During his first term, Trump discovered that the Near East Bureau of the State Department and the CIA’s “national intelligence officers” for the region shared two characteristics. The first was that they were utterly confident in their assertions — in contrast with the cautiously tentative opinions of their China and Russia-focused counterparts.
The second was that they were utterly, totally wrong. This was only discovered by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, when he learned from his Arab friends — wealthy young men like himself, who were sons of princely potentates — that some Arab rulers would be interested in opening diplomatic relations with Israel if the US President were to ask them.
Trump handed the suggestion to his Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, the former head of Exxon-Mobil, who had two decades of experience in negotiating with oil-country dictators and kings. (I once sat next to him in Astana in a small meeting with Kazakhstan’s then-dictator Nursultan Nazarbayev, which should have been a clash because of a hugely costly production failure by Exxon’s Italian partner, but instead became a contest in amiability.)
Tillerson had already criticised Kushner’s intrusions in US diplomacy, but nevertheless passed on the idea to his Near East Bureau. Its response was prompt and categorical: no Arab state would follow Egypt and Jordan in establishing diplomatic relations with Israel — or even discuss that possibility — until a “process” was solidly underway to implement the “two-state solution” with the establishment of a Palestinian state.
The experts further warned that any attempt to push this non-starter would greatly damage US prestige in the region. So Trump sent Tillerson on the path to his resignation by telling young Kushner to go ahead and try his best. He was met with striking success. The Saudis readily agreed to open their airspace to Israeli civilian overflights, and permitted business travel from Israel, though they delayed a response on diplomatic relations. So did Oman, which had already received Netanyahu in 2018, and which also allowed over-flights.
The United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, for their part, swiftly agreed to normalise diplomatic relations, as did Morocco. Israeli embassies were quickly established in each of those countries, while travel and commerce surged.
Kushner’s success was quite enough to convince Trump that the government’s Middle East experts were best kept out of any serious US diplomacy in the Middle East. And so Trump promptly gave the Gaza negotiation to his son-in-law and Steve Witkoff, a successful property developer uncontaminated by any faux diplomatic expertise.
In their negotiation over Gaza, Kushner and Witkoff had a determined ally in Egypt’s dictator, Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, who had come to power in 2013 by removing the elected Muslim Brotherhood President, Mohamed Morsi. When Hamas, the Brotherhood’s Gaza offshoot, celebrated their victory on October 7 two years ago, el-Sisi was directly called upon to join the fight. But that threat vanished as soon as Israel started demolishing Gaza’s high-rises and fancy condominiums. Nobody in Egypt wanted to share that fate.
“Nobody in Egypt wanted to share Gaza’s fate.”
It was enough for Witkoff and Kushner to negotiate a prisoner/hostage swap accompanied by a final ceasefire, which Hamas’s surviving leaders had no choice but to accept when Qatar made it clear that it would not pay for more hopeless resistance. In endorsing Trump’s plan, as negotiated by Witkoff, Qatar promised to rebuild Gaza; Israel promised to release prisoners and to withdraw in stages; Hamas promised to release the hostages and hostage corpses; but nobody promised to send an army to protect the hapless people of Gaza from Hamas and clan gunmen.
As for that Palestinian state much in demand from Berkeley, California to Rome, Italy, neither Egypt, nor Israel, nor Qatar, is likely to put much effort into it, after the one so carefully planned in Oslo, in the Nineties, self-detonated.
Trump, Kushner and Witkoff have been vindicated, for now, by the currently holding and the return of the hostages. Can we assume, then, that all the governments which have recognised “Palestine” as a state will immediately drop any lesser priorities, such as helping Ukraine, to actually construct this Palestine, complete, of course, with a freely elected parliament?
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