bonus email — donald trump is not a master deal-maker

[Leon Kraiem]

Hi friends,

I think Donald Trump is a plague on human history, taking a shredder to everything that is sacred about America and sacralizing everything unholy about the pre-American world, right as civilization was on the cusp of genuinely improving. 

And also: I owe him an enormous debt of gratitude, for (it seems) securing the return of the hostages, giving Israel international cover, being — as inappropriate as this sounds (and the correct response to that, to be clear, is to be extra-skeptical about what I'm about to say, not to play the 'I can't believe I'm agreeing with so-and-so, has the world gone mad?? game — the more sensible question, in these situations, is: have I gone mad?) — a voice of moral clarity; and, lest we forget, green-lighting a necessary and wildly successful war against Iran, and bombing a series of nuclear sites in a way we couldn't have, and then sewing everything back together, to the extent that you can actually forget there was a historic regional-powers war in the Middle East less than four months ago. 

Still: let's not sacrifice our critical faculties just because we're happy about the deal. Donald Trump is not a master deal-maker; he's spent sixty years in business, a decade in world politics, if he knew how to make a good deal, he'd have made one by now, maybe even two. In fact, he's gone bankrupt repeatedly, broken the economies of poor countries for a negligible tax increase on American citizens because he understands neither trade deficits nor tariffs, shut down the government twice, and so on and so forth. 

As I wrote in an email after Trump revealed his peace plan: This was never an 'art of the deal' type of problem anyway. This is a major armed conflict between a people trying to survive, and another people hellbent on annihilating them who pulled off one disastrously successful gambit, winning leverage they'd never dreamed of before. If a deal is achieved, I wrote, it won't be the product of some master-stroke of real-estate-chops-turned-diplomacy; it will be because the actual situation on the ground has changed, or been made to change, to shift the balance of power.

I wrote at the time that Qatar and Turkey were the players to watch, as these are Hamas's allies in the region, who have immediate leverage over the terror group and could actually pressure them on the ground. The whole western world, it's worth noting, could also pressure Hamas, by ceasing to carry out, free of charge, its antisemitic global propaganda campaign; still, Turkey and Qatar actually host Hamas leaders, and could credibly threaten to have their brains blown out, which is significantly more dramatic. If Trump has managed to get Hamas to buckle, I wrote, he must have either convinced Hamas that Israel is willing to sacrifice the hostages — which didn't seem to have happened, neither the willingness, nor the credible bluff of it — or he must have found new ways of hurting Hamas without putting the hostages at significant added risk — and if he managed to do that, it probably involved getting the Qataris and the Turks on board. 

Now, I am not a Mideast expert. I have no inside sources, and it's occurred to me since I sat down to write, that the first half of this email is probably just a "can I copy your homework" version of my colleague Lazar Berman's analysis yesterday, peppered with insights from the Unholy and Call me Back podcasts; be that as it may, it's still worth laying out, for those of who you aren't as plugged into the anglo-Ziosphere as I am: I assumed that Trump was using sticks, but it seems — from what's totally out in the open — that he was actually using carrots more than anything else. In the last few weeks, Qatar has basically secured a defense pact with the US. Meanwhile, Turkey got F35s. It's also reasonable to assume — given everything we know about Trump and his administration — that part of the give-and-take here may also be naked corruption, which doesn't show up in White House press briefings; where will the Donald get to build his next hotel? Who's going to give him a shiny new plane? Which country's exports get a sweet deal on tariffs — either because the country really wants it, which you could argue is actual diplomacy, or just because a very rich person pulled some strings to steer state policy?

Now, again, all of this wheeling and dealing may have produced a very good result. It might even be a result so good that Israel would have signed onto it, had it been written out as explicit provisions in the deal. But it wasn't, for obvious reasons. These are serious tradeoffs in terms of Israel's national security going forward — I'll get to that in a second — but they're also, I imagine, complicated moves from an American point of view as well. Maybe it's simple, I don't know. But I know that Turkey's access to American arms has been a thorny issue for decades, and I imagine the US-Qatar relationship is not a clean and simple alliance (contra, say, Tucker Carlson, who regularly asserts that Doha is an ally but, when Israel is called an ally, becomes a radical deconstructionist who doesn't know what that word means). 

It could well be, I'm trying to say, that Trump was not more insightful or creative or brave in making these deals than Biden was, he was just more willing, and it may also be the case that his personal affection for autocrats, and his hobby of violating the emoluments clause, unlocked moves that a law-abiding, democratically oriented president would be constitutionally (and Constitutionally) incapable of accessing. Shrewdness and shamelessness may yield the same result sometimes, but they're categorically not the same thing. We shouldn't confuse them.

In terms of what those barely-backroom deals mean for Israel: again, I'm not a security expert. But I know that Qatar has hosted Hamas's leaders for a gazillion years, and provided the Strip with gazillions of dollars (though — it should be noted — it did so at Bibi's request, after [per a Yediot report earlier this year] Netanyahu blew up a Saudi plan at the end of the last Gaza war to depose Hamas and train the PA to take its place); I know that Qatar is behind Al Jazeera, which is Hamas's propaganda arm and at least as important, possibly more, to Hamas's strategy than its military or its political wing. And I know that Erdogan is an open Hamas superfan, who said the other day that Israel has "surpassed Hitler" in our commission of genocide, and that — as Trump frequently compliments him on, in classic quiet-part-out-loud fashion — he basically "took over Syria" from Assad (where, by the by, he is working to ensure that northern Syria's Kurds, who defeated ISIS with lethal female combat soldiers, give up their arms and integrate into the al-Qaeda-offshoot-led government, demonstrating yet again the correctness of Zionism as a national liberation scheme, and the necessity of repeating it for other nations, the Kurds first and foremost, who've been left yet again with "no friends but the mountains.")

Israel has been spectacularly successful, over the last two years, crippling Iran's terror axis. The beepers, the nuclear sites, the smuggling route (Erdogan gets credit for Syria, as I said, but he couldn't have filled that vacuum had our knocking out Hezbollah not opened it for him). But already, in the contours of this deal to finally resolve the war's first and most challenging front, you can watch the next axis — also helmed by a petrostate and a bygone, imperial center of non-Arab Islam — grabbing footholds to take its place. 

We can handle that new axis, I'm confident. Israelis are scrappy, crafty, courageous, all of that. But it goes to show, in addition to the not-so-openly-acknowledged trade-offs of Trump's Gaza plan, that it is not — as the president frequently, comically proclaims — a deal for "peace in the Middle East."  It is a repositioning, the start of a regroup period, "stand back and stand by," as POTUS memeably told the Proud Boys. Gazan "journalist" Abubaker Abed reassured a concerned Hamas simp on Twitter yesterday: "Understand your frustration. But there will be no disarmament. Believe me. It's not like what you think. It's a pause to rest." 

Which brings me to my last point, a proverbial horse that's been dead for decades but which I will continue to beat, in these emails and elsewhere: It can't be a peace deal, it could never, in any universe, be a peace deal, if one of the sides is uninterested in peace. And — again, to rehash well-worn territory, but it's important nevertheless — I'm not talking exclusively or even, necessarily, primarily about actual Palestinians in the actual land of Palestine. I'm talking about them, for sure — watch Mr. FAFO react to the ceasefire, then go remind yourself how he sounded on Oct. 7 — it's the same euphoria, the same "Allah hu-Akbar"s, with not the slightest indication of having reconsidered anything since he first cheered on Hamas's invasion of Israel; I'm also talking, though, about, e.g., Nerdeen Kiswani, the leader of the major Palestinian protest group in New York City, who said of Trump's Gaza plan: “The deal would dismantle Hamas’ military capabilities, end its political rule, and ensure Gaza never poses a challenge to Israel." This — just to be clear — was her argument against the deal. Or Students for Justice in Palestine, who said: “Normalization is never the answer.” 

Early in the war, I was on Mt. Herzl, at the funeral of a soldier who I hadn't known personally but whose family had called on the general public to attend. While I was standing there, listening to the wails of each of the people who loved him the most — except his best friend, who was fighting in Gaza and still didn't know that the person we were mourning was dead — it occurred to me that, had the last hundred years of the Israel/Palestine conflict taken place a thousand years ago, we probably wouldn't break it up into a bunch of different wars. We'd probably call it one long war, a Middle Eastern Hundred Years' War, characterized by perpetual insurgent violence, and punctuated by a series of dramatic battles — like the Battle of Aleppo, the Battle of Mosul, the Battle of Britain, all of which took significantly longer than most Israeli wars — of which the current Gaza fighting was only the most recent, unlikely to be the last.

Of course, even if this deal had ended that war — the one between Jews who want to live in this place and everyone dead-set on stopping them, that's been going on since, let's say, the 1929 riots —  it obviously wouldn't make "peace in the Middle East." The idea that the Jews of Israel are what stand between this region and a future of peace and prosperity is one of those relatively benign antisemitic ideas that we've all just come to accept from think-tank, Pod Save the World types. It's about as plausible, of course, as 'Mossad did 9/11.' (Incidentally, the reason it's so implausible is that the Middle East is populated by millions of people, including very rich and powerful ones, who despite being personally oppressed at every turn by the ideology — and in some cases, the very people — who did do 9/11, insist on believing Mossad did it instead.) 

But regardless, it didn't even do that. This hundred years' war is not over, nor is a conclusion visible anywhere on the horizon. 

On the level of short-term strategy, it looks like we're in a better place than we were on October 6, 2023. There aren't 150,000 Hezbollah rockets hanging over our heads, we have freedom of movement in the skies of Iran, Hamas is not Oct. 7.-ready a mile and a half from our kibbutzim. Longer-term, though, we've clearly lost enormous ground on the front of global opinion, which really does matter a whole awful lot — maybe we can regain that ground, maybe not; we'll see. But more than at any point since the Holocaust, "Israel" is an easy byword for every bad thing that the west is guilty of, and in true western fashion, millions of protesters seems eager to string us up on a cross in order to feel absolved of it. In the Muslim world, the antisemitism is even fiercer than it was before Oct. 7. And in America, which was always the exception, support for Israel as against the Palestinians (that's how the poll asks it, not me) was +48 before the war, it's -1 now. Only 58% of younger Americans say that "the way Hamas carried out its attack on Israel on Oct. 7" was unacceptable. One in ten says it was acceptable, which is a pretty high approval rating, when you think about it, for taking babies hostage.

Still, amid all this confusion, and as I said in that earlier email, one has to hand Trump a lot of credit for refusing to compromise on the wrongness of Hamas here, and for insisting — against not just Hamas and other international mediator types, but against a huge percentage of the Israeli public! — that any deal include the release of all the hostages at once, at the very beginning; Trump actually let us turn down proposals that didn't guarantee an initial, total hostage release, and he managed — however he did it — to get such a deal signed (and, God willing, implemented), which very serious people accepted long ago was impossible. Which Bibi seemed to think was impossible, when Hamas gave its typical, conditional yes. (Triggering a phone call that produced this Hebrew TV graphic for the ages.)

All in all, it is a very good day, and we have much and many to be grateful for.

As the psalmist sang:

Ah, the wars they will be fought again
The holy dove, she will be caught again
Bought and sold, and bought again
The dove is never free

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in

Shabbat shalom

Leon