The Turbulent World with James M. Dorsey

There is logic to Donald J. Trump’s madness. Irrespective of the merits of the US president’s ethics, policies, and style, Mr. Trump’s grenade-throwing shock-and-awe approach has galvanised Arab states into action over Gaza, much like it did with the Europeans regarding their defense and Ukraine policies. “Love him or hate him, Trump has shaken things up… Before him, Gaza had no real roadmap. Now, the Arab world is singing a new tune: No Hamas, No Arms,” said journalist Amjad Taha.

Russia is not the only country laughing all the way to the bank after US President Donald J. Trump’s war of words with his visiting Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky. So is Israel. Mr. Trump’s willingness to accommodate Russian President Vladimir Putin serves Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s purpose as he seeks to redraw the Middle East map in his mould.

Israeli security demands threaten to upset Syria’s apple cart by James M. Dorsey

US President Donald J. Trump’s shock-and-awe Gaza therapy appears to be working. Infuriated by Mr. Trump’s assertion that the United States will take ownership of the Strip, resettle its 2.3 million inhabitants in Egypt, Jordan, and elsewhere, and turn it into a high-end beachfront real estate development has forced Arab leaders to come up with an alternative plan. Mr. Trump has acknowledged as much.

Second-guessing US President Donald J. Trump is a tricky business.

An Israeli refusal to allow mobile homes and heavy construction equipment into Gaza bodes ill for this week’s second-phase indirect Gaza ceasefire talks with Israel and Hamas hardening their negotiating positions.

With Arab leaders gathering in Cairo later this month for an emergency summit on Gaza, the United Arab Emirates has emerged as the United States and Israel’s best Arab friend.

Might is right. That sums up US President Donald J. Trump’s vision of a 21st-century world order. Barely a month in office, Mr. Trump has not wasted time creating building blocks for his worldview. Mr. Trump’s efforts to end fighting in Ukraine, coupled with his territorial ambitions in Gaza, Greenland, Panama, and Canada, have put the ‘might is right’ principle on steroids. So has the president’s unilateral renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu may have opened a Pandorra’s Box when he suggested creating a Palestinian state on Saudi territory. Mr. Netanyahu wasn’t just throwing a hand grenade into US efforts to engineer Saudi recognition of Israel when he told Israeli television, “The Saudis can create a Palestinian state in Saudi Arabia; they have a lot of land over there.” A quick Saudi retort hinted at the Pandorra’s Box, a decades-old assertion, as fantastical as it may sound, that Judaism’s Zion was in Saudi Arabia, not in Palestine.

Marco Rubio is likely in for a reality check when he visits the Middle East for the first time this week as US Secretary of State.

US President Donald J. Trump’s Gaza plan could change the nature of the Gaza war and prolong rather than end the hostilities. Amid calls for a unified Arab response to Mr. Trump’s plan to resettle or ethnically cleanse Gazan Palestinians, according to many Middle Easterners, officials, journalists, analysts, and social media activists are mulling options. The options under discussion range from approaches that would give US companies a significant stake in Gaza’s reconstruction to the fuelling of a Hamas-led armed guerilla-style resistance.

Hamas has released the fifth batch of hostages to the Red Cross. In exchange, Israel will release 183 Palestinian prisoners, some convicted of involvement in attacks that killed dozens of people, including 18 serving life sentences, and 111 detained in Gaza during the war, according to Hamas. James M. Dorsey, an adjunct Senior Fellow, at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies give us more analysis on the story.

US President Donald J. Trump’s call for the permanent resettlement of Gazan Palestinians has focused regional minds, even if the White House and senior officials have walked back key elements of the president’s proposal

US President Donald J. Trump’s plan to expel Palestinians and take control of Gaza threatens to render second phase ceasefire negotiations to the dustbin of history and kill prospects for Saudi recognition of Israel. So has Mr. Trump’s suggestion that he would decide in the next month whether to endorse Israeli annexation of the West Bank occupied by Israel since 1967. Mr. Trump’s propositions take Palestinian aspirations off the table. They fulfill visiting Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s wildest dreams.

Donald Trump’s Oval Office could be Binyamin Netanyahu’s brick wall. That is if the president uses Tuesday’s meeting with Mr. Netanyahu, the first foreign leader to visit Washington since Mr. Trump returned to office, to ensure a successful Israeli-Hamas negotiation of the Gaza ceasefire agreement’s second phase.

US President Donald J. Trump’s approach to managing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict may have legs, even if Arabs and Muslims reject his call for the resettlement of Gazan Palestinians. Egypt, Jordan, and Palestinians have rejected resettlement in no uncertain terms. So have non-Arab Muslim countries like Indonesia and Albania, who the United States reportedly approached with a request to take in Palestinians. Palestinians say they voted with their feet with hundreds of thousands of Gazans returning this week to their ruined homes in the north of the Strip. Even so, Egypt and Turkey, a more strident Middle Eastern state, see geopolitical and geostrategic advantage and commercial opportunity in working with the Trump administration on a plan first tabled during Mr. Trump’s first term in office that falls short of Palestinian aspirations but would serve Egyptian and Turkish interests.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Israel’s ultra-nationalists and ultra-conservatives have turned Israel into a ‘haven’ for some Jews rather than all Jews. Not only by encouraging an intolerant, supremacist domestic environment hostile to vigorous public debate and equality for all but also by endorsing the far-right’s flirt with language and imagery that risks stoking ant-Semitism, and efforts to rewrite the history of the Holocaust, Jews’ worst calamity in modern history.

US President Donald J. Trump risks putting relations with Saudi Arabia and other US partners in the region on a knife’s edge, sending the Middle East into a tailspin, and complicating, if not undermining, negotiations to make the three-phase Gaza ceasefire permanent rather than temporary by advocating the removal to Egypt and Jordan of 1.5 million Gazan Palestinians.

US President Donald J. Trump has foreign governments, domestic constituencies, journalists, and pundits running in circles as they attempt to identify his Middle East policy.

US President-elect Donald J. Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu may soon diverge in their approaches to a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yet, the Trump administration is set, as a ceasefire takes effect in Gaza, to cement suppression of criticism of the Jewish state, a pillar of Israel’s long-standing effort to manipulate US and international public opinion and squash public censure.