But America Can Still Use Its Leverage to End the War in Gaza
Following the Israeli and U.S. attacks on Iranian nuclear sites and the subsequent Iranian-Israeli cease-fire, another agreement seemed to be close at hand, this time in Gaza. Late last week, however, both the United States and Israel halted their participation in the negotiations, accusing Hamas of a lack of coordination and good faith. Hamas, the Islamist organization and de facto authority in the Gaza Strip, wants the United States to guarantee that the cease-fire will become permanent, Israel to withdraw its military, and the UN and other aid providers to surge humanitarian assistance to Palestinians who are facing mass starvation.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s continued deference to Israel and his withdrawal from the talks are a huge mistake. Unless a deal can be made, Trump’s desire to preside over a broader regional peace that includes the normalization of diplomatic ties between Israel and Saudi Arabia will be dead in the water. Such a comprehensive regional agreement is desperately needed after 21 months of death and destruction in Gaza and persistent conflict between Israel and much of the Middle East.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ultranationalist governing coalition, however, have not shown any signs that they are ready to prioritize a durable peace. Even if the remaining Israeli hostages held by Hamas since October 2023 are released, Netanyahu has emphasized that an end to the war in Gaza is impossible until Hamas is completely disarmed and its leaders exiled. And even then, he wants Israel to maintain security control over Gaza and the West Bank indefinitely. Meanwhile, as Egyptian, Qatari, and U.S. mediators were shuttling back and forth between the Palestinian and Israeli negotiators, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz advanced a plan for relocating Gaza’s population into a so-called humanitarian city—what former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert refers to as a “concentration camp”—built on the ruins of Rafah near the enclave’s southern edge. Under Katz’s proposal, over two million Palestinians would be held in an area a third the size of Washington, D.C., until they can be resettled abroad.
“We are destroying more and more homes, and they have nowhere to return to,” Netanyahu said of Gaza’s population in May. “The only inevitable outcome will be the desire of Gazans to emigrate outside of the Gaza Strip.” So even if he were to agree to a short-term cease-fire, addressing Palestinians’ right to self-determination cannot be part of any deal because he considers the notion of an independent Palestinian state to be a threat to Israel, as the Israeli prime minister stated during a visit to the White House on July 7.
But Netanyahu’s formula to end conflict in the Middle East is not fit for purpose. No Arab government will entertain the forced displacement of Palestinians. Moreover, Arab states have made it increasingly clear that they are no longer willing to deepen their ties or normalize relations with Israel until Israel accepts a sovereign Palestinian state. France, meanwhile, has announced that it will recognize the state of Palestine. The British government is under growing domestic pressure to go beyond the sanctions it has imposed on specific Israeli cabinet ministers and approve a full embargo on arms exports to Israel and support the International Criminal Court’s prosecutions of Netanyahu and the former Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes, including for the deliberate starvation of Gaza’s population.
If left unchecked, Netanyahu may soon succeed in forcing a mass displacement of Palestinians, preventing Trump from properly recalibrating the United States’ Middle East policy and from reducing the U.S. military footprint in the region. The blunt truth is that Netanyahu is one of a small handful of regional actors whose interests do not broadly align with Trump’s. And Trump has more room to maneuver than any other recent American president. He must deploy the full weight of U.S. power to force Netanyahu to end his territorial ambitions and accept a peace that enables recognition of an independent state of Palestine. That is the only way Trump can be a genuine peacemaker in the Middle East.
IMMOVABLE OBJECT
Netanyahu has been an obstacle to Trump’s objectives in the Middle East since the U.S. president’s first term in the White House. Back then, Trump hoped to make a grand Middle East peace deal his signature achievement. But by allowing Netanyahu to have a hand in drafting his 2020 plan for a comprehensive regional peace, Trump killed any chance he had for success. That plan sought to resolve all outstanding issues between Israel and the Palestinians in Israel’s favor: there would be no Israeli military withdrawal from the West Bank, no evacuation of any Israeli settlements, and no right of return for Palestinian refugees, either to Israel or to the Palestinian territories. Predictably, Palestinians refused to accept their permanent subjugation under a regime that the International Court of Justice judged in 2024 to be equivalent to apartheid rule. Netanyahu’s strategy allowed him to appear a peacemaker while denying Trump a true peace deal that addressed Palestinian rights head on and cleared the way for Israel’s integration into the region.
Trump may not have fully appreciated the extent to which Netanyahu’s political identity was founded on denying Palestinians’ national identity. “Everyone knows that I am the one who, for decades, has blocked the establishment of a Palestinian state,” Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, asserted last year. He was not being braggadocious; he spoke the truth. For over two decades, he has been instrumental in putting obstacles in front of any agreement that would further Palestinian self-determination.
Netanyahu’s strategy is to deny Trump a true peace deal.
Netanyahu is now better positioned than ever to not only prevent the creation of a Palestinian state but also annex the occupied Palestinian territories for Israeli settlement. Days after Hamas’s October 2023 attack on Israel, the Israeli Ministry of Intelligence submitted a plan to Netanyahu—versions of which had been in circulation since 2018—recommending the depopulation of Gaza under the guise of “humanitarian voluntary evacuation.” The Israeli government went on to prosecute a military campaign that destroyed most of the enclave and its agricultural land; what buildings still stand are being methodically leveled in controlled bombings.
Netanyahu has repeatedly claimed that killing Palestinians—the toll stands at more than 59,000 Palestinians—and rendering Gaza unlivable was necessary to destroy Hamas. His critics often counter that he has prolonged the war in Gaza to keep himself in office as he battles corruption charges in court. But his underlying goals are bigger, and if not for the ongoing trial, Netanyahu would likely be pursuing the same policies in Gaza. His government has established a bureau to find willing third countries to take Palestinians from Gaza. And in the West Bank—where there is no Hamas enemy to point to—the Israel Defense Forces launched the so-called Operation Iron Wall mission in January to, as Katz, the Israeli defense minister, explicitly put it, apply the lessons of what the military accomplished in Gaza. More than 40,000 Palestinians were forced from their homes, the greatest displacement in the area since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Essential infrastructure and symbols of Palestinian national identity were destroyed, and streets were widened to make way for future Israeli tanks. Netanyahu also seized control of the Palestinian land registry in the West Bank to expedite the transfer of Palestinian private land to Israeli settlers.
Netanyahu has no intention of deviating from the platform of his Likud party, which states that “between the Sea and the Jordan there will be only Israeli sovereignty.” As he stated in December 2022, his government’s guiding principles are that “Jewish people have an exclusive and indisputable right” to settle in the entirety of “Judea and Samaria,” encompassing all the West Bank. Under Netanyahu’s leadership, Zionist parties to the left of Likud have shifted toward his position. In July 2024, the Israeli parliament overwhelmingly approved a bill opposing the establishment of any Palestinian state that included territory west of the Jordan River; last week, an even larger parliamentary majority called for annexing the West Bank.
MORAL MAJORITY
If October 7, 2023, and its aftermath established anything for key Arab states, however, it is that the need for regional peace and security is urgent—and that peace between Israel and the Palestinians is indivisible from this aim. The lack of a resolution has become a national-security noose around the neck of every state in the Middle East—whether because of the spillover of fighting since October 7, the threat of refugee flows across borders, or the impact of persistent regional turmoil on states’ ability to act on essential national development goals. Even if some appetite still exists among Arab leaders to deepen relations with Israel, they are now constrained by the fact that their populations’ opinions of Israel are overwhelmingly negative, as Michael Robbins and Amaney Jamal wrote in Foreign Affairs in January.
Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, has been clear: after what he referred to as Israel’s “collective genocide” in Gaza, his country can accept only a normalization process that resembles the one proposed by the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, adopted at an Arab League summit: Israel must first accept a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital, and only then will Saudi Arabia normalize relations. In early July, the crown prince’s foreign minister, Faisal bin Farhan, reiterated that position, saying that a cease-fire in Gaza must be “a prelude to the establishment of a Palestinian state.” And despite statements in June by Trump administration officials that Lebanon and Syria might be on the cusp of embracing Israel as a neighbor, the Israeli air attacks that have pounded eastern Lebanon and the heart of Damascus this month make that unlikely.
Significant elements of Trump’s domestic base, meanwhile, want him to prioritize American interests, which they believe diverge from Netanyahu’s vision for the Middle East. Figures such as Tucker Carlson question the unconditional financial, military, and diplomatic support the U.S. government gives to Israel. Others go further: in June, for instance, the influential podcaster Theo Von called out Israel’s “genocide” of Palestinians during an interview with Vice President JD Vance. These MAGA influencers are not outliers; they are reflective of broader changes in the Republican Party and the country. A March survey by the Pew Research Center found that 37 percent of Republicans overall and half of Republicans under 50 now hold an unfavorable view of Israel. And according to a poll released in May by Ipsos and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, over 60 percent of Americans now agree that Israel is playing a negative role in “resolving key challenges in the Middle East.”
CLEAR PATH
This offers Trump some freedom to break from Washington’s decades-long approach mandating that there be “no daylight” between Israeli and U.S. policy in the Middle East. The president should listen to his public and shift the U.S. government’s relationship with Israel so it better reflects Americans’ preferences, as well as the desires of most U.S. partners in the Middle East. That means preventing Netanyahu from thwarting a permanent cease-fire; accepting that it is impossible, in the near term, to eliminate Hamas from Palestinian society; helping strengthen Palestinian institutions; and putting Palestinian statehood at the center of any regional agreement. Any peace deal that Trump proposes or backs will have to look very different than the one he put forward in 2020, when Netanyahu stood beside him at the White House without a Palestinian counterpart.
Trump should aim for a deal that draws support from a wide variety of stakeholders in the Middle East, throughout the Muslim world, and in Europe. He will need many governments in those regions on his side to help provide the many billions of dollars necessary to fund Gaza’s reconstruction. The essential elements of a cease-fire deal that could lay the foundation for a more comprehensive regional peace already exist in two documents: the so-called 2024 Beijing Declaration (which the major Palestinian political factions, including Fatah and Hamas, signed last year) and the Arab League’s Plan for the Early Recovery, Reconstruction, and Development of Gaza, backed by the 57-member Organization of Islamic Cooperation and by France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom. According to Jeremy Scahill’s reporting at Drop Site News, Hamas negotiators have offered Israel an “all for all” formula as long as the United States guarantees that Israel will not resume its attacks after Israeli hostages are freed.
To take advantage of this opportunity, Trump must be willing to hold Israel to a commitment not to restart hostilities anywhere in the occupied Palestinian territories. Then he would have to secure an agreement from Israel to allow international peacekeeping forces into Gaza, and eventually the West Bank, as a broader political accord is negotiated. Egyptian and EU forces were successfully deployed during the short-lived cease-fire that began in January, and they should be called on again. Their presence could allow signatories to implement the Beijing Declaration, in which Hamas agreed to hand over governance and security control in Gaza to the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority and Fatah agreed to hold elections and begin a process to integrate Hamas into the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
Successful solutions to other once intractable conflicts, such as the decades of sectarian and civil strife in Northern Ireland, show that enduring peace is possible only when all stakeholders are invited in. And Hamas is hardly the only entity that seeks the outcome delineated in the Beijing Declaration. A March poll conducted by the Institute for Social and Economic Progress, a think tank based in the West Bank city of Ramallah, found that more than 60 percent of Palestinians in Gaza supported a unity government for postwar rule and that over half said they would also support rule by the Palestinian Authority.
Only when Gaza and the West Bank come under one authority can the enormous task of healing and rebuilding in Gaza begin. And only a unified and legitimate Palestinian leadership can guarantee that the terms of any future political agreement with Israel will be upheld. Ultimately, to broker a real peace between Israelis and Palestinians, Trump will need the PLO, the internationally recognized interlocutor possessing the legal capacity to sign an agreement on behalf of all Palestinians. And by supporting the inclusion of Hamas under the organization’s umbrella, he would mitigate the potential for spoilers.
BREAK THE MOLD
Achieving all this would likely have been too tall an order for most U.S. presidents over the past three decades. But the war in Gaza has cost the United States an extraordinary amount. According to estimates from the Watson School of International and Public Affairs at Brown University, the United States provided Israel with at least $22.7 billion during the war’s first 12 months. That was far above the annual cap of $3.8 billion mandated in a ten-year memorandum of understanding between the United States and Israel that extends until 2028. On top of this monetary assistance, the U.S. government has been roped into a game of international whack-a-mole on Israel’s behalf to prevent countries such as France and the United Kingdom from imposing sanctions on Israel or recognizing a Palestinian state.
Rather than expend such resources and political energy to win Israel’s forever war in Gaza—one that the United States’ Arab partners oppose—the Trump administration must recalibrate U.S. policy toward winning the peace. Trump has been uniquely willing to break with Israel on many issues—for instance, by making deals with the Houthi militant group in Yemen and opening a diplomatic dialogue with Syria’s new leader, Ahmed al-Shara, despite his past alignment with al-Qaeda. Trump will have to break with Netanyahu again, regardless of the implications for the Israeli leader’s political future. He should walk back his previous statement supporting the resettlement of Palestinians from Gaza and make the case directly to Israelis that their security is tied to the security of Palestinians and the rest of the region. With a recent Pew poll indicating that more than 80 percent of Jewish Israelis have confidence in Trump as a world leader, he can credibly argue that opposing Palestinian self-determination will undermine Israeli security and preclude normalization with Arab states and Israel’s regional integration.
When it comes to Israel and the Palestinians, Trump’s administration has already shown flexibility by breaking with Washington orthodoxy to open channels of communication with Hamas to secure the release of an American held in Gaza. Now, putting American interests first requires brokering an immediate and permanent cease-fire in Gaza. If Trump goes further, he might have a peace-prize-worthy achievement—but not if Gaza starves.