U.S. President Donald Trump and Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu participate in a meeting in the Oval Office of the White House, Sept. 15, 2020. (Doug Mills/Pool/Getty Images)
(JTA) — WASHINGTON — For months on the campaign trail, Donald Trump has said he wants the war in Gaza to end — even reportedly setting a timeline for Israel to finish its campaign against Hamas in the Palestinian territory by his inauguration.
He also warned at the Republican convention that if Hamas does not release its hostages before Jan. 20, it will pay “a very big price.”
But will the campaign vow translate into real-world results? And will it deliver on the return of the hostages — one goal shared across Israelis and Jews of all political persuasions?
The answers depend, according to experts on Middle East policy — on specifics that Trump has not yet offered; on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who faces pressures that extend well beyond Trump; and, to a certain degree, on the definitions of the words “war” and “end.”
Multiple analysts said they expected fighting to continue in some form despite Trump’s warnings.
“The war in Gaza, the intensive fighting, ended months ago. What we have now is a counterinsurgency,” said Shira Efron, senior director of policy research at the Israel Policy Forum, an organization that seeks the establishment of a Palestinian State alongside Israel.
“Israel could say, OK, we ended the war in Gaza, but we are staying here for, I don’t know, 10 years until we can hand it over to a trusted partner,’” she said. “And this is something that Trump might be fine with.”
Mark Dubowitz, the president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, which favors a confrontational posture in dealing with Iran and its proxies, said he believed Trump understood that Israel would continue to engage militarily with its enemies. In a call with Netanyahu before the latest Israeli strike on Iran, Trump reportedly told the prime minister, “Do what you have to do.”
“I don’t think the incoming Trump administration is under any delusions that ‘ending the war’ essentially means no continued Israeli operations in Gaza or or in southern Lebanon or against Iran,” Dubowitz said. “I think what[Trump is] talking about are major ground operations in Lebanon and major ground operations in Gaza.”
Whether Trump would count the war as having ended if there are ongoing military operations in Gaza and Lebanon is unclear. As with many aspects of his agenda, the president-elect has offered few details about his vision for ending the conflict in the Middle East.
“I would say he expects them to end it by winning it, 100%, that’s how he always talks about ending wars,” a GOP spokeswoman who is Jewish, Elizabeth Pipko, told an Israeli broadcaster on Wednesday. Pressed to explain how a decisive win could come quickly now after Israeli forces have fought a grueling war in Gaza for more than a year, she blamed the Biden administration for preventing “decisive” action.
It’s also unclear whether an end to the war in Trump’s view would constitute one for what is left of Hamas. The terror group, which remains nominally in charge of Gaza despite having been decapitated and routed by Israeli forces, has so far been unequivocal that it will not agree to any ceasefire deal that would include the release of the hostages without a full cessation of hostilities and withdrawal of all Israeli troops.
Efron noted that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have been specific in outlining how they want the war to end. That solution includes a release of the hostages and a surge of humanitarian assistance to Palestinians in Gaza. In contrast, she said, “I’m not sure that we know where Trump and his folks are going to be,” Efron said.
Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of J Street — the liberal Jewish Middle East lobby that has called for a ceasefire for months, endorsed Harris and criticized Netanyahu’s government — said he could not predict whether Trump’s election would accelerate an end to the war. Before the election, Ben-Ami said that he believed Netanyahu was positioning himself to declare victory if Trump won.
“‘Who knows’ is the honest answer,” he said. “There is no such thing as a coherent foreign policy. There’s no coherence to anything that happens around Donald Trump, and I have absolutely no idea what his policy will be in 74 days, and I imagine he has no idea either.”
That has left ample room for Middle East insiders to speculate about what both Trump and Netanyahu might be thinking, and where the daylight between them might be.
“On the Netanyahu side, I think he is hoping he has a freer hand with Trump on Gaza in general,” said David Makovsky, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think tank that consults with both the U.S. and Israeli governments. He added, “He probably feels that the Trump administration will not will not put him under the same sort of scrutiny.”
But Makovsky said if Netanyahu thought he had fully alleviated pressure from the United States with Trump’s election, he could soon face a rude awakening. Trump told audiences on the campaign trail, including Arab-Americans in Michigan, that they could expect “peace in the Middle East” if he became president. Trump also faces pressure from the Republican Party’s isolationist flank — including Vice President-elect J.D. Vance — that opposes foreign entanglements and has cautioned against conflict with Iran.
“I think Trump is thinking about the Middle East breakthrough he would like, which is what the Saudis want,” he said. “But the Saudis say, ‘You can’t have a breakthrough, Abraham Accords 2.0, if Israel is in a war in Gaza.’ I don’t think Netanyahu is as certain on his relationship with Trump as some people think.”
Offir Gutelzon, an Israeli expat who lives in the Bay Area and who founded a group, UnXeptable, that protests Netanyahu in solidarity with Israeli antigovernment activists, said he did not believe Trump would be any more successful than Biden was in pressuring Netanyahu to end the war in Gaza.
Trump or not, Netanyahu faces pressure from his right wing, which favors continued war until Hamas is crushed and which downplays the return of the hostages.
“We are in a situation where Netanyahu needs to hold this government until the end of the budget [which must be approved by Dec. 31], and therefore he is unable to execute anything, unfortunately, due to his political survival needs,” Gutelzon said.
Gutelzon pointed to the fact that Netanyahu this week fired Yoav Gallant, the defense minister who argued that Israel had achieved its goals in Gaza and pushed for a postwar plan, as a sign that no end to the war, or hostage deal, is in sight, with or without Trump’s pressure.
“Firing Gallant is not a good sign for the hostages,” said Gutelzon, whose organization works with hostage families. “I honestly don’t know what Trump can do that Biden didn’t do — we hear from the hostage families themselves, that the main block for the hostage deal is Netanyahu and his government. And therefore it’s up to the government in Israel, not up to the president in the U.S.”
Netanyahu has clashed with Democratic presidents throughout his career, something that is thought to play well with his base of voters. But Helit Barel, a former director at Israel’s National Security Council, said that a clash with Trump, who is popular among Israelis, wouldn’t carry the same benefits for the prime minister.
“Skirmishes with Trump are much harder for Netanyahu to manage than those with a Democratic administration, because at least there he scores political points at home,” she said in an interview. “Trump, however, also appeals to Netanyahu’s base and the Israeli public as a whole really favor him.”
For the families of the remaining hostages — who include four Americans thought to remain alive — the election is a jolt to a stalemate that has not returned their loved ones. They exhorted Trump to work with the Biden administration during the transition period to secure the hostages’ release.
“This is an urgent, catastrophic humanitarian crisis, not a partisan issue,” they said in a statement issued Wednesday by the Hostages and Missing Families Forum. “Our family members in captivity in Gaza need a bipartisan coalition of brave, committed leaders to bring them home.”
It’s unclear if that advice will be heeded. In Trump’s first transition to the White House, he and his team famously rejected coordination and support from the Obama administration that was exiting.
Ben-Ami said he saw Trump’s antagonism against the war as the only glimmer of hope following the election.
“If there is any chance that Donald Trump will be an effective messenger to convince Prime Minister Netanyahu and this radical right government that the time has come to declare victory and stop this war and bring the hostages home, that will be a positive,” Ben-Ami said. “But it doesn’t change the fact that this is an unmitigated disaster for the United States and for the cause of democracy around the world.”
Efron said Trump’s record of unpredictability could nudge all parties — including Iran, which has backed Hamas and is threatening a third direct attack on Israel right now — toward ending the conflict.
“The good thing is that, because he’s unpredictable, despite being president four years — It’s pretty remarkable that he’s still so unpredictable – that he’s creating some sort of deterrence effect.” she said. “I’m sure the same conversations are happening now in Ukraine and China, Taiwan and North Korea and in Iran and Israel: ‘What is he going to do?’ And we don’t know. And because of this deterrent effect, [Trump] might have leverage on the players.”
With additional reporting by Deborah Danan.
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