‘Lead picture: Brooklyn Daily Eagle / Public domain (thanks to love.property).

Update 08 February**: A new government has been formed in Lebanon with Nawaf Salam as PM and, in a slap in the face for Trump’s Deputy US Envoy for the Middle East, Morgan Ortagus, with five cabinet members representing the Shiite “duo,” Hezbollah and Amal, being appointed with the slate including Yassine Jaber, affiliated with Nabih Berri’s Amal movement, as Minister of Finance. This is no less and no more than has been customary in past years. The position of Minister of Finance is seen as crucial in view of the importance of the coming anti-corruption drive.

Update 07 February**: Trump’s deputy envoy to Lebanon Morgan Ortagus demanded in a surprise press conference in front the Presidential Palace in Beirut that Hezbollah ministers be removed from the cabinet, thanking Israel for “defeating Hezbollah.” Ortagus’ surprise move was unplanned and unprecedented in diplomatic history. However, the Lebanese presidency announced that her views did not represent its views. Furthermore, given that Netanyahu told the Saudis at the same time that they should take in the Palestinians because they had so much land, Ortagus’ statement was most especially a message directed at Saudi Arabia which was working directly with the Lebanese presidency to create a government for reconstruction. In that light, there is a very high probability that the fatuous Gaza statements of February 5 from the White House represent an additional bargaining chip in the coming negotiations with Saudi Arabia over the “protection” money that the US is demanding (see discussion in main text below. Note also that in the last Trump presidency the Saudis paid $400bn without agreeing to normalisation, but that in 2019 when Saudi Arabia was attacked by Yemen, the US did nothing to protect the oil fields). Finally, it is clear that the Trump statements have given the Netanyahu government a new lease of life.

New postscript 06 February below.

It was like a scene from the Apprentice, in which an ambitious slum lord from Queens seeks to escape his father’s shadow and ascends to the affluent world of Manhattan real estate under the guidance of his demented lawyer, Roy Cohn. In reality – if it could be called that – the new President of the United States blithely told everybody yesterday that his country would ‘take over Gaza,’ help Palestinians ‘find the right piece of land’ and ‘build them some really nice places.’ He called it a permanent relocation. ‘I don’t think people should be going back to Gaza,’ Trump said. ‘Gaza is not a place for people to be living.’ This stuff isn’t new. Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law has been floating the idea for a while now. Except that Kushner was talking about building new homes for the Palestinians in the Negev Desert, that is – in Israel.

In contrast, Trump has been talking about relocating “Palestinians” to Egypt and Jordan. It isn’t clear what he means by that. Is he talking about the terrorised 2,100,000 Gazans that have recently survived the most ruthless campaign of extermination using American weapons? But why mention Jordan if he isn’t also talking about the some 2,900,000 West Bankers that are now beginning to be dealt the terrifying hand as the Gazans suffered? And what about the 2,037,000 Palestinians who are Israeli “citizens,” living in the shadows?

During Trump’s first term, in 2018, American media began talking about a plan to displace Palestinians under the so-called “Deal of the Century,” which Jordan’s King Abdullah II took seriously enough to formally reject in March 2019, calling such change to demographics in Palestine and Jerusalem a “red line.” Egyptian official channels and media followed suit. Trump ignored them and unveiled his “Vision” under the title “Peace on the Path to Prosperity” on 28 January 2020. It envisioned a “State of Palestine” which would be ‘a future state,’ and ‘could be recognized by the United States only if the criteria described in this Vision are satisfactorily met.’ The Palestinians were not consulted on one iota of the “Vision.”

There are three main reasons why Trump’s new plan will not happen, assuming that he is actually unrealistic enough to be sincere about this new “Deal of a Century,” and that it isn’t just a political ploy to take the initiative away from Netanyahu, and to put a temporary stop to the war in Gaza, while a new political process starts within Israel. Elections to get rid of Netanyahu have recently been demanded by Ehud Barak, and controversy stalks Miriam Adelson’s demand for the same. The Zionist lobby has so far railroaded Netanyahu’s interests over the actual imperial interests of the United States, represented in Congress by its most senior elected Jewish politician, Chuck Schumer, who did call for Netanyahu’s replacement in the last presidency. But let’s come back to that.

So, the first reason that Trump’s plan will not happen is the same as last time. Given that the history of peace negotiations with Israel and the United States has been a history of fakery and deception, from the Camp David Accords in September 1978, mediated by Jimmy Carter, to the Oslo Accords (Oslo I in 1993; Oslo II in 1995), mediated by Bill Clinton, earning the sobriquet of the process of ‘Preventing Palestine,’ and that Netanyahu is directly responsible for the assassination of the Israeli peacemaker at the Oslo Accords, Yitzak Rabin, even though Rabin himself wasn’t giving much away in Oslo, the Palestinians are simply not going to cooperate. This is obviously why the Palestinians were not consulted on this deal last time. They are going to have to be physically dragged to whatever ‘really nice places’ Trump has in mind for them.

Which brings the discussion to the second point. This complete and utter lack of trust, not in the intentions of the Israelis, but in the word of American politicians, means there has to be war again. Given that this is precisely what the “Deal of the Century” wants to avoid means that we have yet another Trumpian contradiction. This Trumpian contradiction is, perhaps unlike last time, irresolvable with an Alexandrine “cut of the Gordian knot,” which stands for the use of brute force to achieve your aims. This has been tried. Israel’s military dropped over 85,000 tonnes of bombs on the Gaza Strip between October 2023 and November 2024, exceeding the amount of explosives used in World War II.

This failed and failed miserably as became evident during the recent hostage releases, in which the apparent strength and control displayed by Hamas, American media agreed was a humiliating spectacle for Israel. Indeed, Daniel Levy, former Israeli negotiator at the Taba summit for the Oslo II peace process, explained in a recent video that the shock defeat at Hamas’ hands, has uncovered Netanyahu’s lies and ‘fractured the Israeli psyche.’  

Levy’s point, however, needs to be considered from the Arab point of view as well. The fact that Hamas has fought off such an overwhelming Israelo-American offensive, and caused such devastating damage to the Israeli invading forces in Gaza has broken a glass ceiling in the Arab mind overall. The same is true of the war against Lebanon. When the Israelis launched a full scale attack against Lebanon, Hezbollah stymied their attempt to invade, causing substantial losses among Israeli troops, terrorising Israel with its drone capability and finally targeting the centre of Tel Aviv with missiles which could not be defended against. All of this led to Israel actually asking for a cease fire, although hundreds of Israeli violations of the agreement would follow, so that Netanyahu could appease his extremist coalition members, by pretending to them that he was only pretending to have a cease fire. This is coming to an end.

The victories of resistance movements like Hamas and Hezbollah against the (figurative) American “Death Star” has revolutionised awareness on the Arab Street, and this has come at the same time as a revolution in warfare itself. A West Point Modern War Institute report of 15 June 2023, detailed how information technology, drones and guided missiles have changed the face of war generally. Apart from the fact that at the great power level Russia has replaced nuclear weapons with guided weaponry with the same force without the radiation, at the resistance movement level, cheap but very effective weapons (like the tandem Yasin RPG and the adapted Kornet missile) have revolutionised war against now outdated armoured vehicles and tanks. This has been even more devastating at sea against US Naval battle groups, with the Ansar Allah movement effectively controlling the Red Sea during the Israel-Gaza War with its guided missile and drone capability.

Israel, despite its enormous air force, therefore no longer has the deterrent capacity it once had, and this is changing the geopolitics of the Middle-East. Although social media is traditionally deployed en masse to deny the effectiveness of devastating attacks against Israel like Iran’s True Promise II, and to wildly exaggerate the effectiveness of, for instance, Israel’s response to Iran’s attack, this will be changing too. The Israelo-British-American command of information space has provided the empire and its cohorts the ability to “create” victories that haven’t occurred, and to provide the internet “sludge” of factoids that AI depends on to provide the world with the “truth.” However, with the launch of Deepseek, China has at one stroke destroyed, and democratised the information space, even as the internet was gradually being eaten up by AI.

This renaissance in Arab awareness of Israel’s military weakness, as well as its dysfunction as a society at war with itself over its constitution, brings the discussion round to the third point, about why Trump’s deal isn’t going to happen as he imagines it. The stark perceptible decline of the empire and its cohorts reinforces the geopolitical pivot of the Arab Gulf, Saudi Arabia in particular, towards China. In a previous article, this was called the ‘decoupling from empire,’ and has involved an extraordinary and massive shift of mutual investment between China and Saudi Arabia that now dwarfs the financial relationship between Saudi Arabia and the United States (here is a link to the article).  

The Arab ministers’ recent sharp rejection of the Trump deal is not grandstanding. Not at all. Decision-makers in Jordan have gone so far as to confide to media that the country will close its border if refugees begin to cross over, and that should the Israelis seek to re-open it, Jordan would have its “casus belli.” For Jordanians to threaten war, even informally, is unprecedented and means that it is confident of total Saudi backing. This is important.

If fact ever since it has become clear that Israel’s new right-wing government has a plan for a Greater Israel that includes most of the Middle East, Arab leaders have quite naturally united against the threat. One of the remarkable things that has happened in the past few weeks is that Qatar is now following the Saudi lead in the region (just as the Emirates did when Saudi Arabia decided to change the political dynamics in the Yemen and end the war there) [See new postscript 06 February below]. We see for instance, Qatari FM Mohamed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, whose face most people are familiar with from the endless negotiations between Hamas and Israel in Doha, now visiting Lebanon and pledging the country’s billions behind the Saudi plan to restructure the country.

This new alliance between Saudi Arabia and Qatar creates a massive and so far unprecedented gravitational force in the Middle East and is the main reason why Egypt’s Sisi isn’t weakening in the face of Trump’s threats to cut off military aid if Egypt doesn’t take the Gazans. For Sisi, it has to be remembered that moving large numbers of Gazans to Egypt will strengthen the Muslim Brotherhood there and upend his régime. Now that he has the money to see him through his mismanagement of the economy, nothing on earth will get him to agree to the ethnic cleansing of Gaza.

But, of course, we have the $600bn protection money being tendered by Saudi Arabia to Trump (although Trump said in return he’d like a trillion) to keep him and Netanyahu off their backs. That money comes with a peace deal, normalisation (so-called) and a road map to a Palestinian state, however.

Since Saudi Arabia made peace with Iran in March 2023, we have seen a New Diplomacy develop between the two countries. Not only has this successfully survived the 15 months of war in the Middle East, but was followed in November 2024 by a new “strategic partnership” announced by the Saudi Crown prince between the two nations. The announcement, specifically called Iran a factor for “peace” in the region, burying once and for all the idea that the American empire and its cohorts will be able to foment artificial Sunni-Shia tension under the rubric of “divide and rule.” It has been Iran’s new openness with Saudi Arabia and its decision to pull back from what Saudi Arabia sees as its backyard, which has encouraged Saudi Arabia now to bid for regional hegemony, taking Qatar as well as the Emirates, and Egypt now as well as Jordan in the fold.

The cooperation between Saudi Arabia and Qatar in Lebanon is telling. With Iran completely absent, and the new Lebanese government in the process of being formed, the Israelo-American ally and extremist Christian sect leader Samir Gaegae and his Lebanese Forces has had to give up his bid to exclude the Shiite “duo” for Hezbollah and Amal from the political scene. Why?

Because if Trump sniffs at the $600bn protection money Saudi Arabia offers and insists on ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, then war, as the Jordanians said, will be on the cards. But it won’t be Saudi Arabia or Qatar or indeed Jordan doing the fighting. Why should they if there is a new generation of Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and Liberation Front (PFLP) (and many other) fighters itching to fight, to revenge the deaths of their families. The $600bn will go a long way to repurposing underground arms factories and buy spares for them.

Or maybe it is all just a way for Trump to keep the peace in Gaza and neutralise Netanyahu. But then what? Trump doesn’t look like he knows… he’s just thrown it out there to see what comes back.

Postscript 06 February: Qatar has recently come down on Saudi Arabia’s side in the Sudanese civil war which, as a result, is leading to rapid gains and consolidation of power for the Sudanese government. The destructive role of the UAE in financing Hemeti and the RSF will, as was the case in Yemen, eventually be reined in, and Saudi Arabia will further consolidate its role of Arab hegemon.