
The new guard of kleptocrats are seeking quick deals on Gaza and Ukraine, not because they want peace but because theyâve found a better way to make themselves even richer
Middle East Eye â 14 March 2025
Anyone trying to make sense of the Trump administrationâs policy towards Gaza should have a thumping headache by now.
Initially, US President Donald Trump called for the mass expulsion of Palestinians from the tiny territory wrecked by Israel over the past year and a half, so that he could build the âRiviera of the Middle Eastâ on the crushed bodies of Gazaâs children.
He followed up last week with an explicitly genocidal threat addressed to âthe people of Gazaâ â all two million-plus of them. They would be âDEADâ if the Israeli hostages held by Hamas were not quickly released â a decision over which Gazaâs population has precisely no control.
To make this extermination threat more credible, his administration has expedited the transfer of an extra $4bn worth of US weapons to Israel, bypassing Congressional approval.
Those arms include more of the 2,000lb bombs sent by the Biden administration, which turned Gaza into a âdemolition siteâ, as Trump himself called it.
The White House also nodded through Israelâs reimposition of a blockade that has once again choked off food, water and fuel to the enclave â further evidence of Israelâs genocidal intent.
But while all this was going on, Trump also dispatched to the region a special envoy, Adam Boehler, to negotiate the release of the few dozen Israeli hostages still held in Gaza.
He was given permission to break with more than 30 years of US foreign policy and meet directly with Hamas, long designated a terrorist organisation by Washington.
âPretty nice guysâ
The meeting reportedly took place without Israelâs knowledge.
One Israeli official observed: âYou canât announce that this organisation [Hamas] needs to be eliminated and destroyed, and give Israel full backing to do it, and at the same time conduct secret and intimate contacts with the group.â
In an interview with CNN at the weekend, Boehler remarked of Hamas: âThey donât have horns growing out of their head. Theyâre actually guys like us. Theyâre pretty nice guys.â
Then, in another unprecedented move, Boehler gave interviews to Israeli TV channels to speak directly to the Israeli public â apparently to prevent Israelâs prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, from misrepresenting the content of his talks with Hamas.
In one interview, Boehler said Hamas had proposed a five to 10-year truce with Israel. During that period, Hamas would be expected to âlay down its armsâ and forgo political power in Gaza. He the proposal as ânot a bad first offerâ.
In another, he referred to Palestinian prisoners as âhostagesâ.
His approach left Israel quietly seething but unable to say much for fear of antagonising Trump.
âNo agent of Israelâ
In parallel, Trumpâs Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff â who reportedly laid down the law early on to Netanyahu by ordering him to attend a meeting on the Sabbath â headed to Doha this week to try to restore a ceasefire deal he had previously negotiated.
He appears determined to push Israel into honouring the second phase of that agreement, which requires the Israeli army to withdraw from Gaza and halt its war on the enclave. That would pave the way for a third phase, in which Gaza is reconstructed.
Witkoffâs terms, according to reports, are that Hamas agrees to demilitarise and its fighters leave the enclave.
Israel is deeply opposed to a second phase. It wants to stick with phase one, in which it finishes swapping the remaining Israeli captives held by Hamas for some of the many thousands of Palestinians imprisoned in Israeli torture camps.
The idea is that, once completed, Israel will be free to restart the slaughter.
Boehler reinforced Witkoffâs message, saying the White House hoped to âjump-startâ talks and that the US was not âan agent of Israelâ â implicitly acknowledging that, for many decades, it has very much looked like one.
Trump indicated a change of heart himself on Wednesday, telling reporters at the White House: âNobody will expel the Palestinians.â
Sword of retribution
Apparently confounding Boehlerâs claim that the US is able to make its own decisions about the Middle East, Trump was reported on Thursday to have removed him from dealing with the hostages issue following Israeli objections.
Meanwhile, Trump noisily shredded First Amendment protections on political speech, specifically in relation to Israel.
He signed an executive order empowering US authorities to arrest and deport visa holders protesting Israelâs year-and-a-half-long slaughter in Gaza â or what the worldâs highest court is investigating as a âplausibleâ genocide.
That quickly resulted in the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a leader of last springâs student protests at New Yorkâs Columbia University â one of the most high-profile of dozens of protracted demonstrations on US campuses last year, which were often met with police violence.
The Department of Homeland Security accused Khalil of âactivitiesâ â namely, campus protests â supposedly âaligned to Hamasâ. These demonstrations, it alleged, threatened âUS national securityâ.
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âThis is the first arrest of many to come,â Trump wrote on social media, declaring that his administration would be coming after anyone âengaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activityâ. Axios reported last week that Secretary of State Marco Rubio planned to use AI to search through foreign studentsâ social media accounts for signs of âterroristâ sympathies.
These developments formalise Washingtonâs working assumption that any opposition to Israelâs killing and maiming of tens of thousands of Palestinian children should be equated with terrorism â a view increasingly shared, it seems, by UK and European authorities.
In concert, the White House announced that it was cancelling some $400m in federal grants and contracts to Columbia University over its âcontinued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish studentsâ.
Confusingly, the university administration was among the most hardline in calling in police to crush the protests against the genocide. But the financial cuts had the intended effect, with Columbia announcing on Thursday it would inflict stringent punishments, including expulsions and degree revocations, on students and graduates who had taken part in a campus sit-in last year.
Some 60 other institutions have reportedly received letters warning that they are in danger of funding cuts if they do not âprotect Jewish studentsâ â a reference to those who cheerlead Israelâs war crimes.
That will come at a heavy price for other students, including many Jewish students, who have been exercising their constitutional right to criticise Israelâs crimes.
A sword of retribution now hangs over every single publicly funded centre of higher learning in the US: crush any sign of opposition to Israelâs destruction of Gaza, or face dire financial consequences.
âBaffling rhetoricâ
Does any of this amount to a clear strategy? Does it make any sense?
These mixed messages fit a pattern with the Trump administration. Its wider strategy is, as Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the occupied territories, calls it: psychological overwhelming.
âHitting us every day with XXL [extra-extra large] doses of baffling rhetoric and erratic policies serves to âcontrol the scriptâ, distracting and disorienting us, normalising the absurd, all while disrupting global stability (and consolidating US control).â
The White House is doing something similar over Ukraine.
It is now talking directly to Russia, shutting the door on Nato membership for Ukraine, publicly humiliating Ukraineâs president, while also threatening more sanctions and tariffs on Moscow unless it agrees to a rapid ceasefire.
The Trump administrationâs goal is to normalise its inconsistencies, hypocrisies, lies and misdirections so they become entirely unremarkable.
Opposition to its will â a will that can change from day to day, or week to week â will be treated as treasonous. The only safe response in such circumstances is acquiescence, passivity and silence.
In the tumultuous political landscape Trump has created, the one constant â our North Star â is the western mediaâs uncritical cheerleading of the Westâs war industries.
Consider the Biden administration. The mediaâs harshest condemnation came not over the destruction Washington wrought on Afghanistan during its 20-year occupation, but for ending the war â a war that had left the country in ruins and the official enemy, the Taliban, stronger than ever.
Contrast that with the mediaâs resolutely muted response to Bidenâs 15 months of arming Israelâs genocide in Gaza. In doing so, the media eagerly cast aside their supposed humanitarian concerns, including their ritualistic nods to the post-Second World War global order and international law.
Similarly, the media have been openly critical of Trumpâs overtures to Russia over Ukraine, siding with European leaders who insist the war must continue to the bitter end â regardless of how much higher the death toll of Ukrainians and Russians climbs as a result.
And predictably, the media have gone out of their way to accommodate Trumpâs Israel-supporting, openly genocidal rhetoric and actions towards Gaza.
It was astonishing to watch outlets that regularly portray Trump as a threat to democracy contort themselves to whitewash his explicit call to exterminate âthe people of Gazaâ should the hostages not be immediately released. Instead, they mendaciously suggested he was referring only to Hamas leadership.
It is not just Trump and his team who are well practised in the dark arts of deception.
Illegitimacy trap
While the Trump administration may be playing fast and loose with Washingtonâs political culture, it is largely adhering to the Westâs traditional script on Israel and Palestine.
Witkoff and Boehler are deploying a well-worn strategy, binding the Palestinians into what could be called an illegitimacy trap. Damned if you do; damned if you donât.
Whatever Palestinians choose â and however much they are dispossessed and brutalised â it is they, and anyone who supports them, who are cast as the villains. The criminals. The oppressors. The Jew-haters. The terrorists.
This applies not only to Hamas but also to the accommodationists of Fatah.
Faced with relentless dispossession through decades of Israeli colonisation, Palestinian factions have responded in the two main ways available to them.
One is to adopt the course enshrined in international law as the right of all occupied peoples: armed resistance. This is the path Hamas has taken as it governs the concentration camp that is Gaza.
Every US administration, including the current one, however, has conditioned any talks about statehood on Palestinians renouncing armed resistance from the outset, dismissing their right in international law as terrorism.
For that reason, until now, Hamas has always been excluded from negotiations. The talks that have taken place â over its head â have operated on the assumption that Hamas must be disarmed before Israel is expected to make any concessions.
Hamas must relinquish its weapons voluntarily â against an opponent armed to the teeth, whose bad faith in negotiations is legendary â or it will be forcibly disarmed by Israel or its rival, Fatah.
In other words, peace with Israel is premised on civil war for Palestinians.
That appears to be the course the Trump administration will pursue. For now, it is demanding that Hamas âdemilitariseâ voluntarily. When that fails, Hamas will find itself back at square one.
Endless accommodation
Faced with Trumpâs plan to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians from Gaza, Hamas has precisely no incentive to disarm.
In fact, it has a further disincentive. Its rivals in Fatah are all too visibly caught in their own, even more fatal, illegitimacy trap.
Mahmoud Abbasâs faction, which heads the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank, has chosen the alternative to armed resistance: diplomacy and endless political accommodation.
The problem is that Israel has never shown the slightest interest in granting the Palestinians â even Fatahâs âmoderatesâ â a state.
Even during the so-called apex of peacemaking â the Oslo Accords of the 1990s â Palestinian statehood was never mentioned.
Oslo was simply a nebulous process in which Israel was supposed to gradually withdraw from the occupied territories as Palestinian leaders took responsibility for maintaining âsecurityâ â meaning, in practice, Israelâs security.
In short, the Oslo concept of âpeaceâ was little different from the catastrophic status quo in Gaza before the genocide began.
During its so-called disengagement in 2005, Israel pulled its soldiers back to a fortified cordon, and from there controlled all movement and trade in and out of the enclave.
In the vacated space, Israel allowed only a glorified local authority, running the schools, emptying the bins and acting as a security contractor for Israel against those not ready to accept this as their permanent fate.
Hamas refused to play ball.
Abbasâs PA, on the other hand, accepted this kind of model for its series of cantons across the West Bank â on the assumption that obedience would eventually pay dividends.
It hasnât. Now Israel is gearing up to formally annex most of the West Bank, backed by the Trump administration. Behind the scenes, the White House is finagling support from the Gulf states.
Fatah cannot extricate itself any more than Hamas from the illegitimacy trap set for it by Washington and Europe.
Clinging to the old order
Paradoxically, critics in Washington â backed by the media and European elites â dismiss Trumpâs moves on Ukraine as appeasement of a supposedly resurgent Russian imperialism, rather than as peacemaking.
These same critics are equally discomfited by the Trump administrationâs meetings with Hamas.
All of this breaks with the decades-old Washington consensus, which dictates who are the good guys and who are the bad guys, who are the law enforcers and who are the terrorists.
In typical fashion, Trump is disrupting these former certainties.
The reassuring, knee-jerk response is to take one side or another. Either Trump is a mould-breaker, remaking a dysfunctional world order. Or he is a fascist-in-the-making, who will hasten the collapse of the established world order, bringing it crashing down on our heads.
The truth is he is both.
There is a consistency to Trumpâs approach to both Ukraine and Gaza â despite the apparent contradiction. In both he appears determined to bring to an end a failing status quo. In the former, he wants an end to war and destruction by forcing Ukraineâs surrender; in the latter, he wants the running sore of a Palestinian concentration camp gone by forcibly emptying it of its inhabitants.
This new consistency replaces an older one, in which Washingtonâs elite perpetuated forever wars against painted devils that justified the siphoning of national wealth into the coffers of the war industries on which that eliteâs wealth depended.
The pretexts for those forever wars had become so threadbare, and so destabilising in a world of ever-depleting resources, that the elites behind those wars were utterly discredited.
The far-right, most especially Trump, is riding that wave of disillusionment. And its success stems precisely from this rule-breaking, by presenting itself as a new broom sweeping away the old guard of corporate war-makers.
As the Bidens, Starmers, Macrons, and Von der Leyens sink deeper into the mire, the more desperately they cling to a crumbling system. Trumpâs disruption works against them.
Feathering their nests
But the new guard is no more invested in peace than the old, as Gaza makes clear. It is simply looking for new ways to do business â new deals that still siphon national wealth away from ordinary people and into the pockets of billionaires.
Trump would rather strike lucrative deals with Russiaâs Vladimir Putin over resources â in both Russia and Ukraine â than sink more money into a futile war that locks up the regionâs vast potential profits.
And he would rather put an end to Gazaâs decades-long status as a no-go zone, a holding centre for Palestinians, when it could instead be transformed into a playground for the rich, its vast offshore gas reserves finally exploited.
The new guard of kleptocrats is less interested in forever wars â not because they have any love for peace, but because they believe theyâve found a better way to make themselves even richer.
This newfound openness to âdoing things differentlyâ has an appeal, especially after decades of the same cynical elites waging the same cynical wars.
But make no mistake: the fundamentals remain unchanged. The rich are still looking out for themselves. They are still feathering their own nests, not yours. They still see the world as their plaything, where lesser humans â you and me â are expendable.
If he can, Trump will end the war in Ukraine by cutting a money-making deal, over Kyivâs head, with Russia.
If he can, Trump will end the slaughter in Gaza by striking a deal with Israel and the Gulf states, over the heads of Hamas and Fatah, to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians from their homeland.
And if he can get away with it, Trump is ready for something else, too. Heâs prepared to break heads at home to ensure his critics canât stop him and his billionaire pals from getting their way.