether this was election season pandering or a reflection of her actual beliefs remains unclear even now. She spoke repeatedly about both the suffering of Gazans and Israel’s absolute right to self-defence, but never really discussed the strategic benefits of the US-Israel relationship, or the American national interest in an Israeli triumph over Iranian-backed jihadists. Harris named Iran as America’s most threatening adversary during the race’s closing weeks, but her top foreign policy advisor, Philip Gordon, is a leading proponent of detente with the Islamic Republic regime and an architect of the 2015 nuclear deal which Trump discarded. Harris neither endorsed nor repudiated Biden’s post-October 7 policies, addressing one of the most divisive issues on earth though a muddle of hard-to-reconcile platitudes that had no clear vision or purpose at their heart.

This was the story of Harris’s entire campaign. In an October interview, she appeared to endorse the construction of a wall on the US-Mexico border, thus embracing a major Trumpist objective that Democrats once widely abhorred. She ran as the change candidate despite having been the second highest-ranking official in the US government for the prior four years. On the Middle East, as on numerous other topics, she never had a compelling or coherent or politically appealing approach to undoing the mess she’d helped make, arrogantly believing her contrast with the supposedly extreme and unpresidential Donald Trump would be enough to bridge her campaign’s glaring contradictions.

Instead, Trump appeared a paragon of decisiveness and authenticity when juxtaposed with someone as simultaneously vacillating and over-managed as Harris. That Trump is imperious and perfectly legible in his motives explains how a man who moved the US embassy to Jerusalem and recognised Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights won a plurality of votes in the Arab-American stronghold of Dearborn, Michigan in the midst of the deadliest episode in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Strict truthfulness is generally not considered one of Trump’s qualities, but unlike Harris he could at least say what he really believed free of the transparently gross and corrupting logic of Democratic-style coalition politics, which voters of all backgrounds have now come to distrust. The president-elect never seems to be balancing various warring sects and interest groups against one another, and instead operates according to a singularly Trumpian alchemy of charisma and instinct. These instincts often aren’t that mysterious, including where the Middle East is concerned.

Trump was not fixated on Israeli-Palestinian peace during his first term in office, but he discussed the topic with an almost messianic sense of his own dealmaking skills. An elusive Israeli-Palestinian peace was “the toughest of deals”, then-president Trump said in 2019, adding that he thought an agreement was possible by the end of his term in January 2021. In 2020, his administration bucked decades of precedent by releasing maps of possible territorial swaps within a US-endorsed peace framework. The so-called “Deal of the Century” was widely mocked at the time, largely because it drew wildly impractical borders between Israel and a future Palestine state, with an eye towards keeping nearly the entirety of the country’s disconnected West Bank settlements within undisputed Israeli territory. Even a generous Trump-brokered peace is highly unlikely after the October 7 slaughter, which is liable to sour several generations of Israelis on the idea of entrusting the country’s survival to any Palestinian-ruled entity. But Trump is transactionally minded, and has long believed he can solve the world’s problems through his unique force of personality —  including the Israeli-Palestinian impasse.

As we learned during his first term, Trumpian charisma is often expressed by proxy through loyalists and family members. Last week, Massad Boulos, a Lebanese-American businessman and father of the husband of Trump’s daughter Tiffany, claimed he would be appointed as the incoming administration’s Lebanon envoy. Boulos told Lebanese media the president-elect will “end the destruction in Lebanon” as part of a “comprehensive regional peace agreement”, adding that “Trump is committed to ending the war before he enters the White House”.

The Israelis are more likely to listen to the president-elect than they are to an ever more disconnected Biden, given the comparatively harsh policies towards Iran that Trump pursued during his first term. Jerusalem might be willing to sacrifice its hard-won strategic initiative against Hamas and Hezbollah in exchange for positive relations at the outset of a second Trump term and a possible return to first term-style “maximum pressure” against Tehran. The Trump presidency also gives Prime Minister Netanyahu an off-ramp in Israel’s successful yet grinding year-long war: so long as the Iranian regime is no longer receiving US-brokered cash transfers and safety assurances, as it did under Biden and Harris, there is less immediate or long-term danger in reducing the pace or scope of operations in Gaza, Lebanon, and beyond. But even Trump’s opposition to the Iranian regime could be up for negotiation. As president, Trump did nothing to stop American funding for the Lebanese Armed Forces and other Hezbollah-infiltrated state institutions. Boulos even claimed that Trump will “set the stage for a nuclear deal with Iran”.

Since October 7, Netahyahu has grown almost freakishly adept at manoeuvring within the limits that an often-oppositional US administration set for him. It is unlikely the Prime Minister will ever miss Joe Biden, or curse his bad luck at not having Kamala Harris as his counterpart. Yet there is an added challenge to a Trump presidency from Israel’s perspective. Over the past year of war, Israel has gained a critical degree of strategic independence from Washington, diversifying its defence supply chains and launching major operations with little coordination or prior warning to its top ally. Under Trump, who was perhaps the most pro-Israel president in US history, a dynamic of dependency could quickly reassert itself. If conflicts between Jerusalem and Washington arise — if Netanyahu and Trump disagree over the necessity of bombing Iranian nuclear sites, for instance — Trump’s second term could be a test of whether Israelis have truly internalised the post-October 7 reality that their survival depends on their freedom to ignore or openly defy the United States, regardless of who’s in the White House.

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