President Trump can be slow to catch on when foreign leaders try to play him for a patsy. They want to score points with their people at the expense of the U.S. Their aim is to take all they can from us, without conceding anything in return.
So it is with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, with whom the president insists he has a great relationship. That’s despite Kim’s provocative missile tests, his refusal to accommodate the president on any issue and his dispatch of troops to Ukraine in support of Russia.
So it is with Vladimir Putin, the Russian tyrant who intensifies his murderous war on Ukraine whenever Trump tries to get him to talk peace.
So, too, it is with Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
A familiar pattern
Trump is not the first president with whose patience Netanyahu has trifled. Democrats Barack Obama and Joe Biden also indulged him too much.
But Netanyahu’s recent missile strike against Hamas leaders in Qatar should have exhausted even Trump’s capacity for equivocation.
The Hamas people who died in the strike at Doha, which failed to kill any top leaders, were meeting to discuss a U.S. proposal to end the dreadful war in Gaza.
Netanyahu treated the U.S. effort as bait in a trap.
Qatar is one of the most important U.S. allies that is not part of NATO. It hosts a U.S. air base with 10,000 service members, the forward headquarters of U.S. Central Command. For Israel to mount a lethal attack there was as provocative a violation of its sovereignty — and to U.S. relations — as if the missiles had been aimed at Paris. The rest of the world, remember, regards the U.S. as Israel’s partner and enabler.
‘What the hell?’
“Qatar must be wondering, ‘What the hell is going on?’” said Simon Henderson, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, in an interview with the newspaper Stars and Stripes. The article observed that Arab leaders in the region may want to reassess their relationships with the U.S.
As if to acknowledge the damage, Trump said on social media that the strike was Israel’s unilateral decision, and that his Middle East envoy tried to warn Qatar. A Qatari spokesman said the call came too late, “during the sound of explosions.”
What the Doha strike should have made clear even to Trump is that peace is not a priority with Netanyahu. Quite the contrary.
Success in decapitating the heads of Hamas might have given Netanyahu an excuse to declare the war won, but it would have been ephemeral.
Hamas is so deeply rooted in the historical grievances of the Middle East that it will continue to sprout new heads until a genuine and comprehensive peace settlement occurs.
A reliance on radicals
Netanyahu’s entire policy is staked on precluding any such settlement that would necessarily involve sovereignty for the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
His governing coalition depends on the participation of not only his own Likud Party, but also extreme radicals in smaller political parties such as the Religious Zionist Party and Otzma Yehudit; leaders in both parties have called for permanently occupying Gaza and annexing the West Bank.
The longer the war continues, the more remote the fading prospects of peace, the longer Netanyahu avoids conviction in a long-running corruption trial, the longer he also postpones his long-overdue reckoning with the people of Israel.
The vicious surprise Hamas attack that killed some 1,200 people in Israel on Oct 7, 2023, raped and mutilated women, and took some 250 hostages, was worse than a mere intelligence failure.
The Netanyahu government had been nourishing Hamas, encouraging Qatar to support Hamas with hundreds of millions of dollars. Hamas was useful to Netanyahu as a foil for any prospect of a two-state solution.
Israelis know this. Multitudes have come to realize that Netanyahu would rather keep the war going than make any concession to recover the estimated 24 hostages believed to still be alive.
That’s why there have been mass demonstrations on their behalf and against the Netanyahu coalition.
But if many Israelis know this, the question remains: Does Trump?
If he does, it would mean that he would rather condone this brutal strategy by tolerating it rather than put the screws to Netanyahu to make peace.
Trump is said to resent that his predecessor, Obama, won the Nobel Peace Prize and craves one for himself. Renaming our defense agency as the Department of War is not likely to impress the Nobel committee.
Putting an end to the Gaza war surely would.
The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman, and Executive Editor Gretchen Day-Bryant. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.
