Mouin Rabbani discusses what Donald Trump's return could mean for the Lebanese ceasefire, normalization efforts in the region, and the prospect of Israeli annexation of the West Bank.
December 4, 2024
MONDOWEISS
MONDOWEISS
Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and US President Donald Trump (Photo: Bandar Algaloud/Saudi Royal Court)
Donald Trump is headed back to The White House amid escalating developments in the Middle East.
What does a new administration mean for the Lebanese ceasefire, normalization efforts in the region, and the prospect of West Bank annexation? Should we expect anything different from Trump in terms of policy or will it largely be a continuation of Biden’s policies?
Mondoweiss U.S. correspondent Michael Arria spoke with Jadaliyya co-editor and Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies fellow Mouin Rabbani about what to expect
Mondoweiss: Trump recently said there will be “hell to pay” if Hamas does not release the hostages by the time he takes office. It’s hard to know what to take seriously from him, but I am wondering what you made of those comments.
Mouin Rabbani: The problem with any discussion about Trump, particularly more than a month before he takes office, is that the man is so erratic, so unpredictable, and so given over to hyperbolic polemics that it’s really impossible to determine what should be taken seriously and what should be dismissed as as hot air.
This latest statement, I’ve seen various interpretations. One is that he’s getting ready to nuke Tehran in a manner of speaking. Another is that he’s trying to exercise pressure on all parties concerned, not only Hamas, but also Israel. That he wants this issue resolved before he comes into office so that he doesn’t have to deal with the crisis and can pose as the president who ends wars rather than participates in them.
Another version that I’ve heard is that the Biden and Trump teams are coordinating closely and Trump believes, rightly or wrongly, that a deal may be in the offing and that the real purpose of the statement is his way of taking credit for whatever development may may take place next.
He also just had dinner with Netanyahu’s wife and son, and it could be kind of a spur-in-the-moment response to whatever he heard last. So, the short answer is, the real meaning of the statement is impossible to tell. There are multiple interpretations, and it’s anyone’s guess which which one is correct.
Last week Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich claimed that the West Bank will be annexed in 2025. What should we make of those comments and the prospects of Israeli annexation?
That’s certainly plausible. One scenario refers to Israel with U.S. consent annexing the settlements, another speaks of annexing Area C and another speaks of annexing the West Bank in its entirety. I think suggestions that Trump is prepared to go along with at least one of those scenarios seems entirely plausible. It’s consistent with his “Peace to Prosperity” initiative of 2020.
However, I would make two points. The first is, given the direction of travel of Israeli politics, would we be right to say that this wouldn’t have happened if the Democrats retained the White House? I’m not so sure because if Israel is doing these things with White House encouragement in the case of Trump, I think in the case of Harris, they would probably do it, not with necessarily with the encouragement of the White House, but with the knowledge that they can effortlessly defy the U.S. president and get away with it.
I think the ultimate difference here has to do perhaps less with the United States or the Israelis and more with the Europeans. Let’s not forget that Israel already annexed Jerusalem in June of 1967 and got away with it, more or less. If Israel conducts further acts of annexation in the West Bank in 2025, how will the Europeans respond? I think this is of crucial importance to the Israelis because it is the EU and not the U.S., which is Israel’s main trading partner, particularly for illegal products from the illegal settlements. Here you could argue that there would be a difference insofar as a Trump administration may be willing to impose greater costs or seek to impose sanctions on the EU if it takes action against Israel over annexation.
What are you thoughts about the ceasefire in Lebanon, which Israel has notably already broken multiple times. What does it mean for the region?
I don’t think a ceasefire is really the right way to describe this, because it seems we’re dealing with two agreements.
There’s the U.S.-brokered agreement that both Israel and Lebanon agreed to, and that Hezbollah indirectly agreed to. It calls for a comprehensive cessation of hostilities, a 60-day period during which Hezbollah is obliged to withdraw its weapons north of the Litani River, and Israel is obliged to withdraw its forces south of the Israeli-Lebanese border, and and so on. That’s more or less a public document.
Then according to multiple reports, which are credible, but not confirmed, there is also and a secret side letter of a letter of American assurances to Israel. According to this reporting Washington basically gives Israel a free hand in Lebanon to do as it pleases and effectively assigns Israel the role of the enforcer of a ceasefire to which Israel is supposed to be one of the parties ceasing fire. It’s almost giving Israel the right to conduct armed hostilities in order to enforce a ceasefire. From Washington and Israel’s perspective, what we’re really talking about is not a cessation of mutual and reciprocal cessation of hostilities, but a unilateral cessation of hostilities, that Lebanon and Lebanese parties are obliged to scrupulously respect, but that Israel is free to ignore at will on the basis of its own interpretation of any Lebanese violations.
That’s very clearly an unsustainable situation, and that’s why we’ve seen not only, according to UNIFIL [United Nations Interim Force In Lebanon] there have already been more than 100 Israeli violations of the ceasefire, but yesterday for the first time, we also saw Hezbollah responding with mortar fire after a number of Lebanese had been killed in recent days. My own view is is that both Israel and Hezbollah accepted this agreement with the full expectation that it would prove to be a temporary agreement. They needed to regroup with their wounds and so on.
From the outset, I’ve had very serious questions about whether it would last past the new year.
I wanted to talk about what’s often referred to as “normalization efforts.” During his first presidency Trump touted the Abraham Accords as his big achievement in the region. That effort was embraced and celebrated by the Biden administration as well.
One of the most talked about aspects of these ongoing efforts is a deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia. This has been referenced many times Biden and Netanyahu. How should we understand all this?
Let’s take a step back and and recall that the traditional approach to this issue has been that Arab-Israeli normalization, meaning normalization between Israel and the various Arab states, with which it does not yet have a formal agreement, is a process that would occur at the end of an Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
In other words, Israel would withdraw from the occupied territories, you would have the establishment of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and and Gaza Strip, an informal Israeli-Palestinian peace treaty. Then and only then, as a result, would you have Arab-Israeli normalization. Arab-Israeli normalization was kind of a trump card, the leverage that that would be used to persuade Israel to end the occupation. That was the theory. It was laid forth most clearly in the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative.
Since you’re asking about Saudi Arabia, it’s worth recalling, that initiative was in fact, primarily a Saudi initiative. That process has now been inverted most clearly in the normalization agreements during the Trump administration, where now these normalization agreements precede any Israeli-Palestinian agreement, and rather than being used as leverage to produce an end to occupation and an independent Palestinian state, they’re now being used as leverage by Israel to further marginalize and isolate the Palestinians by in effect providing an Arab halal certificate to greater Israel.
Saudi Arabia, I think, is a somewhat different case for the following reasons. First of all, as you noted, after the Trump administration produced normalization agreements between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and to an extent Sudan, they were hoping that a similar agreement with Saudi Arabia would be the crowning achievement. It failed. Biden, as with every other Trump Middle East policy, rather than reverse or reconsider that policy, simply picked up where Trump left off.
The only significant diplomatic initiative undertaken by the Biden administration in the Middle East was to achieve a Saudi-Israeli normalization agreement. It’s called the Saudi-Israeli normalization agreement, but I think it’s a bit of a misnomer because it consists primarily not of a Saudi-Israeli agreement, but of a bilateral Saudi-U.S. agreement. The primary deliverables, if you will, in this agreement are not anything the Saudis would give to the Israelis, apart from formal recognition, nor anything the Israelis would give to the Saudis, but rather a U.S. formal security treaty with Saudi Arabia and U.S. delivery of a nuclear program to Saudi Arabia.
So it’s really a Saudi-U.S. agreement in which Saudi-Israeli normalization is the icing on the cake. It’s added on to make the Saudi-U.S. component palatable to Congress and others. It’s essentially a marketing tool to sell a Saudi-U.S. deal.
Before October 7th, this deal would have included a number of cosmetic Israeli concessions to the Palestinians in order to allow Saudi Arabia to make the argument that they did this not only for themselves, but also for the Palestinian cause. Since October 7th, the Saudis have raised the price significantly. What in fact happened during the past year is that the Saudis were demanding that any such tripartite agreement include credible and irreversible progress towards an end to occupation and the establishment of the Palestinian state.
This was simply not on the agenda as far as the Israel government is concerned so the Saudis then went to the Americans and said, “The Israelis aren’t ready for this.”
Let’s at least start with the bilateral U.S. Saudi aspects, which would include, as I said, the security guarantee of the nuclear program, the Saudis committing to various restrictions in terms of its relationship with Russia and China and so on. The response from Washington was, it’s either a three-way deal or no deal. So now Trump is coming into office and will go to the Americans after January and say, “This is a deal that’s on the table. We’re prepared to do it. But we can only do it if Washington extracts from Israel this irreversible progress towards a Palestinian state” or failing that goes only with a bilateral U.S.-Saudi aspect. I can see Trump going along with either scenario, particularly given his obsession with China. He may well say, “If the Israelis aren’t interested, why should I be more interested in this than they are?” and just go ahead and conclude a bilateral U.S.-Saudi deal.
Or there’s a prospect for the “deal of the century” as he’s called it. He may try to pursue a tripartite deal that satisfies the the minimum requirements of the Saudis. Either is possible.
Should we expect anything different from Trump overall in terms of the Middle East or will it largely be a continuation of Biden’s policies?
I’d just once again like to emphasize that he’s so erratic and unpredictable, it’s really difficult to make any confidence predictions over what comes next. I would just make two observations.
The first is that we should look not only for changes in U.S. policy, but we should also focus on the continuities. If you look at you know the major initiatives that that Trump took during his first term, many of them can in fact be seen as a logical culmination of administrations past. They often, for example, relied on pre-existing, bipartisan congressional legislation. Similarly, Biden simply picked up where Trump left off. I think the discussion we had about annexation is a good indication of this.
Secondly, I think the Century Foundation’s Aaron Lund recently made a very perceptive point, that given kind of the chaotic nature that that is rightfully expected of the next administration, policy may well be made by individuals appointed to various portfolios rather than centrally directed from the White House. Here it becomes interesting, of course, because the Trump coalition consists of different interest groups. You have, let’s say, the Adelson crowd, you have the Christian Zionists, you have the isolationists. So it’ll be interesting to see if this simply results in total chaos, or if it ultimately results in anything that can even remotely be considered a a coherent policy, and then we’ll have to see what that is.
Donald Trump is headed back to The White House amid escalating developments in the Middle East.
What does a new administration mean for the Lebanese ceasefire, normalization efforts in the region, and the prospect of West Bank annexation? Should we expect anything different from Trump in terms of policy or will it largely be a continuation of Biden’s policies?
Mondoweiss U.S. correspondent Michael Arria spoke with Jadaliyya co-editor and Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies fellow Mouin Rabbani about what to expect
Mondoweiss: Trump recently said there will be “hell to pay” if Hamas does not release the hostages by the time he takes office. It’s hard to know what to take seriously from him, but I am wondering what you made of those comments.
Mouin Rabbani: The problem with any discussion about Trump, particularly more than a month before he takes office, is that the man is so erratic, so unpredictable, and so given over to hyperbolic polemics that it’s really impossible to determine what should be taken seriously and what should be dismissed as as hot air.
This latest statement, I’ve seen various interpretations. One is that he’s getting ready to nuke Tehran in a manner of speaking. Another is that he’s trying to exercise pressure on all parties concerned, not only Hamas, but also Israel. That he wants this issue resolved before he comes into office so that he doesn’t have to deal with the crisis and can pose as the president who ends wars rather than participates in them.
Another version that I’ve heard is that the Biden and Trump teams are coordinating closely and Trump believes, rightly or wrongly, that a deal may be in the offing and that the real purpose of the statement is his way of taking credit for whatever development may may take place next.
He also just had dinner with Netanyahu’s wife and son, and it could be kind of a spur-in-the-moment response to whatever he heard last. So, the short answer is, the real meaning of the statement is impossible to tell. There are multiple interpretations, and it’s anyone’s guess which which one is correct.
Last week Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich claimed that the West Bank will be annexed in 2025. What should we make of those comments and the prospects of Israeli annexation?
That’s certainly plausible. One scenario refers to Israel with U.S. consent annexing the settlements, another speaks of annexing Area C and another speaks of annexing the West Bank in its entirety. I think suggestions that Trump is prepared to go along with at least one of those scenarios seems entirely plausible. It’s consistent with his “Peace to Prosperity” initiative of 2020.
However, I would make two points. The first is, given the direction of travel of Israeli politics, would we be right to say that this wouldn’t have happened if the Democrats retained the White House? I’m not so sure because if Israel is doing these things with White House encouragement in the case of Trump, I think in the case of Harris, they would probably do it, not with necessarily with the encouragement of the White House, but with the knowledge that they can effortlessly defy the U.S. president and get away with it.
I think the ultimate difference here has to do perhaps less with the United States or the Israelis and more with the Europeans. Let’s not forget that Israel already annexed Jerusalem in June of 1967 and got away with it, more or less. If Israel conducts further acts of annexation in the West Bank in 2025, how will the Europeans respond? I think this is of crucial importance to the Israelis because it is the EU and not the U.S., which is Israel’s main trading partner, particularly for illegal products from the illegal settlements. Here you could argue that there would be a difference insofar as a Trump administration may be willing to impose greater costs or seek to impose sanctions on the EU if it takes action against Israel over annexation.
What are you thoughts about the ceasefire in Lebanon, which Israel has notably already broken multiple times. What does it mean for the region?
I don’t think a ceasefire is really the right way to describe this, because it seems we’re dealing with two agreements.
There’s the U.S.-brokered agreement that both Israel and Lebanon agreed to, and that Hezbollah indirectly agreed to. It calls for a comprehensive cessation of hostilities, a 60-day period during which Hezbollah is obliged to withdraw its weapons north of the Litani River, and Israel is obliged to withdraw its forces south of the Israeli-Lebanese border, and and so on. That’s more or less a public document.
Then according to multiple reports, which are credible, but not confirmed, there is also and a secret side letter of a letter of American assurances to Israel. According to this reporting Washington basically gives Israel a free hand in Lebanon to do as it pleases and effectively assigns Israel the role of the enforcer of a ceasefire to which Israel is supposed to be one of the parties ceasing fire. It’s almost giving Israel the right to conduct armed hostilities in order to enforce a ceasefire. From Washington and Israel’s perspective, what we’re really talking about is not a cessation of mutual and reciprocal cessation of hostilities, but a unilateral cessation of hostilities, that Lebanon and Lebanese parties are obliged to scrupulously respect, but that Israel is free to ignore at will on the basis of its own interpretation of any Lebanese violations.
That’s very clearly an unsustainable situation, and that’s why we’ve seen not only, according to UNIFIL [United Nations Interim Force In Lebanon] there have already been more than 100 Israeli violations of the ceasefire, but yesterday for the first time, we also saw Hezbollah responding with mortar fire after a number of Lebanese had been killed in recent days. My own view is is that both Israel and Hezbollah accepted this agreement with the full expectation that it would prove to be a temporary agreement. They needed to regroup with their wounds and so on.
From the outset, I’ve had very serious questions about whether it would last past the new year.
I wanted to talk about what’s often referred to as “normalization efforts.” During his first presidency Trump touted the Abraham Accords as his big achievement in the region. That effort was embraced and celebrated by the Biden administration as well.
One of the most talked about aspects of these ongoing efforts is a deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia. This has been referenced many times Biden and Netanyahu. How should we understand all this?
Let’s take a step back and and recall that the traditional approach to this issue has been that Arab-Israeli normalization, meaning normalization between Israel and the various Arab states, with which it does not yet have a formal agreement, is a process that would occur at the end of an Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
In other words, Israel would withdraw from the occupied territories, you would have the establishment of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and and Gaza Strip, an informal Israeli-Palestinian peace treaty. Then and only then, as a result, would you have Arab-Israeli normalization. Arab-Israeli normalization was kind of a trump card, the leverage that that would be used to persuade Israel to end the occupation. That was the theory. It was laid forth most clearly in the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative.
Since you’re asking about Saudi Arabia, it’s worth recalling, that initiative was in fact, primarily a Saudi initiative. That process has now been inverted most clearly in the normalization agreements during the Trump administration, where now these normalization agreements precede any Israeli-Palestinian agreement, and rather than being used as leverage to produce an end to occupation and an independent Palestinian state, they’re now being used as leverage by Israel to further marginalize and isolate the Palestinians by in effect providing an Arab halal certificate to greater Israel.
Saudi Arabia, I think, is a somewhat different case for the following reasons. First of all, as you noted, after the Trump administration produced normalization agreements between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and to an extent Sudan, they were hoping that a similar agreement with Saudi Arabia would be the crowning achievement. It failed. Biden, as with every other Trump Middle East policy, rather than reverse or reconsider that policy, simply picked up where Trump left off.
The only significant diplomatic initiative undertaken by the Biden administration in the Middle East was to achieve a Saudi-Israeli normalization agreement. It’s called the Saudi-Israeli normalization agreement, but I think it’s a bit of a misnomer because it consists primarily not of a Saudi-Israeli agreement, but of a bilateral Saudi-U.S. agreement. The primary deliverables, if you will, in this agreement are not anything the Saudis would give to the Israelis, apart from formal recognition, nor anything the Israelis would give to the Saudis, but rather a U.S. formal security treaty with Saudi Arabia and U.S. delivery of a nuclear program to Saudi Arabia.
So it’s really a Saudi-U.S. agreement in which Saudi-Israeli normalization is the icing on the cake. It’s added on to make the Saudi-U.S. component palatable to Congress and others. It’s essentially a marketing tool to sell a Saudi-U.S. deal.
Before October 7th, this deal would have included a number of cosmetic Israeli concessions to the Palestinians in order to allow Saudi Arabia to make the argument that they did this not only for themselves, but also for the Palestinian cause. Since October 7th, the Saudis have raised the price significantly. What in fact happened during the past year is that the Saudis were demanding that any such tripartite agreement include credible and irreversible progress towards an end to occupation and the establishment of the Palestinian state.
This was simply not on the agenda as far as the Israel government is concerned so the Saudis then went to the Americans and said, “The Israelis aren’t ready for this.”
Let’s at least start with the bilateral U.S. Saudi aspects, which would include, as I said, the security guarantee of the nuclear program, the Saudis committing to various restrictions in terms of its relationship with Russia and China and so on. The response from Washington was, it’s either a three-way deal or no deal. So now Trump is coming into office and will go to the Americans after January and say, “This is a deal that’s on the table. We’re prepared to do it. But we can only do it if Washington extracts from Israel this irreversible progress towards a Palestinian state” or failing that goes only with a bilateral U.S.-Saudi aspect. I can see Trump going along with either scenario, particularly given his obsession with China. He may well say, “If the Israelis aren’t interested, why should I be more interested in this than they are?” and just go ahead and conclude a bilateral U.S.-Saudi deal.
Or there’s a prospect for the “deal of the century” as he’s called it. He may try to pursue a tripartite deal that satisfies the the minimum requirements of the Saudis. Either is possible.
Should we expect anything different from Trump overall in terms of the Middle East or will it largely be a continuation of Biden’s policies?
I’d just once again like to emphasize that he’s so erratic and unpredictable, it’s really difficult to make any confidence predictions over what comes next. I would just make two observations.
The first is that we should look not only for changes in U.S. policy, but we should also focus on the continuities. If you look at you know the major initiatives that that Trump took during his first term, many of them can in fact be seen as a logical culmination of administrations past. They often, for example, relied on pre-existing, bipartisan congressional legislation. Similarly, Biden simply picked up where Trump left off. I think the discussion we had about annexation is a good indication of this.
Secondly, I think the Century Foundation’s Aaron Lund recently made a very perceptive point, that given kind of the chaotic nature that that is rightfully expected of the next administration, policy may well be made by individuals appointed to various portfolios rather than centrally directed from the White House. Here it becomes interesting, of course, because the Trump coalition consists of different interest groups. You have, let’s say, the Adelson crowd, you have the Christian Zionists, you have the isolationists. So it’ll be interesting to see if this simply results in total chaos, or if it ultimately results in anything that can even remotely be considered a a coherent policy, and then we’ll have to see what that is.
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