Wednesday, February 12, 2025
Elder of Ziyon
Right now (at least as of this writing Tuesday night) we have President Trump warning Hamas to release all hostages by Saturday noon, or "all hell will break out." Hamas refuses, falsely claiming that Israel hasn't held up its part of the deal and setting the stage to blame Israel if things get hot.
Trump is also engaging in diplomacy of threats with Egypt and Jordan, demanding that they allow Palestinians to take refuge there. In those cases, the US has leverage in the form of withholding aid which is crucial for both those countries' economies. Egypt's response is its own threat - to tear up the peace agreement with Israel, claiming that US aid was part of that agreement. (Permanent US aid to Egypt was certainly not part of Camp David.)
Trump uses these sorts of threats as opening moves in his game of negotiations. To him. everything is a deal, everything is negotiable, everyone has a price whether it is in terms of carrots or sticks. Keeping his negotiating partners off balance is part of his tactics.
To a large extent, it works. In only the past three weeks since the inauguration we are seeing that Trump's outlandish sounding statements move the needle towards his desires, and the compromises made are therefore more favorable to Trump's side.
But what happens when Trump's negotiating tactics come up against the pure honor-shame driven mentality of Islamists like Hamas?
Dead fighters don't deter Hamas. Hamas sees dead civilians as assets. What can deter Hamas when it is so wedded to the idea that capitulation itself is shameful, and therefore to be avoided at all costs?
The honor/shame dynamic seems to indicate that Hamas does not fit into Trump's transactional worldview. The Islamist desire to avoid shame is more important than life itself.
However, Donald Trump has identified one asset Hamas would do anything to avoid losing: land.
The world and the media has not linked Trump's threat to take over Gaza with his open-ended threat to Hamas of all hell breaking out if they don't release the hostages (except in the sense that they believe Trump is crazy in both threats.) But they are one and the same.
Palestinians are very sensitive to the idea that they could permanently lose the land they control. They have felt secure for decades that international law and the majority of world leaders are on their side when they claim the entire Judea, Samaria and Gaza. Really, the only reason Israel hasn't annexed parts of Area C is fear of world reaction, including and especially from the US.
Clearly Trump doesn't care. He has put something on the table that has never seriously been placed there: the idea that Palestinians can lose some of the land awarded to them at Oslo as a consequence of their actions.
The idea that land conquest is a violation of international law is quite recent. The world accepted conquest as a legitimate means of acquiring land for the 4,000 years before the 1945 UN Charter and 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention. Trump instinctively understands that it is illogical that wars can be waged without permanent consequences to the aggressor. To him, and indeed to most of the world, an attacker must not be rewarded by always having the game clock reset to zero after every war they start and lose. Of course Hamas must lose control of parts or all of Gaza, otherwise they have every incentive to keep attacking forever. Taking away their land is true justice.
I'm not sure whether he is consciously thinking this way, but Trump's announcement that the US will take over Gaza - and his doubling down on that - is in effect the US part of the hostage negotiations with Hamas. He's saying that if the hostages aren't released, the US will soon take the land, however that happens (with the probable help of the Israelis.) And unlike Israeli leaders, he really doesn't care if Europe or the UN screams at him that this violates international law; he knows that there is nothing morally wrong with forcing Hamas to accept that its crimes have consequences not only to them but to their people.
It is also a message to the Palestinian Authority: don't think that the land you have is safe from being taken if you continue to support terror.
An analyst I admire looks at Trump this way: "he has an 'on the spectrum' savant quality, a lightning-fast perception mechanism and speech that’s ill-regulated from the standpoint of social usage, but if you just look past that, and listen to the meaning of what he’s saying, his speech is very intentional and is meant to have kinetic effects, to provoke movement and activity for the ends he envisions." I think this is right on.
Which means the next four years will be just as interesting as the past few weeks have been
The new normal is anything but normal.
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