What to expect from Netanyahu-Trump meeting?

It is not surprising that President Donald Trump's first meeting with a foreign leader is with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. This reflects the depth of the relationship between the two countries and the two men, because one of them is not enough. Trump's predecessor, Joe Biden, refrained from meeting Netanyahu for a long time after assuming the presidency, indicating the tension in relations between them.

The meeting between Netanyahu and Trump will be important, pivotal and complex, as the former is bound by narrow personal and Israeli calculations related to his personal role and the survival of his government, even if that requires resuming the war on the Gaza Strip, even in new forms such as carrying out raids, arrests, assassinations and destruction, if he is unable to achieve the goals of the war, and the expected goal to focus on now is related to disarmament and ending the rule of the Hamas movement in the Strip.

Trump, on the other hand, is bound by a much greater ambition related to achieving a major deal in the region and obtaining the Nobel Peace Prize, and what this requires in terms of preparing the atmosphere for the generalization of the “Abraham Accords,” through the normalization agreement between Saudi Arabia and Israel as a major strategic step, followed by the normalization of a number of Arab and Islamic countries, and what this entails in terms of political, economic and strategic advantages for Israel and the United States of America.

It is natural for Netanyahu to submit to what Trump wants, who is convinced that stopping the war is a prelude to concluding a grand deal that Saudi Arabia wants to include a Palestinian state or a reliable political path to achieving a Palestinian state. This is something that Netanyahu, with the current composition of his government, cannot accept. Minister Bezalel Smotrich is threatening to withdraw from the government, which means its collapse, if the war is not resumed and sovereignty over the West Bank is not moved forward.

While confirming that the new Trump is no different from the old Trump, he made a major maneuver days before the meeting when he told the Jordanian king and the Egyptian president to “accept” a million and a half Gazans for a temporary or long period, until the Gaza Strip is rebuilt. Despite Cairo and Amman’s rejection of the displacement of the Palestinians, Trump repeated his call several times, and this is due to a number of reasons according to the following possibilities:

The first possibility: Trump is convinced that they will respond to his request, and this is unlikely because it poses a threat to Egyptian national security and Jordanian national and demographic security, and because displacing Palestinians under any name means passing a plan to liquidate the Palestinian cause, and what is temporary will turn into permanent according to previous experiences, and the Oslo Accords experience is the best example of this, as it was agreed that it would end in 1999, and here we are after 25 years and this promise has not been fulfilled.

The displacement in Gaza also whets the occupation's appetite for further displacement in the West Bank and the Palestinian interior, and this paves the way for the annexation of parts of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, or at least large parts of them.

The second possibility: Trump knows that his proposal will not be accepted, but he set a high ceiling for his demands from the beginning, in order to put the Arab states and the Palestinians in front of a very narrow margin for negotiation, since achieving less than displacement, no matter how bad, will appear to be a great achievement. Or Trump wants to lower the ceiling of Netanyahu’s demands by showing that what he is demanding is impossible to achieve. It is not unlikely that Trump’s goal is to lower the ceiling of the demands of the Palestinians and the Israelis in one fell swoop, with absolute bias towards Israel, and not necessarily towards its current government.

It is not possible to be absolutely certain which of the two possibilities will happen, so the Arab and Islamic countries are required to hold a summit whose resolutions stipulate that if Israel and America displace the Palestinians, this will mean immediately withdrawing ambassadors and severing all relations between the Arab and Islamic countries and Israel. They are also required to work to issue a resolution that considers the displacement as ethnic cleansing and a war crime by the Security Council or the General Assembly if the veto is used in the Security Council.

There is another issue worth discussing, which is the document related to the issue of displacement, and it is related to the state of complete or almost complete certainty among political and media circles, especially Palestinian and Arab, that the war has stopped and has not resumed, ignoring the factors that push for the resumption of the war of extermination as it was and more harshly, or through new forms, despite the fact that the owners of certain expectations have not learned from the error of their previous false expectations since the beginning of the war of extermination since they estimated that the response to the Al-Aqsa flood would not be like the war of extermination that lasted 471 days, and that Israel cannot tolerate great losses and a long war, and that it will not fight a ground war and will not complete it if it starts it, so they were heralding the imminence of an agreement with each new round of negotiations, and the disappointments and shocks did not awaken them from the disease of false expectations.

Yes, the factors that led to stopping the war are still ongoing and the strongest are Trump’s insistence on stopping it, the shift in Israeli public opinion towards stopping the war, the position of the occupation army that the war has exhausted itself and that the goals are very high and cannot be achieved, and the ongoing war of attrition of the occupation forces, as a result of the continued resistance and the precious gifts that Trump promised and began to offer to Israel.

However, there are strong factors pushing towards resuming the war, the most important of which are firstly, the failure to achieve the war’s goals or more modest goals, and the implications of that on Israel’s role and future in the region. Secondly, Netanyahu’s personal and political future. Thirdly, the future of his government.

Perhaps the suspension of the start of negotiations on the second phase, which was supposed to begin yesterday, until Netanyahu returns from his visit to America, and the appointment of Minister of Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer as head of the Israeli negotiating delegation, and what this means in terms of focusing on political aspects rather than security, in addition to the statements of Eyal Zamir, the new Chief of Staff, that the year 2025 is a year of war; which requires not neglecting the possibility of resuming the war if an agreement is not reached on the second and third phases or after them and achieving disarmament and the overthrow of Hamas rule, if not in the old forms of war then in new forms.

What is expected from the Washington meeting is either an agreement that Washington will support the resumption of the war if disarmament and the overthrow of Hamas rule are not achieved before or after the implementation of the second and third stages. Here, reconstruction and control over the entry of humanitarian aid will be employed to achieve the goals that were not achieved in the war, or an American-Israeli dispute will occur that will increase the chances of the Israeli government falling and going to early elections in which the current coalition will not have great chances, but rather the possibility of Netanyahu losing will be greater.

In conclusion, the priority for the Palestinians and the best embodiment of steadfastness and resistance and the standard for judging positions and actions is whether they contribute to enhancing the possibility of stopping the war, withdrawing and rebuilding or not. This requires a real partnership, a realistic national program, a long-term truce and ending the division by forming a national consensus government, or at the very least, agreeing to empower the existing government after amending it to rule the Gaza Strip, where the Palestinian consensus on it is the locomotive that leads an Arab regional and global coalition that imposes itself on the United States, and then on Israel, which refuses the return of the Authority to the Gaza Strip to perpetuate the division and separation between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state. Will we learn a lesson before it is too late?