By MEDEA BENJAMIN & NICOLAS JS DAVIES*

Between the catastrophe Donald Trump will inherit and the war hawks he is picking for his cabinet, peace in the Middle East seems further away than ever.

1.

When Donald Trump takes office on January 20, all his campaign promises to end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours, and almost as quickly Israel’s war against its neighbors, will be put to the test. The choices he has made for his new administration so far, from Marco Rubio as secretary of state to Mike Waltz as national security adviser, Pete Hegseth as defense secretary and Elise Stefanik as U.N. ambassador, form a gallery of venomous snakes that like to bite.

The only conflict where peace talks appear to be on the agenda is Ukraine. In April, both Vice President-elect J.D. Vance and Senator Marco Rubio voted against a $95 billion military aid bill that included $61 billion for Ukraine.

Marco Rubio recently appeared on Today Show da NBC saying: “I think the Ukrainians have been incredibly brave and strong in standing up to Russia. But at the end of the day, what we are financing here is a military standoff – and it needs to end… I think there has to be some common sense here.”

On the campaign trail, JD Vance made a controversial suggestion about the best way to end the war: Ukraine cedes the lands it has seized from Russia, a demilitarized zone is created, and Ukraine becomes a neutral country. He has been heavily criticized by Republicans and Democrats, who argue that supporting Ukraine is vital to U.S. security because it weakens Russia, which is a close ally of China.

Any attempt by Donald Trump to halt US military support for Ukraine will undoubtedly face fierce opposition from pro-war forces in his own party, particularly in Congress, as well as perhaps from the entire Democratic Party. Two years ago, thirty progressive Democrats serving in Congress wrote a letter to President Joe Biden asking him to consider negotiations. The party’s top brass were so incensed by the lack of party discipline that they attacked the progressives like a ton of rocks. Within 24 hours, the group redeemed itself and repealed the letter. Since then, they have all voted for more money for Ukraine and have not uttered another word about negotiations.

So an effort by Donald Trump to cut off funding to Ukraine could run up against a bipartisan effort in Congress to keep the war going. And let’s not forget the efforts by European countries and NATO to keep the U.S. involved in the fight. Still, Donald Trump could stand up to all of these forces and push for a rational policy that would restart talks and stop the killing.

2.

The Middle East, however, presents an even more difficult situation. In his first term, Donald Trump demonstrated that he is on Israel’s side when he brokered the Abraham Accords between several Arab countries and Israel. He famously moved the US embassy to a location in Jerusalem that is partly on occupied land outside Israel’s internationally recognized borders. In addition, he recognized the occupied Golan Heights in Syria as part of Israel. These unprecedented signs of unconditional US support for Israel’s illegal occupation and settlements helped set the stage for the current crisis.

Donald Trump seems unlikely to defy Joe Biden and cut off US arms shipments to Israel, despite public opinion polls favoring such a suspension. Furthermore, a recent UN human rights report showed that 70 percent of those killed by US weapons are women and children.

Meanwhile, wily Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is already preparing for a second Donald Trump presidency. On the same day as the US election, Benjamin Netanyahu fired his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, who opposed a long-term Israeli military occupation of Gaza and at times advocated prioritizing the lives of Israeli hostages over killing more Palestinians.

Israel Katz, the new defense minister and former foreign minister, is more hawkish than Yoav Gallant and has led a campaign to falsely blame Iran for arms smuggling from Jordan to the West Bank.

Other powerful voices, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who is also a Defense Ministry minister, represent extremist Zionist parties that are publicly committed to territorial expansion, annexation and ethnic cleansing. Both live in illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.

Thus, Benjamin Netanyahu has deliberately surrounded himself with allies who support his policy of expanding the war. They are certainly developing a war plan to exploit Donald Trump’s support for Israel, but first they will use the unique opportunity of the US transition of power to create facts on the ground that will limit Donald Trump’s options once he takes office.

The Israelis will undoubtedly redouble their efforts to expel as many Palestinians as possible from Gaza, confronting President Donald Trump with a catastrophic humanitarian crisis in which the surviving population of Gaza is crammed into an incredibly small area, with almost no food, no shelter for many, disease running rampant and no access to necessary medical care for tens of thousands of horribly injured and dying people.

The Israelis will count on Donald Trump to accept whatever final solution they propose, likely expelling the Palestinians from Gaza, into the West Bank, Jordan, Egypt and elsewhere.

Israel has constantly threatened to do to Lebanon what it did to Gaza. Israeli forces have met fierce resistance, suffered heavy casualties, and have made little headway in Lebanon. But as in Gaza, they are using shelling and artillery to destroy villages and towns, kill or drive people north, and hope to effectively annex the part of Lebanon south of the Litani River as a so-called “buffer zone.” When Trump takes office, they may well ask for greater US involvement to help them “finish the job.”

3.

The big wild card is Iran. Donald Trump’s first term was marked by a policy of “maximum pressure” against Tehran. He unilaterally withdrew the United States from the Iran nuclear deal, imposed severe sanctions that devastated the economy, and ordered the assassination of the country’s top general. Donald Trump did not support a war with Iran in his first term, but he had to be persuaded not to attack Iran in his final days in office by General Mark Milley and the Pentagon.

Colin Powell's former chief of staff, retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, recently described to Chris Hedges how catastrophic a war with Iran would be, based on US military war games he was involved in.

Lawrence Wilkerson predicts that a U.S. war with Iran could last ten years, cost $10 trillion, and still fail to conquer Iran. Air strikes alone would not destroy Iran’s entire civilian nuclear program and ballistic missile stockpiles. Thus, once launched, the war would most likely escalate into a regime-change war involving U.S. ground forces, in a country with three or four times the territory and population of Iraq, more mountainous terrain, and a thousand-mile-long coastline riddled with missiles that can sink U.S. warships.

But Benjamin Netanyahu and his extremist Zionist allies believe that they must, sooner or later, wage an existential war with Iran if they are to realize their vision of a dominant Greater Israel. And they believe that the destruction they have inflicted on the Palestinians in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, including the assassination of their senior leaders, has given them a military advantage and a favorable opportunity for a confrontation with Iran.

As of November 10, Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu had spoken on the phone three times since the election. Netanyahu told reporters that they are “in agreement on the Iranian threat.” Donald Trump has already hired Iran hawk Brian Hook, who helped him sabotage the JCPOA nuclear deal with Iran in 2018, to coordinate the formation of his foreign policy team.

So far, the team that Donald Trump and Brian Hook have assembled appears to offer hope for peace in Ukraine, but little or no hope for peace in the Middle East and a growing danger of a US-Israeli war on Iran.

4.

Donald Trump’s long-awaited national security adviser, Mike Waltz, is best known as a China hawk. He voted against military aid to Ukraine in Congress but recently posted a message saying Israel should bomb Iran’s nuclear and oil facilities, the surest path to full-scale war.

Donald Trump’s new UN ambassador, Elise Stefanik, has led moves in Congress to equate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, and led the aggressive questioning of American university presidents at a congressional anti-Semitic hearing, after which the presidents of Harvard and Penn resigned.

So while Donald Trump has some advisers who support his desire to end the war in Ukraine, there will be few voices in his inner circle urging caution about Benjamin Netanyahu’s genocidal ambitions in Palestine and his determination to cripple Iran.

If he wanted, President Joe Biden could use his final two months in office to de-escalate conflicts in the Middle East. He could impose an offensive arms embargo on Israel, push for serious cease-fire negotiations in Gaza and Lebanon, and work through U.S. partners in the Gulf to ease tensions with Iran.

But Joe Biden is unlikely to do that. When his own administration sent a letter to Israel last month threatening to cut military aid if Israel did not allow a wave of humanitarian aid into Gaza within the next 30 days, Israel responded by doing exactly the opposite — in effect, cutting the number of trucks allowed in. The State Department claimed that Israel was taking “steps in the right direction,” and Joe Biden refused to take any action.

We will soon see whether Donald Trump can make progress toward peace in Ukraine by starting negotiations that would potentially save the lives of many thousands of Ukrainians and Russians. But between the catastrophe Donald Trump will inherit and the war hawks he is choosing for his cabinet, peace in the Middle East seems further away than ever.

*Medea Benjamin is a journalist and political activist. Co-founder of the feminist and pacifist movement Code Pink.

*Nicolas J.S. Davies is a journalist. Author of, among other books, Blood on our hands: the american invasion and destruction of Iraq (Nimble Books).

Translation: Eleutério FS Prado.

Originally published on the portal counterpunch.

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