Let’s Make a Deal

Few things about President-elect Trump’s Middle East policy can be said with any certainty, but two things are for sure: Universal values will play no part in his pursuit of a deal, and a viable, sovereign State of Palestine is not on his agenda.

The “lame duck” period in US politics refers to the 10 weeks between Election Day and Inauguration Day, when the outgoing president remains in office but their successor has been chosen and is waiting to take over. This is a period in which the person holding the highest office in the land may make bold moves, feeling that they are no longer beholden to anyone – especially if the person waiting in the wings is from a different party.

One of the most famous moves by a lame duck president was John Adams’ appointment of Federalist John Marshall as Chief Justice while reducing the number of seats on the Supreme Court in order to deny Republican President-elect Thomas Jefferson a Supreme Court appointment. In more modern times and relevant to our region, Barack Obama deviated from decades of US policy by abstaining rather than vetoing UN Security Council Resolution 2334 of December 2016, which reaffirmed the illegality of the settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) and called for the application of differentiation between the State of Israel and the OPT in all dealings.

After Donald Trump’s surprising victory in which the GOP took the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives, distraught progressives in the United States and Israel held out hope that President Joe Biden would follow in Obama’s footsteps and do something that would change the imbalance between Israel and Palestine in a way that Trump could not easily reverse. Their wishlist included halting the flow of weapons that could be used in the perpetration of war crimes and allowing acceptance of the State of Palestine as a full member of the United Nations, either through a yes vote or through abstention at the Security Council. Instead, the man who ran for office in 2020 with the promise that he would always stand for the values of human rights and dignity decided to thumb his nose at the principle of equality before the law and pardoned his son, Hunter, after repeatedly stating that he would not do so. With that move, Biden further undermined America’s faltering faith in its justice system, which a recent Gallup poll found stands at a record low of 35%, and stuck it to the party he feels betrayed him. 

Anyone watching the world news in recent weeks would find it hard to believe that Inauguration Day is still ahead of us.  Biden has exited the Oval Office de facto if not de jure. Trump is already boasting about the ease with which his premature assumption of power has been accepted, declaring at a recent press conference that everybody is lining up to be his friend. Rather than responding to appeals to make a grand gesture that would leave the Palestinians on slightly firmer ground, Biden abandoned them to the whims of the president-elect.

What lies ahead for the Middle East under a Trump presidency? No analyst who values their reputation would dare predict what this capricious leader has in mind, and his appointments to date contribute to that uncertainty. Although Israeli officials are talking as if his picks are their wet dream, nothing is in the bag.  Upon hearing of his nomination, Mike Huckabee, Trump’s designated ambassador to Israel, expressed enthusiastic support for Israeli annexation of the West Bank, but he was quick to add that policy will ultimately be determined by the president. Huckabee knows that the key to remaining in Trump’s good graces is leaving no questions about who calls the shots.

After checking off his debt to the evangelicals with the Huckabee appointment, Trump turned his attention to the Arab American community and named businessman Massad Boulos, Tiffany Trump’s father-in-law and the man who stumped on Trump’s behalf in Arab and Muslim communities, as his advisor on Middle East affairs.  Announcing the Boulos appointment, Trump hailed his skills as “a dealmaker.”  Boulos will be supporting real estate investor Steve Witkoff, Trump’s pick for Middle East envoy, whom he also applauded as “a highly respectable leader in business.”

Despite all the uncertainty, these appointments indicate that Trump’s quest for Middle East peace will not be driven by a sense of goodwill toward men but rather by his wish to close a megadeal that will boost the US economy and his popularity and possibly win him the coveted Nobel Peace Prize. And at the heart of that deal lies Saudi Arabia.

Trump already dispatched Witkoff for talks with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS) and Boulos for talks in Qatar and Jordan. Adam Boehler, his special envoy for hostage affairs, is in the region amid reports of an imminent ceasefire agreement. The Biden administration is trying to paint this flurry of activity as the Trump team’s effort to study the issues, but there is no question that we are witnessing the start of the new administration’s diplomatic endeavors.

Trump’s views on the Israel-Palestine conflict are not a total enigma. Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and the architect of the 2020 “annexation for normalization” policy, is heavily invested in Saudi Arabia and still dreams of expanding the Abraham Accords.  In the wake of the death and destruction that Israel has wreaked on Gaza, however, MBS dare not appear to sell out the Palestinian people. So it is that Boulos, in an interview to the French Le Point, emphasized that “Saudi Arabia is not demanding the creation of a Palestinian state today” and revived the Bush-era concept of “a roadmap” to Palestinian statehood.

Trump keeps repeating that he wants an end to the war and an end to the killing, but his warning that there will be hell to pay if there is no hostage deal by the time he takes office was directed solely at Hamas, not Prime Minister Netanyahu who by all accounts has done his share to scuttle previous rounds of negotiations. In his Time interview remarks about not wanting to see a repeat of the fighting every couple of years, Trump refers again and again to October 7, without one mention of the toll paid by the Palestinians. In fact, the only time the word Gaza appears in the interview is in a question posed by one of the interviewers, and the issue of humanitarian aid is raised only in the Ukrainian context.

It remains to be seen whether Trump will dust off his “Peace to Prosperity” plan or opt for one of the “numerous” other options he referred to in Time, without naming any of them. He may enable annexation of some West Bank territory, although he underscored that it’s not a “likely scenario.” He may give Israel the green light to attack the Iranian nuclear facilities or order the US Air Force to do the job, or he may go for a JCPOA-like agreement whose main difference from the earlier one is that it will bear his signature. He is unpredictable, and while it’s clear that he wants a quiet Middle East, it is unclear how he plans to get it.  Two things, however, are irrefutable: Universal values will play no part in his pursuit of the ultimate deal, and a viable, independent, sovereign, contiguous State of Palestine is not on his agenda.