Yeah, no. That would go over about as well as calling for 35% tariffs on Canada. The year is 2014, remember? There’s a reason Pat Buchanan didn’t get an invite to the event, and the staunchly isolationist libertarian Ron Paul was mocked as a crank during the keynote. You’d probably already be in the parking lot — or a shouting match — by the time your tablemates tucked into their slices of mediocre cheesecake.

The quips you made at the table are real quotes, however. They come directly from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s X account this summer, as the Gaza war approaches its two-year mark and “food supplies in Gaza have dwindled,” per a headline in The Wall Street Journal. Greene, one of President Trump’s staunchest supporters in Congress, shattered another GOP taboo last week by describing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in Gaza as a “genocide.”

A similar trend is afoot on the Left, meaning that Israel now faces a bipartisan pincer movement of disapproval and alienation.

Greene is far from alone on the Right. Steve Bannon, the former Trump political consigliere and one of the most popular Right-wing podcast hosts in America, recently argued, “Netanyahu’s government is out of control.” On Bannon’s show, former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince accused the Israeli military of intentionally targeting a Catholic church in Gaza and declared: “The time of subsidizing the IDF as the American taxpayer must end.”

After that church was hit, Daily Wire host Michael Knowles addressed the Israelis in lament: “You’re losing me. You’re losing me, when you strike churches, the only church in Gaza, even if accidentally, but especially if not accidentally, you’re losing me.” At Turning Point USA’s summer student conference, the group hosted a debate on the subject between comedian Dave Smith and columnist Josh Hammer that exposed the movement’s divide. Smith, who’s called Ron Paul “the greatest living American hero,” was greeted with cheers from many attendees for criticisms of the Jewish state that would have fallen on deaf ears — if not hostile ears — before Oct. 7. 

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How woke doomed Dems on the border

By Emily Jashinsky

Florida’s Rep. Randy Fine — perhaps Israel’s most vociferous defender in the House of Representatives, who even earned a rebuke from the American Jewish Committee over his enthusiasm for starving Gaza — has a GOP primary challenger in Aaron Baker. “I do NOT support starving children,” Baker posted recently, adding: “I do NOT support punishing [Gazan] citizens for having the worst government in existence.” 

Tucker Carlson, another of the country’s most popular broadcasters, released an episode of his podcast on Wednesday with University of Chicago scholar John Mearsheimer, titled “The Palestinian Genocide and How the West Has Been Deceived Into Supporting It.” Carlson and his guests have been consistently critical of Netanyahu’s government for months. That isn’t even to address the outright anti-Semitism of other fringe voices with significant social-media followings. 

Of course, the horror in Gaza now is not an apples-to-apples comparison with the 2014 clash between Israel and Hamas. But that’s kind of the point. The war since Oct. 7 has claimed the lives of at least 18,500 children, according to a new Washington Post analysis of the Gaza Health Ministry figures. According to the Post, that means “Palestinian children have been killed at a rate of more than one child per hour during the war.” The deaths included 953 babies who never made it to their first birthday; another 943 never made it to their second; 972 never made it to their third.

The sheer scale of the misery, as Israel now controls a wide swath of Gaza and starvation mounts, challenges modern definitions of proportionality — even as Americans are horrified by the evil tactics of Hamas and continue to sympathize deeply with hostage families. Recent attacks on Christian communities in Gaza and the West Bank are further incensing many in the United States.

Speaking of 2014, the Obama administration veterans at Pod Save America are issuing their own mea culpas from the Left. “Barack Obama signed a 10-year [Memorandum of Understanding] for $3.3 billion a year. So we are part of the problem here. Let’s correct it,” said co-host Tommy Vietor this week. Vietor, who served under Obama as a spokesman for the National Security Council, added, “When the war ends, we are not going back to the pre-October 7 status quo.”

Challenged on X by a critic who accused him of exacting a grudge against Netanyahu from the Obama years, Vietor replied, “Or … stay with me here … the entire world is horrified by what we’re witnessing in Gaza, which is why this conversation is happening now and not back in 2015.”

There’s little insight about the Right to be gleaned from Pod Save America. But in this case, Vietor is correct that revulsion at the humanitarian crisis in Gaza is no longer limited to progressives. This nationwide movement is so sweeping that it’s dragging people on the Right away from Israel, even as some conservatives triple down on support for the war. 

What’s eroded on the Right, above all, is the stigma that used to surround criticism of Israel. Gallup has been tracking public opinion on the Gaza war since its earliest weeks. On Tuesday, the firm released stark new findings. “American approval of Israel’s military action in Gaza has fallen 10 percentage points since the prior measurement in September, and it is now at 32%, the lowest reading since Gallup first asked the question in November 2023,” read the report. “Disapproval of the military action has now reached 60%.”

To be sure, Gallup’s survey found a stunning gulf between Democrats and Independents on one side and Republicans on the other. 71% of Republicans still approve of Israel’s military action in Gaza, but that number is only 25% among Independents and 8% among Democrats. For what it’s worth, that same poll found Trump’s approval rating has declined 17 points among Independents since the start of his second term, and only 27% approve of his handling of the conflict.

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We are caught in Gaza’s starvation trap

By Hasan Jber

While that number means less to Republicans in red states and primary elections, in swing districts, battleground states, and nationwide races, it’s enormously significant. Independents split evenly between Trump and Kamala Harris last November, but that was itself a gain for Trump, because he erased Democrats’ nine-point advantage from the 2020 election. Back in 2022, before the war, Independents fell at 71% when it came to favorability for Israel, squarely between Republicans at 81% and Democrats at 63%.

It’s true that even in 2024, Israel ranked low among voters’ priorities when choosing between candidates, but it’s also true that Republicans counted for years on reflexive support for the Israeli government from moderates and the party faithful. Now the incentive structure has been transformed. 

And for the GOP, that fissure looks poised to get much worse. A Pew survey this spring found that “Republicans under 50 are now about as likely to have a negative view of Israel as a positive one (50% versus 48%). In 2022, they were much more likely to see Israel positively than negatively (63% and 35%, respectively).” That’s a shocking change, especially as younger generations begin to comprise more of the electorate. 

Bannon himself put it best when he told Politico this week, “It seems that for the under-30-year-old MAGA base, Israel has almost no support.” Bannon further believes it’s not just Young MAGA but that “Netanyahu’s attempt to save himself politically by dragging America in deeper to another Middle East war has turned off a large swath of older MAGA diehards.” It’s precisely the Israeli hard-liners’ awareness of this generational problem that impels them to act in a maximalist fashion in Gaza and beyond. Better to strike big now, the thinking goes, before the generational turnover empowers Israel-skeptics on both sides.

The problem for Jerusalem is that the harder they go, the more they intensify the sense of alienation in America, the one country whose public sentiments are downright existential for the Jewish state.

The letter arrived a few days after Department of Homeland Security agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a pro-Palestinian student activist at Columbia University, and revoked his green card. Now, they are trying to deport him over his political speech. The same week, DHS searched two student dorm rooms and arrested another international student who was involved in the campus protests against the Gaza war for overstaying her visa. Going forward, the State Department will be deploying artificial intelligence to scan the social media posts of tens of thousands of international students to search for pro-Palestinian sympathies.

The dragnet isn’t limited to the foreign-born. Under pressure from the White House, Columbia University is looking into an American student for writing an op-ed calling for divestment from Israel. On Friday, the Department of Justice announced an investigation into the Columbia protests to determine whether they violated federal terrorism laws; 59 other universities are also under investigation.

These are the actions of a President who claims to be restoring free speech to America after four years of online censorship orchestrated by the Biden administration. “This is the most significant threat to free speech in modern United States history,” civil rights attorney Jenin Younes, who sued the Biden administration for censorship in the Supreme Court case of Missouri v. Biden, tells me. “There is almost no precedent for deporting people in the United States merely for voicing dissent from the government’s foreign policy.”

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Britain has learned nothing from Palestine

By Aris Roussinos

For years, conservative politicians and “heterodox” writers (myself included) have complained incessantly about the threats to free speech posed by the social justice-oriented Left. About a decade ago, an authoritarian, schoolmarmish ideology took hold within Left-wing academic and activist circles. It then percolated into elite American institutions, including the media, the government, the nonprofit sector, and the human resources departments of major American corporations.

This ideology equated speech with violence. The thinking was that because spoken and written expressions of disfavor toward “marginalized communities” can lead to real-world discrimination and even physical attacks, such speech should be suppressed. Mobs of activists “de-platformed” speakers at public venues; universities enacted speech codes, created safe spaces and instituted trigger warnings; employers forced workers into training sessions on what to say and how to think.

Over time, this ideology began to shape government policy too. During the Covid pandemic, the federal government pressured social media platforms to suppress posts that questioned vaccine efficacy and criticized lockdowns. Joe Biden accused Facebook of “killing people” by not censoring the expression of views that the government disagreed with.

The Right baulked at this culture of censorship, as did some on the Left. The annihilation of “woke” ideology became the animating cause of the Republican Party, and may have won Trump the 2024 election. But all the while, a conservative strain of the exact same ideology was gestating on the Right, until October 7 unleashed it.

When the Gaza war erupted and militant student protests mushroomed on campuses all over the country, Republicans suddenly began to talk exactly like the social justice activists they so despised. In precisely the same way that Left-wing ideologues condemned every opinion that failed to conform to social justice dogma as “racism”, “misogyny”, or “transphobia”, the Right vilified not only the excesses of the pro-Palestinian movement, which were considerable, but declared just about any expression of opposition to Israel’s bombardment of Gaza as “antisemitism”. The very expression of those views, they insisted, put Jewish students in physical danger. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis banned Students for Justice in Palestine from the state’s public university campuses. Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed a bill that promised to make campuses into “safe spaces” for Jewish students. House Speaker Mike Johnson stood alongside students from elite private universities who claimed to be victimised by the political beliefs of their classmates.

For 18 months, the pro-Palestinian narrative has been systematically demonized. And now, to Republicans and many Democrats, pro-Palestinian activism has become synonymous with antisemitism, promoting terrorism, and endorsing Hamas. This narrative is taking on the force of law. In an NPR interview last week, deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Troy Edgar described Mahmoud Khalil’s participation in pro-Palestinian protests as ipso facto support for Hamas. He called Khalil’s advocacy “antisemitism activity” and compared it to terrorism.

This isn’t mere political rhetoric; it’s the legal basis for the administration’s case against Khalil. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has openly declared that he was arrested for being “a supporter of Hamas” and for “ril[ing] up all kinds of anti-Jewish student, antisemitic activities”.

Even if he had explicitly declared an allegiance to Hamas and a hatred of Jews, his views would still be protected by the Constitution. But no evidence has emerged that he holds either of these beliefs. Khalil has explicitly disavowed antisemitism in his movement, telling CNN that “the liberation of the Palestinian people and the Jewish people are intertwined and go hand-by-hand and you cannot achieve one without the other”.

Yet in the Right’s imagination, there is no distinction between supporting Palestinians and supporting Hamas. Just as, on the Left, concern for preserving women-only spaces can only indicate deep-seated transphobia, on the Right, criticizing Israel can only suggest a genocidal hatred of Jews. As such, to the movement’s critics, pro-Palestinian speech must be criminalized and suppressed, even at the cost of America’s commitment to free speech.

Trump’s stifling of free speech won’t end with Khalil. “The administration has indicated that its next strategy will be to go after US citizens for ostensibly engaging in terrorist activities,” Younes says. “Given that pro-Palestine activism is defined as terrorism, this is an absolutely horrifying prospect.”

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Britain has learned nothing from Palestine

By Aris Roussinos

Nor are Trump’s brazen attacks on free expression limited to pro-Palestinian speech. In its mission to expunge “woke ideology” from the federal government and those entities funded by it, Trump and Elon Musk have directed the National Science Foundation to do keyword searches of disfavored terms (such as “women” or “diverse”) in its grant database to determine where to make cuts. Other agencies have scrubbed references to such terms from their websites, as have their contractors in the private nonprofit world. Trump’s de-wokification campaign has begun tracing the outlines of China’s censorship apparatus.

The will to silence the political opposition is neither a specifically Republican nor Democratic predilection. Rather, it’s the irresistible impulse of whoever happens to be in charge. Those with the power to censor their ideological opponents will tend to do so; this was true of Biden’s administration and it’s just as true of Trump’s. But as with everything Trump does, it’s dialed up to 11.

If the courts don’t stop him, Republicans should prepare for a future in which they reap what they sow, just as the Democrats are doing now. The Right won’t be in power forever. When their ideological adversaries next return to the White House, the full force of the state could be turned against anyone who dissents from liberal orthodoxies, eclipsing what transpired even at the height of The Great Awokening. The scale of that suppression will make Biden’s Covid censorship subtle by comparison.

In their race to restrict each other’s right to free expression, both parties have contributed to this catastrophe. We’ll be fortunate if American democracy survives it.

The unexpected collapse of Assad’s regime, propped up by Russia and Iran, was the result of years of meticulous planning by Hussain al-Shara’a, known as Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) — an offshoot of al-Qaeda based in the Turkish-protected enclave of Idlib outside of Assad’s control. An astute operator who currently appears to prioritise governing Syria over messianic dreams of global jihad, Jolani timed his offensive to benefit from the US-sponsored ceasefire between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah, when the latter’s fighters had been withdrawn from Syria or neutralised. Meanwhile, Russia was preoccupied with Ukraine.

Assad’s fall is a major blow to Iran and a victory for Israel in its drawn-out contest with the Islamic Republic. But the biggest winner is probably Turkey, whose leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is a “soft” supporter of Islamism. The power vacuum created by the fall of the Assad’s regime, with soldiers abandoning their units, leaves the country with a number of forces outside of Jolani’s control. These include the Syrian National Army —  a militia supported by Turkey — as well as Iran-linked Iraqi militias and Kurdish forces in the north-east. The southern border has its own cluster of militias, including some manned by the Druze minority.

Jolani has signalled inclusiveness, ordering his fighters not to “instil fear” into people of different sects. The Shi’ite minorities, such as Alawites and Ismailis, will be feeling especially vulnerable, given the extent to which they relied on Assad’s Alawite-dominated Baathist regime for protection. Yet there is no guarantee that Jolani will succeed in asserting his authority over the mosaic of Syria’s different faith or ethnic communities, which tend to arm themselves in times of civil strife. While a majority of Syrians are Sunni, its society contains a large diversity of ethnic and religious communities including Alawis, Armenians, Assyrians, Chechens, Druzes, Catholic and Orthodox Christians, Ismailis and Turkomans. Before the civil war erupted, in 2011, polarising religious forces between Salafist-oriented groups supported by Turkey and Saudi Arabia, Syria had an impressive record of permitting pluralist religious spaces, though not political dissent.

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Why Syria is back at war

By Aris Roussinos

Assad’s fall is sure to have unnerved Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), along with other wealthy Gulf rulers. While they may relish the Iranian setback — two of Iran’s “axis of resistance” allies, Assad and Hezbollah, have effectively been sent off the field — the deeper implications of Syrian regime change must seem threatening. After years of civil war, during which some half a million people were killed and 14 million displaced, and which saw cities such as Aleppo pulverised by Russian air power and Syrian air force barrel bombs, the situation appeared to have been stabilised. The mainly Sunni rebels were safely contained in the north-western enclave of Idlib. And in May 2023, Syria was readmitted to the Arab League, a mark of “normalisation” supported by Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

Now, the region has fallen to chaos again. The kings and emirs of the Gulf have good reasons to fear that the recent scenes of jubilation in Damascus and other Syrian cities could become harbingers of a new Arab Spring. After all, popular feeling against repressive political structures often poses a threat to incumbent regimes, especially to dynastic rulers such as the Assads or Sauds. As the Israeli analyst Zvi Bar’el observes: “When militias take over a country, regardless of their ideology, it threatens traditional regimes that rely on authoritarian control. Such success as was seen in the Arab Spring, is contagious and encourages the revival of organisations and rebel movements.”

Saudi Arabia was relatively unaffected by the Arab Spring in 2011. A “Day of Rage” announced on Facebook aimed at imitating the massive street protests occurring in Cairo and other Arab capitals, but the movement fizzled out after would-be demonstrators received messages on their phones threatening fines or national expulsion. By contrast, in neighbouring Bahrain, where a Sunni dynasty presides over a restive Shi‘a majority, there were weeks of sit-ins and protests. The Saudis eventually sent troops across the causeway to assist the island’s government in restoring order.

The Assad regime may come to loom large in the annals of human torture and misery after a decade of civil war. But the Western-friendly Saudis, who are not currently facing the threat of internal conflict, can hardly be described as laggards in this area, with their high levels of political repression. Since MBS became the de facto ruler in 2015, around 1,400 people have been executed by the state, including minors.

The triumph of Jolani, and his Turkish backers, poses a dilemma for MBS. He and other Gulf rulers may be happy to see the anti-Western “axis of resistance” defanged, based as it is on a “Shi‘ite crescent” stretching from Iran to the Shi‘ite heartlands of southern Lebanon. The Saudi kingdom was founded on an alliance between the tribal power of the Al Saud family and the explicitly anti-Shi‘ite ideology of Wahhabism — and, for a long time, its strategy was to foster a disdain towards or even hatred of Shi’ism that persists to this day. When the Sunni minority in Iraq felt vulnerable after the US invasion that removed the (Sunni) Saddam Hussein, Saudi clerics spread fear of the Shi’ite danger, warning against the murder, torture and displacement of Sunni Iraqis. After the Arab Spring uprisings that lit the fuse of civil war in Syria, the Saudi government adopted a policy of “‘sectarianisation”. Madawi al-Rasheed, a historian and anthropologist, sees this as “a deliberate counter-revolutionary strategy…deployed to exaggerate religious differences and hatred and prevent the development of national non-sectarian politics”.

More than a decade ago, the emergence in Syria of a Sunni-dominated regime of neo-fundamentalist or “salafist” colouring would have suited the Saudi agenda perfectly. Over the years, the Saudi regime has spent billions of petrodollars promoting salafism (a neo-conservative type of religiosity, with emphasis on outward observance) throughout the Islamic world. According to several estimates, the sums spent by the Saudis on dawa (evangelism) prior to 2016 ranges from $70 billion to $100 billion. This dynamic dates back to the oil-boom years of King Faisal (r. 1964-75), who saw the Muslim Brotherhood and other salafist movements as necessary counterweights to the secular-oriented Arab nationalism promoted by Egypt’s charismatic leader Abd al-Nasser. Muslim Brotherhood exiles, such as Muhammad Qutb, brother of the movement’s leading intellectual Sayyid Qutb, were welcomed to teach in the Saudi kingdom, where Muhammad’s students included the young Osama bin Laden.

The Iranian revolution of 1979 and, more strongly, the attacks on New York and Washington in 2001 (with 15 of the 19 hijackers hailing from Saudi Arabia) led to an eventual volte-face in Saudi religious orientation. The change was epitomised by a state-sanctioned sermon delivered by Shaikh Abdulrahman al-Sudais, imam of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, hailing the vision of MBS as the “young, ambitious, and divinely-inspired” crown prince, comparable to the great Umar ibn-al-Khattab, second caliph of Islam or “deputy” to the Prophet Muhammad. The sermon, broadcast live on cable networks and social media, was delivered less than three weeks after the murder and physical dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. A former champion of the Saudi regime, Khashoggi was like Erdoğan a “soft” supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood — a movement that includes not only hardened jihadists such as Jolani, but constitutionally minded politicians such as Rachid al-Ghannouchi, leader of the Ennahda Party in Tunisia. The Brotherhood, once championed by King Faisal, is now anathematised in both the Gulf (with the exception of Qatar) and Washington as the primary threat to dynastic rule.

The Saudi volte-face was a necessary prerequisite to the Abraham Accords signed between Israel, Bahrain and the UAE in September 2020, (and later with Sudan and Morocco). It was negotiated in part by Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, a family friend and political supporter of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In September 2023, Saudi Arabia was on the point of “normalising” relations with Israel, with Riyadh allowing journalists to write op-eds in their favour, and MBS himself telling the US Fox News that “every day we get closer” to a deal. The October 7 attack by Hamas, killing more than 1,200 Israelis and taking several hundred hostages, put paid to these prospects, as Israel’s counter-attack on Gaza produced Dresden-like scenes of urban devastation and many thousands of civilian casualties. Last November, at a gathering of Islamic leaders in Riyadh, the Crown Prince even used the “G-word”, accusing Israel of carrying out “collective genocide” against the Palestinian people in Gaza.

Although the Gaza war may be coming to an end, “normalisation” between the Saudi kingdom and Israel now seems a distant prospect — even if Kushner returns as his father-in-law’s Middle East adviser next year. The international outrage caused by the Gaza counter-attack, along with genocidal statements by some Israeli leaders and the evident failure of the Biden administration to restrain its Israeli ally, has put the lid on normalisation for the foreseeable future. While Saudi Arabia, unlike Qatar, lacks a free press, polls are sometimes permitted. A rare poll published in December 1993 by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy found that 90% of Saudis think that Arab countries should sever all ties with Israel “in protest against its military action in Gaza”.

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Will Tehran be next?

By Edward Luttwak

Thanks largely to the Gaza war, and to the failure of the Trump administration to retaliate in support of the Saudis after an Iranian attack on the oil refinery at Abqaiq in September 2019, Saudi Arabia has pivoted away from US dependency. The Saudi-Iran rapprochement in 2023 was brokered, not by Kushner or the White House, but by President Xi Jinping of China. When the Chinese president visited Riyadh in December 2022, he was given fulsome honours. Not only was he greeted with a purple carpet, but Saudi jets escorted his plane streaming the green and white colours of the national flag. When Secretary of State Antony Blinken went to visit, MBS kept him waiting for some 12 hours before granting him an audience.

Saudi Arabia’s orientation away from the West and towards the global south is heralded by its upcoming membership of Brics. It will join the existing acronymic members — Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa — alongside Iran, the UAE, Argentina, Egypt and Ethiopia. Though faced with declining oil revenues, MBS may be heartened by the fact that he is now able to trade oil products in the Chinese currency, avoiding the sanctions imposed on Russia by US dollar leverage. And despite the cutbacks on his ambitious plans for Vision 2030, aimed at weaning his economy off oil, a future in a world market dominated by China and the global south could be rosy indeed. That is provided he is clever enough, or lucky enough, to avoid the fate of Saddam Hussein or Muammar Gaddafi — or, indeed, of Bashar al-Assad.

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.

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Yahya Sinwar was a monstrous ideologue

By Armin Rosen

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.