Portside

Benjamin Netanyahu visited Washington this week to meet with Trump administration officials following the countries’ joint attack on Iran. The lack of transparency about what was actually discussed could be a very dangerous sign.

It is said that no news is good news. But when the cone of silence is dropped over meetings between U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, it is prudent to be apprehensive about what we don’t know.

Before Netanyahu’s arrival in Washington, Trump had indicated that he expected their conversations to be focused almost exclusively on ending the Gaza “war.” The sickening euphemism aside, the fact that neither Trump nor Netanyahu are eager to disclose the contents of their meetings opens a wide range of possibilities.

The optimistic view is that Netanyahu is attempting to find a way to accommodate the President’s stated desire to end the genocide in Gaza without causing a rupture in his governing coalition. This view is bolstered by reports of intensive meetings in Doha and Washington between the U.S., Israel, and mediators from Qatar and Egypt speaking on behalf of Hamas.

According to those reports, there has been progress on a ceasefire deal, although they did not echo Trump’s earlier optimism that an agreement could have been reached this week. Trump has reportedly even extended his guarantee to Hamas that he would not allow Israel to resume the genocide at the end of the 60-day ceasefire period.

It hardly seems wise for Hamas to stake so much on the word of a man who lies as a matter of course. But it is also the case that Trump is sympathetic to Netanyahu’s concern that his government would collapse if he implicitly agreed to a longer-term ceasefire, and Hamas is facing increasing desperation in Gaza as more and more Palestinians starve and are gunned down by Israeli and American forces. As has been the case for a long time, the Palestinians, including Hamas, are forced to choose from a short list of terrible options, and they have to hope that Trump recognizes that restraining Israel is in his best interest.

They have little choice but to cling to that hope as other possibilities are grimmer.

The Rafah concentration camp

On Monday, the Israeli military’s Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir told an Israeli court that the Israeli armed forces only “recommends and facilitates the evacuation of civilians in combat zones for their protection, as long as IDF operational activity continues in the area,” an obvious lie Zamir was forced to put forth in response to a petition brought by Israeli reservists charging that they were being ordered to carry out war crimes in the form of forced displacement.

As if to clarify the falsehood of the COS’ claim, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz announced, on the very same day, that Israel would create a ghetto which would quickly become a concentration camp on the ruins of the southern Gaza city of Rafah.

Initially, the camp, which Katz obscenely referred to as a “humanitarian city,” would house some 600,000 Palestinians, mostly from the so-called “safe zone” at al-Mawasi, a zone where Palestinians have been treated as fish in a barrel, regularly gunned down and bombed in their “safe zone.” Eventually, more, perhaps even all, of Gaza’s population would be forced into this “humanitarian city.”

Before the genocide began, the population of Rafah and its surrounding area was approximately 275,000, and it was overcrowded then

It is in this context that Netanyahu’s comments at his Monday dinner with Trump need to be understood:

“I think President Trump had a brilliant vision. It’s called free choice. You know, if people want to stay, they can stay. But if they want to leave, they should be able to leave. It shouldn’t be a, you know, prison, it should be an open place and give people free choice. We’re working with the United States very closely about finding countries that will seek to realize what they always say, that they want to give the Palestinians a better future. And those who — and I think we’re — we’re getting close to finding several countries. And I think this will give, again, the freedom to choose. Palestinians should have it. And I hope that we can secure it.”

A choice to stay in Gaza means staying in a territory under total siege, that has been almost completely destroyed, which cannot sustain a population, can’t provide water for a small city, let alone some two million people. To call this a free choice is beyond dishonest. It is, itself, murderous.

Netanyahu, and Trump as well, can talk all they’d like about how other countries would take in Palestinians fleeing Gaza, but there is little substance to these conversations. We’ve been hearing for months that “numerous countries” are just about to agree to take in Palestinians being driven out of Gaza. It’s simply a lie.

Forget any Arab state, none of which could possibly agree to such a thing, regardless of the American bribes that went with it. Other states that have been suggested would be almost as unlikely to agree. South Sudan was one proposed destination. That is a country currently experiencing intense civil strife, where a civil war could break out at any time. True, Trump has apparently gotten away with deporting eight immigrants from the United States to South Sudan (only one of the deportees is actually from South Sudan), but that is very different from adding large numbers of refugees into a country already facing not only intense civil strife but also a growing humanitarian crisis of its own, exacerbated by a long term cholera outbreak.

No, what Israel intends is what many have been warning about ever since the forced relocations inside Gaza began, shortly after the start of the genocide: concentrating Gaza’s population into one or just a few tiny areas of the Strip and creating a crisis where the people will either die or be so desperate that they will call for relocation. Given the Palestinians’ attachment to their home and the dearth of real alternatives, the former is much more likely.

Trump doesn’t seem to oppose that idea in theory, but he wants a way forward in Gaza to enhance his imagined reputation as a peacemaker and to alleviate some of the popular pressure being felt in both the United States and Europe.

Netanyahu’s and Trump’s goals in Gaza are obviously incompatible. As such, there can be some “progress” in ceasefire talks, but ultimately, Israel will not be willing to withdraw from Gaza or consider a permanent end to the genocide, so talks will inevitably “fall apart.” It’s the same script that has been repeated over and over in Gaza since late October 2023, when Hamas offered to free every hostage in a comprehensive prisoner exchange and end of fighting. Neither Trump nor Netanyahu is eager for the public to be reminded of that bit of recent history.

Netanyahu’s goals in Washington

At their first dinner in the White House, Netanyahu made a show of handing Trump a copy of his letter recommending the president for the Nobel Peace Prize, an obsession for Trump. Setting aside the perversity of a war criminal dodging an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court, nominating an aspiring dictator for this recognition (however tarnished the Nobel prize has become), the presentation was obviously intended to flatter Trump and to do so as publicly as Netanyahu could. What was he hoping to get from Trump by buttering him up in this fashion?

Part of the show was an attempt at a victory lap. Netanyahu and Trump both want to be able to reap political benefits from the idea that Iran’s nuclear program was destroyed without sparking a major Middle East war.

The trouble is, Iran’s nuclear program wasn’t destroyed, though the U.S. and Israel inflicted heavy damage not only to Iran’s nuclear facilities but also to many other military and civilian sites as well. And the U.S. and Israel are not on the same page about where to go from here.

Trump knows he angered his own base by attacking Iran, and that they forgave him only because his actions have not yet embroiled the U.S. in another Middle East quagmire. He has no desire to push his luck.

Netanyahu, on the other hand, has been striving for a regime change war against Iran, and is only more determined to get one now that he has managed to push Trump into military action.

This disagreement is already playing out in public. While Trump continues to insist that his strikes “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program, Israel has gone public with its assessment that Iran can rebuild. Netanyahu continues to call Iran a “cancer” that still needs to be dealt with.

As Israel goes further in contradicting Trump, the disagreement will likely come to a head, and much will depend on how Trump’s own people respond to Israel making these claims.

But on this trip, the focus was on Gaza, and it seems clear that neither Trump nor Netanyahu came away from their meetings with all they wanted. Trump had hoped to announce a new ceasefire, but instead has retreated from his earlier certainty about getting one.

Netanyahu leaves the meetings with a somewhat better hand. He thwarted the effort to secure a ceasefire, and at least to this point, Trump doesn’t seem to be threatening to blame Israel when the talks inevitably fall apart.

But that might not hold. Trump has made it clear that he will publicly blame Israel if he gets angry at their actions, as he did when Israel tried to break the ceasefire with Iran. “There’s nothing definite about war and Gaza,” Trump told reporters. “But there’s a very good chance that we’ll have…an agreement of some kind this week and maybe next week, if not.” That statement puts the onus on both parties.

Netanyahu did not see any American movement on his goals for pursuing regime change in Iran, nor did he get any public indication that the United States was ready to put all the blame on Hamas when the ceasefire talks fail. There was no indication that the U.S. would side with Israel on the issue of a broader redeployment of Israeli troops, for example. Indeed, the U.S. was reported to have pressed Israel to modify its initial position on redeployment, and it did so.

While that decision saved the talks from collapsing completely, they remain stalled over the redeployment, the distribution of humanitarian aid, and guarantees that Israel would not do what it did during the previous ceasefire, namely return to genocide as soon as it could and never truly negotiate toward an ending as it had committed to do.

It is entirely possible that there were private discussions between Netanyahu and Trump whose effects we might come to see in the coming days. But as things stand now, Netanyahu leaves Washington with the status quo intact. For him, that’s something of a victory, given the anticipation that Trump might want to press him harder on a ceasefire in Gaza. But it does nothing to relieve the growing pressure on him domestically to end a genocide that has significantly damaged Israel’s standing in the world.