Mitchell Plitnick
Mondoweiss / January 1, 2025
In less than a month, Joe Biden’s presidency will be over, and his legacy will be cemented as one of genocide. With Trump on the way in, it’s becoming more clear what his second term will look like for Palestine. And it’s not going to be good.
In less than one month, the horrific term of U.S. President Joe Biden will be over. His will be a legacy of genocide, of the annihilation of the international system of law, and the hobbling of political norms around basic principles of human rights, state sovereignty, and the unbridled use of force.
Unfortunately, the departure of this president who has set new standards for bloodthirstiness and utter lack of principle does not augur an era where matters are likely to improve.
With Donald Trump taking the White House for the second time, we enter a new phase of uncertainty, with a self-interested, mercurial, authoritarian in the White House.
Trump showed himself to be an authoritarian leader in his first term, but didn’t have the plan, the structure, or the support within his own administration to bring that vision to pass. His disastrous handling of the Covid-19 crisis cost him his office before he could realize that vision. But he comes prepared this time.
Trump’s mercurial and self-interested nature make him a wild card. Those qualities mean that, while we can perhaps make some educated guesses and broad assumptions about how he will approach Palestine, Israel, and a broader Middle East region that is experiencing massive upheaval, his specific policies remain a mystery.
But as the day of Trump’s second inauguration draws closer, and the conditions he is confronting are getting more complicated by the day, we are starting to see some signals about how he might be approaching the Middle East at the beginning of his term. Given the volatility of both the region at this moment and Trump’s shifting interest and limited attention span, even that is subject to frequent changes over short periods of time, but we work with what we have.
The Trump team and its plans
With ardent pro-Israel figures like Mike Huckabee as Ambassador to Israel, Marco Rubio as Secretary of State, and Mike Waltz as National Security Adviser, it is clear that Trump is orienting his team toward support of the Israeli far-right. This is bolstered by nominees like Pete Hesgeth, who idealizes the Crusaders and is a firm believer in the use of force to address issues of foreign and domestic policy.
Trump’s pick for Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard is more ambiguous. She has been a strong opponent of wars of regime change, and that includes a potential attack on Iran. On the other hand, she is a zealous supporter of the “war on terror,” she is known as a strong supporter of the anti-Muslim leader of India, Narendra Modi, and has been widely accused of islamophobia. She has condemned anti-genocide protests in the U.S., although she has opposed anti-BDS legislation on free speech grounds. In all, Gabbard is unlikely to be a strong counterweight in the Trump administration and may well turn out to be just as anti-Palestinian as anyone else in it.
In a recent interview with far-right pundit Ben Shapiro, NSA nominee Mike Waltz gave some hints about where Trump’s policy might be headed. They’re not encouraging.
Waltz, who believes very much in the use of force to achieve policy goals, is a major Iran hawk who has expressed strong support for Israeli aggression against the Islamic Republic. Like many of Trump’s nominees, he sees the Middle East, including Palestine, through the anti-Iran lens and believes the United States can arm Israel sufficiently for it to wage war without direct American participation.
Walz primarily views Gaza through the same anti-Iran lens, and he has repeated the mantra that Iran engineered the October 7 attack to thwart Israeli-Saudi normalization, even though this has been debunked by American intelligence.
Unsurprisingly, Waltz’s words reflect a high priority being placed on Israeli-Saudi normalization, something Trump surely wants to pursue. Waltz also indicated that he supports withdrawing all U.S. troops from Syria, something Trump has hinted at recently.
Trump has indicated that he wants to be seen as driving U.S. foreign policy more directly in this term, but he has been even more vague about Palestine and Israel than he was during his first term. While many have reacted with understandable alarm to his threat to “unleash hell” on Hamas if the hostages are not released, this is just bombast. There isn’t much he can do that Israel isn’t already doing in Gaza, certainly not without killing those same hostages and dragging U.S. troops into a conflict his supporters do not want any direct part of.
Trump has told Netanyahu that he wants the “war” in Gaza to end before he takes office. Netanyahu is clearly not going to do that, and it is telling that we have not heard Trump repeat that demand in recent weeks. As I noted recently, there is also little reason to believe that the much talked about ceasefire is going to materialize, given that all the political incentives for Netanyahu are against it.
Israel’s regular violations of the ceasefire in Lebanon may make Hamas even more suspicious of Netanyahu’s plans, if such an increase is even possible. Even the slightest caginess from Hamas will give Netanyahu the tools he needs to convince Trump that he is trying to do as the president wishes, but Hamas is being stubborn. That is likely to be good enough for Trump, as he moves to crack down on anti-genocide and pro-Palestinian activism in the United States.
Will there be multiple views among Trump’s senior staff ?
While Biden’s inner circle was uniform in both its lockstep support for Israel and its need to spout rhetoric that misled mainstream Americans into believing that they were trying to limit Israel’s genocide in Gaza and brutal approach in other areas, Trump’s team is more mixed.
Gabbard is one obvious outlier among Iran hawks and explicit militarists, but there are some other, less prominent Trump cronies who have expressed scepticism about support for Israel. Vivek Ramaswamy, who will co-direct the nascent “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) with Elon Musk, has explicitly called for ending military aid to Israel.
That idea is likely well out of bounds for Trump, both because his evangelical base would object and, more importantly, his allies in the military supply industry would lose billions. It will be telling to see if Ramaswamy or anyone else in Trump’s orbit will even mention the idea, given how neatly it fits into the “America First” ideology they like to preach.
Within the government, Trump appointed Eldridge Colby, another sceptic of involvement in the Middle East as Undersecretary of Defense for Policy. Colby is a firm supporter of Israel, but is also fiercely opposed to U.S. involvement in the region’s conflicts. His role will place him at the very center of negotiations for the next Memorandum of Understanding that will govern the United States’ commitment of annual aid to Israel.
Colby is known as being from the Realist school of foreign policy, which would imply that he will be guided by his understanding of American interests in a way the Biden team was not. He will have no romantic attachment to Israel or Zionism. Like many Realists, Colby advocates a focus on China and an effort to diminish American involvement in the Middle East. As we’ve frequently seen, that strategy tends to backfire.
Colby’s preference is for arming proxies, and, when it comes to Israel, he strongly believes in diplomatic protection for its actions. That puts him squarely in the traditional American pro-Israel camp, albeit more like previous presidents than like the fanatical Biden.
While some of the more naïve pundits think this might mean Trump will be more reticent to give a “blank check” to Israel, what it really means is that Trump will be looking to use Israel policy, like the rest of his foreign policy, to maximize his own interests.
Trump’s mixed bag of high-level staff choices has less to do with policy preferences than it does with his estimation that those he selects will offer no pushback to his own desires. But, when it comes to Israel, and other U.S. allies, it will have an unintended benefit for Trump: it is likely to keep them guessing about his intentions, and, therefore even more eager to genuflect before the next president of the United States.
Benjamin Netanyahu made clear his preference for Trump all through the campaign, and, while this reflects their shared far right orientation, his support was mostly meant to cover his bases. Netanyahu knew that Biden or Kamala Harris would continue their absolute support for Israeli policies, even if they despised the Prime Minister personally. Trump needs to be flattered, so by doing that, Netanyahu secured his position whoever won.
Trump might not want to deal with the Gaza slaughter, but that same desire will mean that, if and when it continues well into his term, he will be reluctant to press Netanyahu to end it. That will be true especially as long as Israel continues to dominate the region so aggressively.
But Netanyahu needs to tread carefully. He may be more ideologically sympatico with Trump than he was with Biden, but Trump has also been critical of Netanyahu in the past. Trump will have no ideological commitment to Netanyahu. As a result, he will be more disposed to act against Netanyahu personally in a much more material way than Biden would ever consider should Trump want to see Netanyahu fall from his office.
While that opens certain possibilities, they will only matter if Netanyahu displeases Trump. He’s probably far too clever to do that, and he knows well how to flatter the incoming President. Trump’s first term broke many precedents and, in many ways, set the stage for the calamities under Biden. While there are always more variables with Trump, his second term does not promise to be any better for Palestinians than either his first or Biden’s bloody four years.
Mitchell Plitnick is the president of ReThinking Foreign Policy; he is the co-author, with Marc Lamont Hill, of Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics
