On Monday, during a visit to one of his two Trump brand golf fields in Scotland, Donald Trump sat alongside the British Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, and said a fact that should be painfully obvious for a passionate cable observer like himself: there is a “real famine” in Gaza following the war in Israel. “Based on television,” he said on the way to the press conference, “these children are very hungry.” He promised to work with European allies to fight against the crisis and mentioned something about “food centers”. This was portrayed as a direct rebuke to his close ally, israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Who Had Earlier Claimed, Evidence be damned, that there was “no starvation” in the war-torn strip, where fighting has continued largely without the hassas terrorist Atrael October 7, 2023. When Asked about Starmer’s Decision to Join France in Recognizing Palestine As An Independent State, Trump All But gave him one of these famous Trumpian’s inch signs. “I’m not going to take a stand,” the president told journalists. “I don’t mind that he takes a stand.”
But Thursday, Trump was back in a familiar role – does not only defend Israel but explicitly connecting his economic policies to continuous support for this. “Wow!” Has Trump on his social media site, “Canada has just announced that it supports the state for Palestine. This will make us very difficult to conclude a trade agreement with them. Oh “Canada !!! In the days that followed, Trump had sent his all -purpose envoy, Steve Witkoff, in Israel, prepared a new series of sanctions on the Palestinian authority, and said that the recognition of Palestine was equivalent to giving Hamas a victory. An easy but insufficient explanation for wild inversions is that it is only Trump being Trump, a creature of the news cycle, whose attention is captured by horrible images emanating from a war zone on Monday but whose opportunistic cynicism makes him take a fully different position a few days later when he feels an opening in a difficult negotiation.
But launching it like simply the switch to a tilt topper strikes me a bit next to the point. Trump’s overheated promises on Israel – as with his commitment to rapid and transformative measures on Ukraine on his return to the presidency – have been colliding with a more complicated reality on the ground for months. It turns out that wars do not end as if by magic because Trump clicks on his heels and demands that they do it. In February, Trump said the United States would take control of Gaza, “Levelle it”, would move its two million Palestinian residents there and build a new “Riviera du Middle East”-a fantastic vision that he followed a few weeks later by sharing a video generated by AI of “Trump Gaza”, which presented new buildings in the Building Building, Building Building, Building Building Territory Dazzling Mediteranne, the mouth on the counter, the Trump in the territory, the Ballower of the Territory, the Ballower of the Territory. And an image of the president and Netanyahu sipping cocktails on a beach.
I mention this embarrassment because Trump himself barely does it. (Tuesday, when Trump returned to his house in Scotland, an Air Force journalist asked his idea to get out of the Gazans of Gaza; Trump has always insisted that “you could do something spectacular” there, although “it is a concept with which some people fell in love and that some people did not do it.”) Of course, Netanyahu His insensitive and poorly informed. They have done what they learned to do so well in the last decade: humor, pretending to take it seriously and distract it. In February, Netanyahu was held next to Trump and declared her Gaza Riviera plan a “valid” idea that could “change history”. Even more problematic, some of the most extreme personalities of Netanyahu’s cabinet have seized Trump’s words as an implicit approval for their own plans to depopulate Gaza and Reannex the territory. “They believe that Trump gave them the license to continue him,” said Daniel Shapiro, American ambassador to Israel on Thursday during the presidency of Barack Obama. In March, with a more or less complete acquiescence of Trump, Netanyahu put an end to a ceasefire with Hamas that the United States had negotiated in January. The large -scale war of Israel has resumed and with it, an almost total blockage on the essential food aid and humanitarian aid for the people of Gaza – establishing the scene for the horrible images of hungry children that we see now.
The photos have provoked political blowback for israel not only among democrats in washington-twenty-seven democratic senators, a Majority of Their Caucus, Voted Unsuccessfully on Wednesday Night to Block New Shipments of Military Aid to Israel Loud Segments of Trump’s Maga Republican coalition. Publication Introductive Jew Called this “bipartisanslip”, and the signs of the internal discord of the GOP include Tucker Carlson devoting time on his series to a discussion on Israeli war crimes and the fervent Maga Congress of Georgia, Marjorie Taylor Greene, becoming the first Republican of the Chamber of accusing Israel of having committed a “genocide”. Overall, a new Gallup survey published this week has shown that only a third of Americans – a new low – the military action of Israel in Gaza. But the support of the war remains much stronger among the Republicans, a reminder of the Trump dilemma here – the photos of television are devastating, but it cannot simply move away from the unshakable support for Israel which, in recent years, has become a central ideological pillar of its party.
What is not said by these Republicans who questioning Israel’s conduct, however, is the extent to which Trump exacerbated the conditions on the ground for civilians in Gaza. For those of Washington, on the left and on the right, who still support Israel, a new fear has emerged accordingly – that a check for Trumpian white for Netanyahu could be the worst possible thing for Israel. “He assumes a lot of responsibility on where we arrived, including the negative of the consequences for Israel, in terms of pressure now and reputation damage that he is now durable,” said Shapiro.
As Shapiro has observed, the Wars of Israel in recent decades – and there have been many – will have tended to end until an “ramp out of the American ramp” was assembled. It has become the nature of the political dynamics between America and its besieged ally that “the Israeli Prime Minister must seem to be forced to do so by the United States. It is almost integrated into DNA. ” And yet, there is little sign that Trump, even with his critical words this week about famine in Gaza, is ready to make forcing.
The problem, Aaron David Miller, a veteran negotiator of peace of the Middle East, who served under six American secretaries of state, told me, is not that Trump will not be confronted with Netanyahu but that he is too often confused with an ideological supporter of Israel rather than a pragmatic and acquitted opinion “, the one whose Netanyhu is” the point, as Trump said on Thursday, or another, to “finish work”. And where does it lead? He does not remember the advice of Trump in Israel only a few months ago in the face of the intransigence of Hamas: “May all hell are bursting.”
Given the reality of a war that has now lasted almost two years, however, neither a total victory nor a total agreement seems realistic. A more likely scenario for the moment is that Trump and Witkoff will find a way to reduce a new interim agreement, allowing a little more humanitarian aid to go, perhaps forcing Hamas to publish more hostages. “In government, we say that the memo has three options: rupture, rupture and confusion,” said Miller, “and Donald Trump chose the option of confusion on Gaza.” Nobel Prize worthy, this is not the case.
During a summer of horror for Gaza, it is difficult to remember the uninformed promises of last winter, when Trump boasted, in almost world historical terms, of the “epic” ceasefire that he and his team had helped to make a broker. Now, when Trump is and does nothing at all, what can we do, but wishing that he has, for once, right? ♦
