Trump Must Look Beyond Gaza to the West Bank

“Move surprisingly and break dogmas” is not the stated foreign policy doctrine of the Trump administration—or is it? On the issue of Israel–Palestine, walking away from outdated, failed American foreign policy dogmas is long overdue. To what extent—and to what effect—is the Trump administration breaking away from those past failures?

President Donald Trump has already accomplished (almost singlehandedly, it seems) an unexpected ceasefire in Gaza. In forcing an end to the war, he has not only saved precious lives, both Israeli and Palestinian, but also preempted further destabilization of the entire region. As the former senior adviser Jared Kushner recently described the president’s perspective, “He felt like the Israelis were getting a little bit out of control in what they were doing, and that it was time to be very strong and stop them from doing things that he felt were not in their long-term interests.” Clearly, what Kushner is discussing here are American long-term interests that were being jeopardized by “out-of-control” Israeli actions.

Further, after initially floating the unconscionable idea of Gaza’s ethnic cleansing, the president now seems committed to its rebuilding: “No one will be forced to leave Gaza … We will encourage people to stay and offer them the opportunity to build a better Gaza.” This firmly denies Israeli aspirations not only to push Palestinians out of the Strip but also to settle there.

Further still, Trump is ushering in the possibility of de facto international protection for Palestinians in Gaza—an idea so loathed by Israel, it would be unimaginable if not for Trump. From an American command post quickly established in the Israeli town of Kiryat Gat, the Civil-Military Coordination Center (CMCC) is not quite like anything seen before in Israel–Palestine. For sure, it could end up as a glitzy copy/paste of Israel’s crude Coordinator of the Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), thus merely substituting one form of Palestinian subjugation with another. But it may develop into something entirely different: imposing unprecedented restrictions on Israeli military attacks in Gaza; replacing Israel’s decades-long blockade on Gaza with something humane; and bringing forward international forces never before seen in the Gaza Strip. In a reality in which one side—Israel—is so overwhelmingly stronger than the other—the Palestinians—introducing an effective international component was long seen as an essential step. For precisely this reason, Israel has always opposed “internationalizing the conflict.” Trump may very well cut right through that Israeli opposition.

Still, barely a month into the ceasefire, perhaps better branded as Pax Trumpiana, one must write with caution. The reality on the ground remains dire and unstable; just during this nascent ceasefire, Israel has killed some 240 Palestinians in Gaza, bringing the war’s death toll to over 69,000. More than half of the Gaza Strip remains occupied by Israel, a reality that allows it to continue destroying whatever remains in the areas under its control while preventing Palestinians from even returning to the ruins of their homes and towns. Much of Gaza—81 percent of buildings according to the UN—remains destroyed or damaged, while hundreds of thousands remain homeless, displaced, or both.

There is no way around these terrible facts. Nor should it be forgotten that much of this catastrophe was accomplished through Israeli policies greenlighted by Washington under Trump, Biden, and presidents before them, and implemented with American weapons and funding.

None of these facts can or should be forgotten. But it should also not be missed that America might just have reached the conclusion that Israel’s war in Gaza, metastasizing all over the Middle East through “out-of-control” Israeli military actions, has become incompatible with American national security interests in the region, and that the Trump administration is now moving—surprisingly, effectively, and free of at least some of the past’s failed dogmas—in a new direction.

Which must bring us from half-occupied Gaza to the fully occupied West Bank.

Clearly, the Trump administration is already looking beyond the Strip. Not long into the ceasefire, the president stated in the clearest of terms that Israel’s long-sought annexation of the West Bank “won’t happen”. But in stating so Trump has so far limited himself to only forbidding de jure annexation while utterly ignoring the facts on the ground, both the reality that has taken shape over decades since 1967 as well as the developments unfolding under his watch.

In reality, Israel already de facto annexed the West Bank decades ago. It is a one-state reality with a single sovereign—Israel, where Israeli citizens have full rights everywhere and Palestinians have fewer rights, if any at all, anywhere. Trump’s commitment to rejecting formal annexation does nothing to address the reality on the ground; but it gets even worse.

Israeli aggression against Palestinian communities all over the West Bank—sometimes, correctly, dubbed as pogroms—is now at an all-time peak, according to UN data. With almost total impunity, Israeli settler militias, often indistinguishable from the Israeli army, raid Palestinian communities while setting homes, cars, and fields on fire, attacking defenseless residents, all with the aim of taking over more land and pushing Palestinians towards the more populated enclaves of the West Bank known as Area A and Area B. Community after community is forced to flee, as Israel gradually ethnically cleanses the 60 percent of the West Bank known as Area C. Often framed as “settler violence” this reality should be understood for what it is: Israeli state violence.

The scope of this brutality is unprecedented, but the Trump administration has utterly reneged on even trying to halt this Israeli aggression. Contrary to Trump’s utterance that “Israel is not going to do anything with the West Bank,” he is in fact allowing it to do everything it desires there short of formal annexation.

Which raises the question: Why does the Trump administration allow Israel to violently reshape the West Bank while forcefully displacing Palestinians there, ignoring the ominous risk this presents for unchecked escalation leading to renewed regional destabilization?

If the Trump administration is serious about regional stability, it cannot continue to ignore the quite literal fires Israel is lighting all across the West Bank. One should also not miss the fact that there are those in Israel who consider such an outcome—a violent outbreak in the West Bank—a desirable prospect. In their minds, such an event may bring the possibility of displacing Palestinians not from one place to another within the West Bank, but to push Palestinians eastwards of the Jordan River into Jordan itself. Now that Trump has made it clear that the parallel idea—to push Palestinians southwards from the Gaza Strip into Egypt —is off the table, the motivation for such action in the West Bank hasn’t declined. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Israel is still led by the same extremist government quite capable of acting “out of control”. Yet the support for permanent Israeli control over the entirety of the West Bank, without giving any rights to the millions of Palestinians there, is much broader than Israel’s current ruling coalition; it is a broad Israeli consensus. Broad as it may be, this consensus isn’t only cruel and inhumane, but also seeks to enshrine an inherently unjust and unstable reality—one bound to implode, with terrible consequences. It is a future foreseen, and it must be forestalled. Trump has already demonstrated in Gaza his ability to (belatedly) move fast and break dogmas. He should now do so in the West Bank as well.

I am neither an American nor a conservative. I’m an Israeli citizen advocating, from a human rights perspective, for a just future for all people, Israeli and Palestinian, living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. As such, I deal with the world as it is, not as I wish it were. I do not pretend to represent American interests or to understand them better than Americans do. I wrote this piece because of the shameful reality of violent Palestinian subjugation in the West Bank—and because I believe that there is a serious foreign policy argument to be made for the Trump administration to extend its novel approach to the region beyond Gaza. I hope someone is listening; otherwise we’re simply counting backwards not just towards the next Palestinian home being torched, but towards the next regional war.