Netanyahu at the White House: Can he read the new room?

As President Trump prepares to receive Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and as the Gaza ceasefire deal enters its third week, fragility is its defining feature.

Achieving the deal coincided, of course, with the change of administration in Washington. There is a very rare near-unanimity inside Israeli political and commentariat circles that the Trump trepidation factor budged Netanyahu away from his previously stubborn refusal to accept reasonable terms for a ceasefire.

If the resumption of this hellscape war is to be avoided, the hostage and prisoner release completed, and if this is to have any chance of being a stepping stone to something better, then the three cardinal failings of the Biden administration's policy will need to be reversed.

That will be a tall order. But it is worth setting out the path thus far not travelled.

As negotiations neared closure, Netanyahu’s preference became ever more transparent — to avoid a prolonged ceasefire and to re-embrace the wartime leader mantle which has constituted his domestic political flak jacket.

After 15 months, the net result of Biden’s approach, premised on total impunity for, and indulgence of Israel, was to embolden the most extreme elements in Israeli politics, thereby prolonging the war and allowing Netanyahu to avoid hard choices.

Netanyahu’s calculation is rather simple and has been proven by the current near collapse of his coalition: tranquil domestic politics in exchange for a return to the ravages of war. One faction already quit his government in opposition to the deal, Itamar Ben-Gvir’s Jewish Power party; another has threatened to follow suit if the assault on Gaza is not resumed — Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism party. Lose both, and Netanyahu no longer has a governing majority.

Beyond coalition number-crunching, Netanyahu knows that if there is prolonged quiet and normal politics, if Israel's society and polity moves away from its war footing, then dormant divisions, protests, coalition tensions and the settling of accounts for what happened on October 7 await him. Netanyahu’s longevity in office becomes more tenuous.

Netanyahu’s concern that Trump might not automatically align with his narrow personal and political needs likely bounced the Israeli leader into the treacherous waters of deal-making. Above all else, Netanyahu will be in Washington assessing his room for manoeuvre in this respect.

Part of Netanyahu’s reluctance was his awareness that images of Israeli hostages emerging alive from Gaza could shift momentum and expectations inside Israeli society towards greater insistence on a full return of those being held — in other words, a definitive ceasefire implementing all stages of the deal.

But Netanyahu appears to be gearing up to stall that momentum and to crash or at least stall the ceasefire agreement. The Israeli leader is banking on deflecting blame to the other side, with America’s support. Netanyahu’s commitments to continue the war contradict the agreement he just signed. Israel is looking to provoke a crisis, also now undertaking a major escalation against Palestinians in the West Bank (its epicentre is Jenin, but includes widespread destruction of Palestinian infrastructure, imposition of new restrictions on Palestinian movement, mass arrests, and settler rampages).

Qatari and sometimes Egyptian meditation have been tireless and crucial, but they cannot succeed alone. Few believe Netanyahu will even consider entering the second phase of the deal. So the first challenge should come as no surprise — the Trump administration will have to desist from its predecessor’s indulgence of Netanyahu and decisively impact his cost-benefit ledger. The one piece of good news is that Netanyahu has reminded us in the last weeks that he can be pressured.

The second bar is equally, if not more, daunting — namely, the reality of Hamas. One of the great failures of Western policy has been to wish away or dismiss the undeniable resilience of Hamas.

In blunt terms, there is no solution that is sustainable or can come at an acceptable cost that is purely military. There has to be a political plan, grounded in the real world, not magical thinking. Hamas has not been defeated, far from it. The fighters of its military wing, the Al-Qassam Brigades, were highly visible during the hostage handovers. Their ranks are not nearly as depleted as Israeli and American military analysts would have us believe, and the losses in personnel that they have sustained are being replenished with new recruits, of which there will be a near-endless supply as long as Israel deploys such cruelty against Gaza’s civilian population and Palestinians are kept in such despair.

The declared Israeli military goal of Hamas raising the white flag of surrender and of demilitarization is not only unrealistic, it is a recipe for permanent war. Hamas could not be defeated on the battlefield and it will not negotiate itself out of existence or sign an agreement of surrender.

Many policymakers are aware of these realities. It is also a truism that after the events of October 7, a workable plan that acknowledges the Hamas reality has become harder to broach. Equally unavoidable, is that the nature of Israel's assault on Gaza and the bystander position adopted by the Palestinian Authority (rendering it largely irrelevant) have given Hamas a greater, not lesser, political salience. Likewise, suggestions of the inadmissibility of any arrangement that “leaves Hamas standing,” ignore the simplest truth of all — that whether it is called Hamas or something else, there will always be Palestinian resistance and armed struggle as long as the root cause of Israel’s denial of Palestinian rights and freedom, and its ongoing dispossession of Palestinians, remains.

Before hands are thrown up in despair, a crucial piece of information must be inserted (one known to many of the actors involved in political talks) — that Hamas is neither insisting on, nor particularly interested in, continuing to govern Gaza. That was true before this war, and it is certainly true now given the enormous needs for rehabilitation, reconstruction, assistance and funding in Gaza.

Hamas has negotiated — including recently at talks in Cairo with PA President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party and other factions — Palestinian-led governing arrangements, perhaps technocratic in nature, in which it would not be the ruling authority in Gaza. Mercenary forces, foreign armies or the direct administering of Gaza by the Israeli military will guarantee further resistance and chaos.

Finally, there is the not-so-small question of how an approach on Gaza and the overall Israeli-Palestinian question fits into the bigger regional jigsaw. Even a more prolonged Israeli-Palestinian de-escalation is unlikely to hold if it exists alongside an Israeli-U.S. push for escalatory zero sum outcomes, notably with Iran.

The default regional approach in a Trump administration might be an attempt to repeat Abraham Accords style normalization. The Biden administration tried to pick up where Trump left off and departed office with nothing to show for its considerable diplomatic investment.

The need now is to adapt to changed circumstances. For good reason, Saudi Arabia is considered the linchpin. Against the backdrop of a Gaza in ruins and an Arab (and indeed global) public exposed to such horrors on daily social media feeds, something more tangible than the stale rhetoric of distant political horizons is in order.

This is not a call for regional ambition to be curtailed, if anything, it should be expanded, in the language of deal-making: go large or go home.

What the region needs is a comprehensive reset and set of security arrangements — addressing and ending Israel’s decades-long military occupation and dispossession of Palestinians, but also building on the Chinese-brokered Saudi-Iran rapprochement. A smart approach would see this as an area where the U.S. and China can demonstrate a capacity to work together, that serves their respective interests and the global good.

A comprehensive regional security framework best avoids the U.S. being pulled into further conflict — that would be wasteful and upend American priorities. A repeat and intensification of the reckless history of U.S. military involvement in the region would also serve to accelerate the decline in American geopolitical influence. Most of the region is slowly reconciling and does not want war. The Iranian-led axis has incurred some losses, but it is far from imploding. Iran is ready to negotiate, not capitulate. A regional arrangement best guarantees the well-being and security of Israeli Jews — whose military is overstretched and fatigued and who are facing unprecedented international, legal, reputational, and economic vulnerabilities.

Would I suggest placing a bet on any, let alone all, of this agenda seeing the light of day? Sadly, not. The safe money should be on the new U.S. administration ushering in an even more permissive environment for Israeli crimes against Palestinians. The implications of the suggestion by Trump that Gaza should be “cleaned out” of Palestinians should not be exaggerated, but can also not be ignored and are being seized on in Israeli political circles to plan further crimes of ethnic cleansing. American resupplying of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel are of more immediate concern.

The trifecta of policy changes recommended would have fuses blowing across much of the Washington foreign policy establishment. Despite priding itself in being the anti-establishment disruptor, the Trump world is heavily penetrated by those who align with the kneejerk “Make Israel Great Again” instincts prevalent inside the Beltway.

Anyone serious about drawing a line under the failures, not only of the Biden administration, but of decades of reckless Washington disregard for how its Middle East policy undermines America’s interest, should know that a better recipe does exist. It is a failure maintained by layer upon layer of Washington special interests. It would take a true agent of change to barge into that kitchen and cook up a storm of peace-making.