Sixteen months after the Oct. 7 massacre, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has concluded his official visit to Washington a victor.
The Israeli leader — who spent years actively strengthening Hamas’s rule in Gaza and bears deep responsibility for the events leading up to the worst disaster in modern Jewish history since the Holocaust — received royal treatment as the first foreign leader to visit the White House in President Trump’s second term. And while the immediate impact of the visit on key issues — the hostage and cease-fire agreement, Iran’s nuclear threat and U.S. military assistance to Israel — is yet to be seen, one outcome is already crystal clear. Mr. Trump has given Mr. Netanyahu an invaluable gift: extending a lifeline to his government.
In the days leading up to the visit, the Israeli left fantasized, and the right feared, that the American president would impel Mr. Netanyahu to commit to the second phase of the cease-fire agreement, which would require declaring the end of the war. Others speculated Mr. Trump might even push the prime minister so far as to mumble his consent to the prospect of a Palestinian state to further the president’s longstanding goal of striking a normalization deal with Saudi Arabia.
Instead, Mr. Trump laid out a plan that not even Mr. Netanyahu would have dared to suggest: the mass transfer of Palestinians out of Gaza, followed by the United States taking over and rebuilding the territory into a “Riviera of the Middle East.” Aides later tried to soften some of the proposal but Mr. Trump has since doubled down on the overall plan.
By presenting an idea so closely aligned with the goals of the Israeli far right, the president put forward a solution to two political problems for Mr. Netanyahu. The first was that the proposal was welcomed enthusiastically by two extreme-right politicians who had been threatening to make Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition government collapse: Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who had insisted he would quit if Israel ended the war in Gaza on terms that he disagreed with, and Itamar Ben-Gvir, who resigned as national security minister last month to protest the cease-fire deal — and is now laying the groundwork to rejoin the government.
During a news conference after the meeting in Washington, Mr. Trump also signaled he would make a decision on whether he would support Israel’s annexation of the West Bank within four weeks — dangling what could be yet another gift for the far right in front of his guest.
Mr. Netanyahu is also under pressure to approve a budget by the end of March. Failing to meet this deadline would prompt new elections that, based on recent polling, he is unlikely to win. Here, too, Mr. Trump’s proposal gives Mr. Netanyahu a boost. It was immediately popular among Israelis, receiving 72 percent support in polling conducted after the shock announcement. This is unsurprising. The allure of a U.S.-backed plan that would remove Hamas from Gaza, neatly eliminating Israel’s security concerns regarding the Palestinian territory, is substantial to a traumatized population that is exhausted by war and has significantly shifted to the right.
The uproar over Mr. Trump’s vision for the future of Gaza overshadows the more pressing issue of the hostage and cease-fire agreement, which is now halfway through its first phase. The second phase is supposed to see the full withdrawal of the Israeli military from Gaza and the exchange of the remaining hostages for what will almost certainly be a large number of Palestinian prisoners, including many high-ranking militants. Moving into that phase would effectively mean an end to the war — and the far right’s withdrawal from Mr. Netanyahu’s government.
Mr. Netanyahu has reportedly pushed for an extension of Phase 1. Buying time may get a few more hostages out and mitigate some of the suffering on the Palestinian side, important achievements on their own. However, without a true end of the war, Hamas will never release all of the hostages, possibly including Americans, and the fighting and suffering will continue with no end in sight.
Mr. Trump has bought Mr. Netanyahu time. The prime minister might now be able to stave off pressure from his far-right coalition partners to resume the war by telling them that Mr. Trump’s plan will help Israel solve not only the Hamas problem, but the Palestinian problem altogether, and that jeopardizing this with a renewed major operation might spoil a generational opportunity.
The plan counterintuitively may also offer a lifeline to Hamas and strengthen its grip on Gaza. The illusion of a permanent transfer of Gaza’s population — however unfeasible — not only removes the pressure on Israel to grapple with a viable vision for the territory, it also raises the stakes about whether Gaza itself remains Palestinian. That will give Hamas time and space to rebuild, bolster its image as a defender of Palestinians and reassert its de facto control of the territory. In that scenario, another war is all but certain, rendering 16 months of bloodshed just another round of fighting.
Turning Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East” is not a serious plan. It is unfeasible politically, with certain rejection by dozens of countries and the Arab states. Who will pay for it? Who will carry it out? What countries would take Palestinians in? And most important, do Palestinians want to leave?
It is, however, an opportunity for Palestinians and Arab leaders to come up with a unified and pragmatic counterproposal that appeals to Mr. Trump’s goals while weakening Hamas, offering dignity to Palestinians and providing durable security to Israel. Mr. Trump’s foreign policy is intended to be dynamic and disruptive, and is sure to shift further in the coming weeks; those who oppose the president’s vision for Gaza should take the chance to win him over to a different one that can help achieve his own aims: bringing back the hostages and ending wars. The emergency Arab summit expected in Egypt on Feb. 27 is an opportunity to present such a proposal.
Israel, for its part, should be wary of falling into unrealistic fantasies, even if they come from an American president. Israeli history is filled with the disastrous consequences of doing so, from its failed attempt at regime change in Lebanon in the 1980s to the pre-Oct. 7 conceit that Hamas was deterred from military action. Mr. Netanyahu is an adept politician whose government, after months of lurching from crisis to crisis, may be in its strongest position since Hamas’s attack.
But Israel’s enemies are damaged, not dead, and the government coalition faces internal chasms over both domestic issues and the pressing question of the fate of the remaining hostages and the cease-fire itself. The gaunt appearance and the unbearable scene of the release of the three latest hostages on Saturday was further proof of the urgency to bring them back home. Further, merely talking about expelling Palestinians from Gaza has created outrage among Israel’s Arab partners and risks further deterioration in the tense West Bank.
Any grand vision for Mr. Netanyahu must recognize the boundaries of the possible and the moral, and remember this is not a conflict solved by money or simply because powerful countries say it should be. Otherwise, Israel will waste critical time in a dream palace, one that will only push real progress further away.
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