Trump's Gulf tour reshapes Middle East diplomatic map
"He's got the potential. He's a real leader," said Trump after talks with Ahmed on Wednesday in Riyadh — a meeting brokered by his Saudi hosts, with whom the US president agreed a slew of arms, business and technology deals.
Trump's four-day tour of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates was more than just a diplomatic spectacle marked by lucrative investments.
It sealed the emergence of a new Sunni-led Middle East order and leaves Israel sidelined, according to three regional and two Western sources.
Amid growing irritation in Washington with Israel's failure to reach a ceasefire in Gaza, Trump's tour was a snub to Netanyahu, a close US ally who was the first foreign leader to visit Washington after the president returned to office in January, said the sources.
The message was clear: in Trump's less ideological, more results-driven vision of Middle East diplomacy, Netanyahu could no longer count on unconditional US support for his right-wing agenda, said the sources.
"This administration is very frustrated with Netanyahu and that frustration is showing," said David Schenker, a former US assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs under former president George W. Bush.
"They're very, very transactional, and Netanyahu isn't giving them anything right now."
The Trump administration wanted to deliver the message to Netanyahu that the US had its own interests in the Middle East, and it does not like him standing in its way, the sources added.
US patience has been strained not just by the Israeli prime minister's refusal to countenance a Gaza ceasefire but also his objection to US talks with Iran over its nuclear programme.
While publicly insisting US-Israeli relations remain strong, Trump administration officials have privately expressed irritation with Netanyahu's refusal to fall into line with Washington's positions on Gaza and Iran.
Six regional and Western sources said friction between the US and Israel was building before Trump's regional trip.
The tension began when Netanyahu flew to Washington on a second visit last month seeking Trump's backing for military strikes on Iran's nuclear sites — only to discover, to his shock, that Trump was opting for diplomacy.
An unbending advocate for a hardline stance against Teheran, Netanyahu was caught off guard, learning just hours before his meeting that negotiations were about to start.
In the following weeks, Trump's declaration of a ceasefire with the Houthis in Yemen, rapprochement with Syria's new leadership and bypassing of Israel on his Gulf visit showed how the traditionally close relations had become strained, said the sources.
During his election campaign, Trump made clear he wanted a ceasefire in Gaza and the hostages there released before he returned to the White House.
Months into Trump's presidency, Netanyahu has continued to defy ceasefire calls, expanded the offensive and offered no endgame or a post-war plan after 19 months of conflict.
The death toll in Gaza has passed 52,900 in recent days, according to local health officials.
Any hope that Trump could use his regional visit to cement his image as a peacemaker and announce a deal to end the bitterly divisive war were dashed.
Instead, Netanyahu — who is charged with war crimes in Gaza by the International Criminal Court — has doubled-down on his aim of crushing Hamas.
Netanyahu is also on trial in Israel over corruption charges, which he denies.
As Trump wrapped up his visit, Israel launched a new offensive last Friday in Gaza. Israeli strikes have killed hundreds of Palestinians in recent days.
Trump's other key priority — expanding the Abraham Accords establishing diplomatic ties between Israel and Arab states to include Saudi Arabia — has also been blocked by Netanyahu's intransigence.
Publicly, Trump himself has dismissed any talk of a rift. But Trump is forging ahead without Netanyahu.
With unapologetic self-interest, the US president is driving a realignment of US diplomacy towards wealthy Sunni states.
Although Netanyahu led the fight against Iran, the new regional order is being shaped in Riyadh, Doha and Abu Dhabi.
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AN Israeli soldier would position his leg against the wall in the narrow corridor to our school, then order us: 'Pass under my leg, or no school.' That was a recurring event for us children during the early 1990s in our Al-Shati refugee camp in northern Gaza, the 'beach camp.' It took us some growing up to understand it as systematic humiliation, an experience that would define most of our encounters with the Israeli army. That left many of us feeling helpless and outraged, as it seemed an attack on our humanity. This is why when former Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant called us ' khayot adam ' (human animals) after Hamas' bloody attack on Oct 7, 2023, it was not a surprise. Yet, this time, there was an eerie feeling that Gallant was thinking beyond the typical Israeli dehumanisation of us. 'It was a prelude to dismantling what was left of us as a people,' Yousri al-Ghoul, a novelist from Gaza, told me over Whatsapp, in one of many ongoing conversations I maintain with contacts, friends and family in Gaza. Throughout history, dehumanisation preceded and justified atrocities. The Nazis before the Shoah, and the Hutu against the Tutsi before the 1994 Rwanda genocide. Before Israel's 1948 inception, the Zionist movement in Palestine negated our national consciousness, calling us merely 'Arabs,' suggesting an absence of a unique identity. And by viewing us much as colonial powers viewed their subjects, we were perceived as inferior and less worthy of statehood. Many Israelis today see Palestinians as Palestinians – a people with an identity – but still hang on, at least unconsciously, to the notion of superior Israeli Jews. This hierarchical thinking has normalised the occupation, so that Palestinian resistance against it is perceived as aggression against the natural order. Decades of undermining our agency has evolved to a monstrous level, destroying what was left of our physical existence. Seemingly, it's now not enough to besiege, indiscriminately bomb, displace and starve us. We're now asked to die for food. 'We were lured into death traps labeled as humanitarian aid,' says Ahmed, a history teacher in Gaza, referring to the new system of food distribution under the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. 'Even our bodies, the last pasture of dignity, are reduced to breathing corpses,' he added. 'Corpses' is the word the commissioner-general of the United Nations aid agency for Palestinians, Philippe Lazzarini, used to describe Gazans. Quoting a colleague in Gaza, he said they 'are neither dead nor alive, they are walking corpses.' This is a metaphor my uncle, a professor of English literature, has used to describe Gazans under Israeli siege since 2007. He quoted TS Eliot's The Waste Land to paint an image of a Gaza engulfed with despair and spiritual aridity. To Ahmed, 'corpses are not people, so no compunction killing them.' Indeed, the Gaza war is the bloodiest in recent memory. Palestinian numbers point to 59,000, including 18,000 children, killed by the Israeli military as of July. A study by the University of London estimates the death toll to be 100,000. More than 85% of those who remain alive are displaced, squeezed into only 20% of the narrow strip of land. Many of them are facing famine, while the rest are months into sustained malnutrition. A dire situation has weakened many Gazans' sense of self. No longer do they care if they live or die, many have told me. Over a thousand aid-seekers were killed as they tried to reach Gaza Humanitarian Foundation distribution sites, but people still went knowing they may not come back. 'The US contractors manning the aid treat our desperation as savagery, and the IDF shoots us like rats,' Ahmed angrily said, referring to Israel Defense Forces. And the hungrier and more deprived people become, the less 'like us' they appear. Al-Ghoul, the novelist, lamented how the 'hunger games' turned some people against each other, driven by basic survival instincts. He added: 'Don't talk to me about civility when my children are fading to skin and bone.' Meanwhile, Gaza writer Mahmoud Assaf told me that as the war fractures Gaza's society, 'personal survival tops everything. Very few people are now concerned with culture, education or morality, things that Palestinians typically took pride of.' Assaf was offered money to sell his cherished library to be burned as fuel in the absence of basic petroleum-based products or wood. 'I actually considered the offer to feed my children,' he said. 'You lose your soul hopping hungry from a displacement tent to another while herded by Israeli drones and tanks. You feel you don't deserve to live,' he added. But in the ocean of despair, there are those who find salvation in faith to reclaim some of their humanity. My mother, 65, is losing the strength to walk because of malnutrition, as I watch helplessly from the United Kingdom. But she tells everyone to keep faith, because through faith 'she feels complete as a human being.' A comforting outlook for many Palestinians, in a world they feel has abandoned them. 'The world says the Holocaust happened because they didn't know about it. But the Gaza bloodshed is live-streamed,' my friend Murad told me. He added, 'What can I do to prove my humanity to be worthy of saving?' 'Shall I show them my blond blue-eyed daughter so they can relate to us? How about our malnourished cats?' Our conversation was after an Israeli airstrike killed Murad's sister and her family in Al-Shuja'iyya, a neighborhood in eastern Gaza City. We spoke as he searched for water to wash up following hours digging out his sister's family from the rubble. Murad's niece, five, died from malnutrition a week ago. And like all Gazans, he's deprived of grieving his loved ones. 'No time to grieve,' he said, because one has to shut down such natural human instincts to physically survive. And in doing so, one loses part of their soul, the sense of self as a human being. To close the circle of dehumanisation, they deny our right to feel pain. — Los Angeles Times/Tribune News Service Emad Moussa is a Palestinian British researcher and writer specialising in the political psychology of inter-group and conflict dynamics.
