JOSH HAMMER: There May Be More To Trump’s Gaza Plan Than Meets The Eye

Days after shocking the world with his upset victory in the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump espoused his hope of negotiating the “ultimate deal” between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs to resolve the “war that never ends.”

As Trump told The Wall Street Journal at the time: “As a deal maker, I’d like to do … the deal that can’t be made. And do it for humanity’s sake.”

Over eight years later, back in the White House following a Democratic interregnum and with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at his side, Trump confirmed his interest in forging the “ultimate deal.” Crucially, however, Trump’s basic parameters of such a deal will not, to put it mildly, be those long favored by the bipartisan foreign policy establishment.

Before getting into his latest proposal, let’s flash back to Trump’s first term.

From 2017 to 2021, Trump governed as the most pro-Israel American president, by far, since the modern State of Israel was established in 1948. In January 2020, after already taking such measures as withdrawing the U.S. from former President Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear deal, moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem and recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, Trump — again standing at the White House with Netanyahu — unveiled his “Peace to Prosperity” plan to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Although imperfect, it was by far the most pro-Israel plan for resolving the conflict an American president had ever proposed.

Because the “Peace to Prosperity” plan legitimized Israel applying its sovereignty over disputed areas of the Jordan Valley and Judea and Samaria (the “West Bank”), many of the Palestinians’ traditional Arab backers were piqued. In June 2020, the United Arab Emirates’ ambassador to the U.S., Yousef Al Otaiba, took the unprecedented step of publishing a Hebrew-language op-ed warning Israel not to go forward with asserting any additional sovereignty.