Just before his latest meeting with the U.S. president, the Israeli prime minister signed the papers of his accession to the “Peace Council” tasked with implementing the Gaza ceasefire agreement.
Trump appointed himself the permanent chairman of that council, and in such a body it was “natural” that Benjamin Netanyahu – accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity during his war on the Palestinians – would receive a membership card, while the owners of the cause, the land, and the victims were denied membership.
Although he brought, specifically for this occasion, Michael Eisenberg, whom he appointed as his personal representative to the “Peace Council,” along with the usual diplomatic team members (Israel’s ambassadors to Washington and the United Nations), Netanyahu was not visiting to discuss any peace. Therefore, the meeting included his military secretary Major-General Roman Gofman and acting national security head Gil Reich, who presented to Trump and the meeting participants (chief among them U.S. Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth), according to Senator John Kennedy, Israeli intelligence information explaining the practical, executable capabilities should the United States wage war on Iran.
In Netanyahu’s seventh meeting since Trump began his second term, which lasted two and a half hours, Netanyahu laid out the “Israeli red lines” in the American negotiations with Iran, including the demand to reduce and weaken the ballistic missile system and halt support for pro-Iran militias in the region.
While continuing its mobilisation against Iran and negotiating with it using the “big stick” and threats, the Trump administration left the course of the meeting ambiguous, while at the same time showing that Trump still wishes to negotiate (and is not influenced by pressure from another leader, even if Netanyahu). Yet the ambiguity leaves room for Iran’s leadership to remain wary that this vagueness may be a form of “war deception” giving an impression of leniency while preparing for a major strike.
Exploiting the American push against Iran, Netanyahu used the tactic of treating his government’s terrorist plans in Palestine as a “consolation prize” for accepting negotiation with Iran instead of war. Accordingly, Netanyahu again raised with Trump the issue of “annexing the West Bank,” so that accepting negotiations with Iran, or retreating from one maximal condition, would appear as Israeli flexibility requiring U.S. administration reciprocity toward his other demands, chiefly Washington’s legalisation of the annexation of the West Bank, reinterpretation of the second phase of the Gaza ceasefire agreement as “disarming Hamas” rather than “reconstruction” of the Strip, and the start of work by the Palestinian “administrative committee.”
In reality, Netanyahu’s plans and those of his extremist partners in government to bury all Palestinian political projects, not just Hamas’s, have not stopped for years, nor have their plans to undermine Arab and international pressure on the U.S. administration in this regard. This has been pursued through political and economic measures turning Palestinian life, even inside the so-called “Green Line,” into hell – through settlement expansion, military operations against areas and camps to empty them of residents, the fragmentation of Gaza’s people behind and in front of the “yellow line,” the division of the West Bank into Areas A, B, and C, and the planting of deadly checkpoints everywhere.
The latest step taken by Netanyahu’s government, hours before his arrival in Washington, was issuing decisions undermining Jordanian laws that prohibit selling land to Jews, thereby forcing Palestinians to “sell their lands” in a way that accelerates settlement expansion and effectively ends, politically, the Oslo Accords and the sovereignty of the Palestinian Authority.
By his early visit to the White House, in parallel with the noise of American fleets near Iran and the acceleration of annexation measures, Netanyahu raised the banner of defiance to Arab and international influence and turned Trump’s “Peace Council” into an Israeli “War Council.”
[Al-Quds Al-Arabi]
Compiled and translated by Faizul Haque