The US election result is highly consequential for the Middle East, and is a dramatic win for Benjamin Netanyahu. It has the potential to change the map of the Middle East, very much at the expense of the Palestinian people.
The Biden administration had put off imposing any meaningful pressure on the Israeli prime minister until after the election, despite its growing frustration with him on several issues: the obstruction of aid into Gaza, his campaign against the UN, his obstruction of a hostage-for-peace deal, and his government’s support for violent West Bank settlers.
Progressive Democrats had begged Joe Biden to use his leverage throughout the 13 months of the Gaza conflict. Anger over the use of US bombs to demolish Gaza – in Michigan, home to the largest concentration of Arab Americans in the US, and elsewhere – contributed to Kamala Harris’s defeat. Now, even if America’s overwhelming clout in the region is to be finally unleashed, it will be too late to have any meaningful impact.
Netanyahu was among the first of the world’s leaders to call Trump with congratulations on Wednesday.
On the X social media platform, the Israeli prime minister described the US election result as “history’s greatest comeback!” and a “huge victory”.
Trump’s return has come just as the first signs of real pressure on Israel from the Biden administration were emerging. The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, and the defence secretary, Lloyd Austin, wrote to the Israeli government last month detailing its obstruction of humanitarian aid to Gaza and challenging its efforts to close down the UN relief agency, Unrwa. The letter gave Israel 30 days, until after the US presidential election, to change course or face restrictions under US law on the supply of American weapons.
The deadline runs out on 12 November, at which point the US may restrict the flow of arms when there is no longer any risk electorally. But in the shadow of the US election result, it will have little or no influence on Netanyahu’s government. He can simply wait for Trump’s inauguration on 20 January.
The incoming administration will almost certainly not defend Unrwa. Trump cut off US funding to the agency in 2018 and it was only restored by Biden three years later. The UN and the whole relief effort in the region could well face a funding crisis.
The restoration of Trump also removes a substantial barrier to Israel’s full control and potential annexation of at least part of Gaza and the West Bank. The incoming president has shown himself unburdened by the weight of international law and UN security council resolutions when it comes to territory. His administration recognised Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights in 2019.
It is far from clear who would lead Middle East policy in a new Trump administration, but in the pool around the president-elect are notable supporters of the settler movement, such as his son-in-law Jared Kushner (who has talked of the real estate potential of “waterfront property” in Gaza) and the former ambassador to Israel David Friedman, whose application for a new job in the incoming administration took the form of a book extolling Israel’s divinely inspired right to seize the West Bank.
The boost given to the annexationist wing of the Israeli far right may be the most immediate and momentous ramification for the Middle East of a Trump win, because of its potential to redraw the map.
“The threat of a Palestinian state is off the table,” Yisrael Ganz, the head of the umbrella settler organisation the Yesha Council, declared on Wednesday in a statement welcoming Trump’s election. “This is a historical moment and opportunity for the settlement movement … Now, with the election of President Trump, it is time to change reality in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] as well, to ensure it will for ever be a part of Israel and to ensure the security of the Jewish state.”
Settler attacks and land grabs aimed at Palestinians have risen dramatically on the West Bank over the past year and many villagers have been forcibly prevented from harvesting their olives this autumn. In central Ramallah, the main city in the West Bank and the headquarters of the largely powerless and distrusted Palestinian Authority, that territory under full Israeli control, “Area C”, is already seen as annexed in all but name.
The sense of despair from events in Gaza and in the West Bank has become so ingrained, the difference made by a Trump victory was mostly treated as marginal.
“It will not make a big difference,” Eyad Barghouti, a retired university teacher said, expressing a commonly held view. “What Biden was doing before with a low profile, Trump will be more vocal about. He will say it in a clear way, that we are trying to get rid of such-and-such people. He will not play the game of trying to make himself sound like a humanitarian.”
Trump’s return not only strengthens the expansionist cause, it also reinforces Netanyahu’s standing in Israel politics and is likely to accelerate his moves towards turning Israel into a more illiberal state. On that score, he will not, for example, hear complaints from a fellow populist in Washington about his campaign to dilute the strength and independence of the judiciary.
The return of a close ally to the Oval Office does not give Netanyahu an entirely free hand, however. Unlike Biden, Trump does not have to fear that the Israeli prime minister could hurt him politically at home. The new US-Israel power relationship will be more one-sided and the new president’s clout will be many times greater than his predecessors’.
He has already made clear in a reported letter to Netanyahu at the height of the campaign that he wants the Gaza campaign over by the time he takes office, though Trump would most likely accept an outcome heavily weighted in Israel’s favour, including military control over the strip.
The returning president has also made it clear he will want a quick deal in Lebanon, if one is not struck during Biden’s last lame duck months. Most significantly, Netanyahu cannot be sure that Trump would support his strategic priority, a war to destroy Iran’s nuclear programme.
Any such conflict would be likely to draw in the US, and his aversion to overseas wars is a consistent strand in Trump’s often erratic foreign policy. On the other hand, it is perhaps not beyond Netanyahu’s considerable power of persuasion to convince the former and future president that bombing Iran could offer a quick and easy win over a regime that US intelligence believes plotted to assassinate him.
The other big Middle Eastern winner on Tuesday night was the Saudi monarchy, which has invested deeply in the Trump family. It now has a close ally in the White House, who will press for a Saudi-Israeli normalisation deal, to add to the “Abraham accords” with other Gulf states. Biden officials invested a huge amount of time and energy into trying to clinch a Saudi-Israeli agreement and suspected all along that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was waiting for a Trump presidency.
Even for the prince, however, it will not be straightforward to do a deal with Netanyahu at a time Gaza is being flattened and more than 43,000 Palestinians have been killed.
However, the hesitation may be temporary. The forces of convergence between the Gulf monarchies, and an increasingly illiberal US and Israel, are likely to prove stronger in the four years to come than concern for the plight of the Palestinians.