All Eyes in Mideast Focus on President Trump’s Statements and Expected Moves

President Trump’s Mideast policy will be tested immediately and, as with other parts of the world, his next moves are anybody’s guess. It is clear, though, with unqualified support of Israel being expressed by the new state secretary, Marco Rubio, and with some puzzling remarks being made by Mr. Trump’s Mideast envoy, Steve Witkoff, that the region is furiously parsing the president’s statements. The deal for a 42-day cease-fire in Gaza was reached last week in part due to Mr. Trump’s pressure campaign. Another cease-fire agreement, between Israel and Lebanon, is likely to be renewed after its 60-day run ends on Sunday. Its implementation depends largely on Beirut’s ability to prevent a return by Hezbollah to southern Lebanon. Will these deals, especially the fragile Gaza truce, hold? “It’s not our war. It is their war. I am not confident,” Mr. Trump said Monday night. “Gaza is like a massive demolition site. That place … it’s got to be rebuilt in a different way,” the president, himself a builder, said. He added that because of the Strip’s “phenomenal location,” it could be turned around, leading to “fantastic things.” NBC News reported over the weekend that Mr. Witkoff had floated a plan to transfer Gaza’s entire population to Indonesia while the Strip was being reconstructed. Jakarta immediately shot down the idea. Meanwhile, Mr. Witkoff’s sale last year of Manhattan’s Park Lane Hotel for $623 million to a Doha-based company has raised suspicions among some Israelis of bias toward Hamas-backing Qatar.At the same time, Arabs also fear that Mr. Trump is too pro-Israel to bring peace to the Mideast in a form that is fair to all sides. In reality, guessing the president’s next moves or his biases or motives is a loser’s game. Mr. Trump often boasts that unpredictability strengthens his approach to foreign policy.Secretary Xi of Communist China would not dare to impose a blockade on Taiwan because he knows “I’m f—ing crazy,” Mr. Trump told the Wall Street Journal. “I am not forecasting what Donald Trump will do as president because he has no core philosophy or grand strategy,” a national security adviser in the president’s first term, John Bolton, wrote Tuesday in the Australian Financial Review. Although Mr. Witkoff, himself a former New York real estate investor, is new to the world of diplomacy, he was successful in pressing for a hostage deal that the Biden administration had unsuccessfully pushed since last May. His pressure, he says, was equally applied to Hamas and Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel. Mr. Trump “gave me the directive to push forward a deal if a deal was attainable, and so we needed to create the incentives for both parties to push forward and get that deal done,” Mr. Witkoff told Israel’s Channel 12 news on Monday.He had famously forced Mr. Netanyahu to meet on a Saturday even as the premier made clear that Israeli protocol frowns on working on the Jewish Sabbath. Mr. Netanyahu was reportedly convinced to enter the deal after Israel was promised American help to halt Iran’s nuclear program and to widen the region’s peace circles. “I think Saudi Arabia will be in the Abraham Accords,” Mr. Trump said Monday, referring to Arab-Israeli peace treaties signed during his first term. Yet, in his interview with the Israeli channel, Mr. Witkoff made clear that no such deal would be possible unless the Gaza cease-fire is maintained.Prominently addressing an inauguration event Monday night, Mr. Witkoff sounded like a seasoned diplomat, complete with such fuzzy concepts as the need to maintain the “territorial integrity“ of Mideast countries. Those concepts are widely used in such places as the United Nations, where the Golan Heights, for one, is considered Syrian territory occupied by Israel. In Mr. Trump’s first term, America recognized the Golan as part of Israel. Washington has also long resisted global pressures to recognize Gaza and the Judea and Samaria as a Palestinian state. In contrast, Mr. Rubio boasts a long track record as a senator of almost unconditional support for Israel. Asked about the Gaza cease-fire Tuesday, he told CBS News that he is “hoping and praying” it will hold. Yet, he noted, on October 6, 2023, a Gaza cease-fire existed that was then violated by Hamas on October 7. “We think there’s the broader hope of peace” in the Mideast, he said. Agreements “are possible today that were even unfathomable just 90 days ago, before the events in Lebanon and Syria and the work Israel has done to create stability, as well with its acts against Iran,” he said. “We’re hopeful,” Mr. Rubio added, “but I think we have to be realistic about who we’re dealing with here. These are not good people in Hamas.”

All Eyes in Mideast Focus on President Trump’s Statements and Expected Moves

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