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The Israeli right may soon be disenchanted with Trump

Thursday, Jan 16, 2025

Analysis

By Monitoring desk

THE most interesting detail of the hostage-cease fire deal that Israeli and Hamas officials agreed to on Wednesday lies neither in its terms, which mainly resemble what’s been on the table for months, nor in the fact that Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, is effectively acquiescing to Hamas’s continued grip on power in the Gaza Strip after loudly and repeatedly vowing he wouldn’t, says columnist Bret Stephens in an article for the New York Times.

Stephens says: It’s the way the deal was secured: by Steven Witkoff, Donald Trump’s billionaire friend and incoming Mideast envoy, in a blunt Saturday morning meeting with the prime minister. “The envoy explained to his host in no uncertain terms that Trump expected him to agree to a deal,” Amos Harel, the Haaretz military analyst, reported on Tuesday. “Things that Netanyahu had termed life-and-death issues,” he added, “suddenly vanished.”

The result, in the hostage case, is an underappreciated diplomatic paradox: Thanks largely to Trump, a deal demanded by the Israeli left and reviled by the right is about to come into effect. A year’s worth of diplomacy by the Biden administration is finally about to bear fruit on account of its political nemesis. The far-right parties that are part of Netanyahu’s coalition may bolt the government. And Netanyahu is far more prepared to bend the knee to Washington than he was when there were Democrats in the White House.

In the hostage deal, the price for Israel will in many ways be heavy. For every Israeli hostage released by Hamas, Israel will release several-fold Palestinian prisoners, many of them with Israeli blood on their hands. It was through one such release that Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind of the Oct. 7 massacre, was freed. The phased nature of the agreement — which begins with the release of 33 hostages, most of them living but some most likely dead — will leave an unknown number behind, raising their political value and giving Hamas an opportunity to extract additional concessions.

Most seriously, if Israel withdraws from the Philadelphi Corridor, the strip of land that separates Gaza from Egypt, Hamas may have the opportunity to rearm itself at scale, making an eventual replay of Oct. 7 and its aftermath more likely, though by no means inevitable.

A more difficult quandary for the Israeli right is what else Trump may want them to accept. The president-elect clearly wants an Israeli-Saudi normalization agreement as a capstone to the Abraham Accords he oversaw in 2020. For that to happen, the Saudis will demand a road map for a Palestinian state. Trump may also prefer to use Iran’s current weakness to negotiate a second nuclear deal, when what Netanyahu most wants is American help in an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear sites, possibly in the next weeks or months.