Netanyahu-Trump meeting and the fate of the ethnic cleansing and genocide stop proposal

Netanyahu is scheduled to meet with US President Trump tomorrow, Tuesday, February 4, 2025, at the latter’s invitation, to be the first foreign official to visit Washington and meet with the president who has been inaugurated less than two weeks ago. This shows the extent of America’s interest in Israel’s position in the Middle East, where tension and instability have reached their peak, especially after the Al-Aqsa Flood operation carried out by the Palestinian resistance forces in the Gaza Strip on October 7, 2023, which Israel considered an existential threat to the state, and subsequently launched a war of genocide against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip that continued until the signing of the Doha Agreement, which entered into force on Sunday, January 19, 2025, 24 hours before the inauguration ceremony of the president-elect.

The Middle East was President Trump’s first foreign stop in his first term, starting in Riyadh on May 20, 2017, where the first Arab-Islamic-American summit was held. Trump had called for the formation of an Israeli-Arab-Islamic-American military alliance to confront Iran as a threat to the security and stability of the region.

After this visit and during his first term, the American embassy was moved to Jerusalem, and the so-called “Deal of the Century” was published, which was rejected by the Palestinians, and some Arab countries normalized their relations with Israel away from the condition of declaring the establishment of the Palestinian state as stipulated in the Arab Peace Initiative in 2002, matters that appeared to be goals of an American-Israeli plan to liquidate the Palestinian cause and end Israel’s existence as a normal state in the region.

While Trump has achieved some of the goals of the Israeli Jewish right and the American Christian (Evangelical) supporter of Israel and its goals, he realizes, as his predecessor Biden did, that the Israeli intelligence services and the army have failed miserably, first in anticipating the threat, and second in defeating the Palestinians, which makes Israel’s need for America much greater than the capabilities of Smotrich, Ben-Gvir, and even Netanyahu himself.

In fact, the Israeli failure to anticipate the threat, and then the failure to achieve the war’s goals, is a failure of the American state and the rest of the countries that are partners with Israel and have the largest share in its manufacturing project in the region, which makes trying to fix this failure or some of it the main topic of the meeting between Netanyahu and Trump, which will find its manifestations in the statements that will be issued from this meeting, and the policies that will follow from both Washington and Tel Aviv towards the region, especially with regard to consolidating the ceasefire, as well as Biden’s proposal for ethnic cleansing.

The sense of failure in both Israel and America is most clearly evident in the discussions that have begun to surface, especially among intellectuals and opinion writers in both countries, which mostly revolve around the fact that the Al-Aqsa flood and the subsequent war of extermination have forced Israel and its partners to confront questions that they have always sought to evade providing answers to, such as: Can Israel’s military power guarantee a solution? Will extermination lead to the end of existence? Or will extermination deepen the abyss? Will Israel, supported by America, continue its project of extermination and ethnic cleansing, or will it choose a different path? And will the exhausted Israeli society agree to live in the shadow of an eternal war imposed on it by its current right-wing government?

It is clear that these questions and others will dominate tomorrow’s meeting, as they will find their manifestations in the topics that will impose themselves on the agenda of Tuesday’s meeting. I argue here that there are three topics that will dominate the meeting’s agenda: the first relates to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the second relates to Iran, and the third relates to the Palestinian issue and the independent Palestinian state. Netanyahu’s position on the third topic will determine the fate of the second and third stages of the Doha ceasefire agreement and the future of Trump’s plan for ethnic cleansing.

While Israel is trying to downplay the importance of the third issue, and present its media as was clearly seen in Haaretz newspaper on Sunday morning, 2-2-2025, the truth is completely different, as the Palestinian issue cannot be ignored, especially with regard to the ceasefire agreement and the implementation of its three stages, due to the relationship of the Palestinian issue to the first two issues related to Saudi Arabia and Iran.

The first indications of this came in Netanyahu’s appointment of a Minister of Strategic Affairs and a close confidant of his (Ron Dermer) before he traveled to Washington to meet with the president, and in his prevention of the Israeli delegation from traveling to Doha and starting negotiations on the second phase of the agreement, which was scheduled to begin today, Monday, according to the text of the agreement, and in considering Netanyahu’s meeting with President Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East (James Witkoff) tomorrow as the beginning of this round of negotiations.

This article will not address the Iranian issue in tomorrow’s meeting, as a separate article will be devoted to it. Instead, it will focus on the Saudi issue. Regarding Saudi Arabia, there are two issues: the first relates to a defense treaty with America, and the second relates to Saudi Arabia obtaining civilian nuclear capabilities. This issue is solvable, according to what Meir Ben-Shabbat, the former Israeli National Security Advisor and close associate of Netanyahu, who heads the Misgav Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy, wrote in an article published on the website on January 30, 2025.

The second issue revolves around the normalization of Saudi-Israeli relations, as Saudi Arabia stipulates in this issue the establishment of an independent Palestinian state on the 1967 borders, as stated in the Arab Peace Initiative, or Israel’s approval to open a political path leading to the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Regarding the Palestinian state, Netanyahu will make it clear that talk of a Palestinian state after October 7 will be a reward for Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, which supports terrorism. Netanyahu is expected to add two more demands to America’s insistence on removing Hamas from power. The first focuses on clearing Gaza of weapons, and the second revolves around Washington’s non-support for any model of government that allows Hamas to operate behind the scenes.

It is worth noting here that President Trump expressed his optimism after the Doha agreement, considering that the agreement could be the beginning of a broader peace project in the Middle East, while expressing his doubts about the continuation of the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. He added that "this is not our war, it is their war," which indicates that President Trump does not adopt the military approach, or rather the genocidal approach adopted by Israel with the full participation of former President Biden. In this regard, Ben-Shabbat wrote in his previously mentioned article: "Trump seems determined to achieve regional peace."

Since it is difficult to bet on Trump’s statements, as it is difficult to predict his positions and policies, which appeared in his proposal to deport Palestinians from Gaza to Egypt and Jordan, his success in imposing the Doha Agreement and his statements about the opportunities provided by the agreement to achieve regional peace, and America’s conviction as a state that Israel has failed to anticipate the threat and achieve absolute victory in the war of extermination that it has been waging against the Palestinians for more than fifteen months, is enough to conclude that the approach to regional peace from the gateway of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is the best approach for Israel than the military approach, according to Trump’s vision.

The above reinforces the conclusion that Israel is unable to fail to implement the remaining stages of the Doha Agreement, in addition to reinforcing the lack of seriousness of Trump’s proposal for displacement and ethnic cleansing. However, it does not reduce the possibility of further forms of Israeli genocide in the West Bank, and most importantly, it highlights the importance of the role of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in achieving its vision for peace in the region, which requires the Palestinians to improve their political positioning at this stage in time.