America Asia U.S. Principal2 

Bibi and Trump beyond the agreement with Hamas

4 min read EUGENIO GARCIA GASCON

EUGENIO GARCIA GASCON

The relationship between Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu is truly peculiar. One is 78 years old and the other 75. One has amassed a huge fortune while the other is reluctantly content with a more modest fortune. One is beginning his second term as president of the most powerful country in the world and the other is approaching the end of his political career with great power but licking his wounds from the war in Gaza.

Netanyahu's power is beyond doubt. In the very days we are writing these lines, the incoming Trump administration has issued dire threats against the judges and staff of the international court in The Hague that is pursuing Netanyahu for alleged war crimes committed in Gaza. The entire machinery of the American administration is once again at the service of a foreign prime minister, which happens frequently.

The relationship between the two men is unusual. During his previous term, Netanyahu named a Jewish settlement after Trump in the Syrian-occupied Golan Heights to flatter the president. Shortly before that, the president had recognized the Golan Heights as part of Israel and had ordered the transfer of the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, unilaterally recognizing the holy city as part of the Jewish state, contrary to international law. And still a little earlier, the president had imposed very harsh sanctions against the Islamic Republic of Iran, Israel's sworn enemy.

What Joe Biden failed to do in fifteen months, Trump has done in just a few days, leading Israel to the end of the Gaza war. The final agreement with Hamas was carefully crafted by Biden in May 2024, but Netanyahu rejected it then. Now, eight months later, he has had no choice but to accept it in its broad outline and in its details.

But Netanyahu is afraid of Trump. Let us look at some details that confirm this in three reports collected in recent weeks by the American and Hebrew media: 1) Recently, a US journalist asked him if he trusts Netanyahu, and Trump replied that he does not trust anyone. 2) Trump retweeted a video by a Columbia University professor stating that Netanyahu is dragging the United States into a war with Iran. And 3) Netanyahu's entourage has leaked that Trump has told him that he wants a peaceful Middle East, that he does not want Israel to get involved in Syria, since he will be very busy with domestic US politics and other international affairs.

However, this probably does not mean that Trump will forget about Israel. Senior officials appointed by the incoming president have openly talked about a normalisation of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, a gesture that the Americans hope will turn the region into a calming pool (with the exception of Iran), although there are no full guarantees of this, far from it.

Another important detail: the families of the Israeli prisoners held by Hamas in Gaza revealed this January that, in one of their meetings, Netanyahu told them that under the Trump administration Israel will be much better off than under Biden. It is not that the Biden administration has been anti-Israeli, since it has delivered to Israel every day all the weapons and bombs it has needed during the fifteen months of war, and has allowed it to kill nearly 50.000 Gazans, most of them civilians, women and children, but that Trump will be more positive in relation to Israel. Biden's great support has not been enough in the eyes of Netanyahu, who anxiously awaits the new administration.

But Trump always has an unpredictable edge, such as when he retweets that Netanyahu is dragging the United States into a war against Iran. The Hebrew press claims that such talk is anti-Semitic, since anti-Semites accuse Jews of causing most of the world's wars. It is not trivial for Trump to echo such a claim, or to imply that he does not trust Netanyahu.

All this is happening when Netanyahu is in a delicate situation and his future is arguably in Trump's hands, something that was not the case with Biden. Trump is the only one who can stop Netanyahu, and both know it, hence Netanyahu has a peculiar relationship, one of some caution or fear, with the new president. With the end of the war, Netanyahu will have to attend the trial where he is accused of corruption. He does not seem to want to call elections, even though the opposition demands it, and the development of the trial is up in the air. It could last a couple more years, depending on the defense strategy, and, ultimately, Netanyahu could reach an agreement with the prosecution to leave politics in exchange for an acquittal. But that will still take some time.

Eugenio Garcia Gascon has been a correspondent in Jerusalem for 29 years. He is a Cirilo Rodríguez journalism award winner.
EUGENIO GARCIA GASCON
Contributor

Posts

The Zangezur corridor, the key piece of relations between Armenia and Azerbaijan

Jayro sanchez 0

JAYRO SANCHEZ
For Baku there are only two alternative routes to the long detour to bring its gas to Europe. The first is to transfer the gas to Turkey through northern Iran, although it is unfeasible. Tehran is one of Russia's closest partners in the region and has always distrusted Azerbaijan and its relations with the Azeri-Iranian minority, which it sees as a pan-Turkic fifth column within its own population.

Xi and Taiwan: What's New at the XX CCPh Congress?

XULIO RIOS 0

XULIO RIOS
Xi Jinping said little about Taiwan in his report – the short one – to the 1992th CPC Congress. Perhaps the most outstanding thing has been the fact of making a single mention of the "600 Consensus", abounding in everything else (barely XNUMX words) in the usual topics.

View of Huawei's research campus in Shenzhen, designed after several European cities. Photo: Javier García

Investigate to survive

Javier García

JAVIER GARCIA
Few companies in the world have been as attacked from a state as the Chinese technology company Huawei has been by the United States government. Blacklisted, prevented from doing business in the US and also from importing semiconductor material with minimal US technology or components anywhere in the world. Vetoed to install their 5G networks in many countries due to pressure from Washington, unable to use Google's Android operating system on their mobile phones.

All this in the name of "national security", the new multi-purpose expression coined by Washington to twist when it suits competition on equal terms and the basic rules of the "free market" on which its entire economic system is supposedly based.

Achieving the two-state solution in the context of the Gaza war

JEFFREY D SACHS 0

JEFFREY D. SACHS AND SYBIL FARES
The two-state solution is enshrined in international law and is the only viable path to lasting peace. All other solutions - continuation of Israel's apartheid regime, a binational state or a unitary state - would guarantee the continuation of the war by one or both sides. However, the two-state solution seems hopelessly blocked. But it's not like that. Here is a way.

Peace can come through the immediate implementation of the two-state solution, making Palestine's admission to the United Nations the starting point, not the end point. UN member states will have to impose the two-state solution, rather than wait for another Palestinian-Israeli negotiation to fail.

The disarmed left

Txema Garcia Paredes 0

TXEMA GARCIA WALLS
It must be said loud and clear. The so-called left, in general and to very different degrees, seems to be increasingly falling into the trap set by rampant capitalism on a planetary level. It plays on its field and by its rules, those imposed by capitalism itself. And so, it is impossible to win. And it does so with a referee bought in that great stadium with little lights that they have built called “Democracy” through a parliamentary system based on the delegation of votes, on “behave yourself and stay at home” and “don’t bother me again for four years” when you can vote again so that everything remains practically the same.

Seymour Hersh, Nord Stream and the silence of Europe

MIGUEL MOLLEDA

MIGUEL MOLLEDA
On September 29, 2022, the Swedish coast guard released disturbing images of bubbling, frothy waters gushing over the surface of the Baltic Sea. They were effervescences from a huge gas leak under the cold northern currents, emerging to the sea surface. The Russian Nord Stream pipelines supplying cheap gas to Europe had just been dynamited and disabled. From that moment on, the major American media began a tiresome exercise in journalistic tightrope walking with one main mantra: “it is a mystery”.