Conventional wisdom has it that Trump 2.0 will be a disaster for Palestinians, because Trump 1.0 all but buried the Palestinian national cause.

And it is indeed true that under Donald Trump’s first term as president, the U.S.. was wholly guided by the Zionist religious right - the real voice in his ear, either as donors or policymakers.

Under Trump and his son-in-law adviser, Jared Kushner, Washington became a policy playground for the settler movement, with which the former U.S. ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, was unashamedly aligned.

Whatever Trump does, the scale of Palestinian resistance during this war has demonstrated that the agency in the conflict does not lie with extremist leaders in Israel or Washington.

Consequently, in his first term, Trump upended decades of policy by recognising Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and moving the U.S. embassy there; he disenfranchised the Palestinian Authority by closing down the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) office in Washington; he allowed Israel to annex the Golan Heights; he pulled out of the nuclear accords with Iran; and he assassinated Qassem Soleimani, the most powerful Iranian general and diplomat in the region.

Even more damaging for the Palestinian struggle for freedom was Trump’s sponsorship of the Abraham Accords.

This was—and still is—a serious attempt to pour concrete over the grave of the Palestinian cause, constructing in its place a superhighway of trade and contracts from the Gulf that would make Israel not just a regional superpower, but a vital portal to the wealth of the Gulf.

On October 6, 2023, the day before the Hamas attack, the Palestinian cause was all but dead. The Palestinian struggle for self-determination felt like the baggage of an older generation of Arab leaders, which was being unceremoniously dumped by the new generation.

All the diplomatic talk was of Saudi Arabia’s impending decision to normalise relations with Israel, with the picture of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman shaking hands in public with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dangling as the prize lying just behind the next corner. One more push, and it would be in the bag.

If that charge sheet is not long enough, it could easily be argued that Trump’s second term will be even worse for Palestinians than his first was.

This time around, and with the Republican party projected to have control over both houses of Congress, there will be no adults in the room to correct the president’s wildest impulses.

After all, did Friedman not just publish a book entitled One Jewish State: The Last, Best Hope to Resolve the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, in which he argues that the U.S. has a biblical duty to support Israel’s annexation of the West Bank?

“Palestinians, like Puerto Ricans, will not vote in national elections… Palestinians will be free to enact their own governing documents as long as they are not inconsistent with those of Israel,” Friedman writes.

In allowing Netanyahu to claim total victory, the U.S. administration under a first Trump presidency buried not just the prospect of a two-state solution, but along with it, the Zionist dream of a liberal, secular, democratic Jewish state.

So will Trump 2.0 not simply presage yet more territorial changes, such as the annexation of Area C of the occupied West Bank, the permanent division of Gaza, the return of Israeli settlements to northern Gaza, and the clearing of the border area in southern Lebanon?

All of this could, and no doubt will, come to pass under a second Trump term, with no brakes.

I do not for one second underplay or underestimate the sacrifice in blood that Palestinians have paid so far—the death toll in Gaza could easily be three times higher than the current official figure—or could yet pay for all that is about to come.

But in this column, I will argue that the settler movement, backed by a second Trump term, is in the process of burying any chance that Israel will prevail as an apartheid Jewish minority state in control of all the land from the river to the sea.

Let me make two points about the situation that existed on October 6, before I go on to deal with the irreversible consequences of everything that has happened since. And make no mistake—they are irreversible.

The first is that in allowing Netanyahu to claim total victory, the U.S. administration under a first Trump presidency buried not just the prospect of a two-state solution, but along with it, the Zionist dream of a liberal, secular, democratic Jewish state.

The liberal version of this state had been the main vehicle of Israeli expansion, with its salami slices making ever-deeper inroads into historic Palestine. By killing it, the liberal fig leaf dropped from the Zionist project, and the religious Zionist forces who were once regarded as fringe and even as terrorists, such as far-right politician Itamar Ben Gvir and the Kahanists, became mainstream.

This fundamentally altered the whole project to establish Israel as the dominant state between the river and sea. It suddenly became the only state, and one that was governed by religious fanatics; by people wishing to level the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque.

It became a state governed by the religious dogmas of Jerusalem not by the European Ashkenazi internet geeks and sophisticates of Tel Aviv. Under the first Trump presidency, the rift between these two camps became irreconcilable and fundamentally destabilising.

The second change that the first Trump presidency brought about, or rather completed, took place in Palestinian minds.

A whole generation of Palestinians born after the Oslo Accords came to the conclusion that all political and nonviolent ways of seeking an end to the occupation were blocked; that there was no longer any meaning in recognising Israel, let alone trying to find anyone in it to talk with.

Talking to Israel became a meaningless exercise. The political route was blocked not only inside Palestine, but outside it.

To their eternal shame and discredit, U.S. President Joe Biden and his secretary of state, Antony Blinken, kept all the “achievements” of the first Trump presidency in place—first and foremost the Abraham Accords.

Trump’s big boast during his first term of office was that he made all these changes to the status quo of the Palestinian conflict, and the sky did not fall in.

But the sky did fall in on October 7, and everything that Trump and Biden had done before that contributed to the Hamas attack, which provided the same shock to Israel that 9/11 provided to the US.

After the Hamas attack, it was impossible to ignore the Palestinian cause. It moved from the periphery of global human rights causes to the very center.

It’s not a scorecard of total humiliation for Biden, but when the history of this period is written, Biden will emerge as a weak leader.

But Biden didn’t get it. An instinctive Zionist, he allowed Netanyahu to humiliate him. His first reaction to the Hamas attack was to give Israel everything it wanted, thwarting all international moves at the United Nations for a cease-fire. His second reaction was to draw red lines, which Netanyahu proceeded to ignore.

Biden told Netanyahu not to reoccupy Rafah and the Philadelphi Corridor. Netanyahu did it anyway. Biden told Netanyahu to allow aid trucks into Gaza, and Netanyahu mostly ignored him. Biden told Netanyahu not to invade Lebanon; Netanyahu did it. Biden told Netanyahu not to attack Iranian nuclear and oil facilities, and Netanyahu listened to him—for now at least.

It’s not a scorecard of total humiliation for Biden, but when the history of this period is written, Biden will emerge as a weak leader.

He also emerges as a leader who facilitated genocide. The amount of heavy bombs that the U.S. supplied, and that Israel used against overwhelmingly civilian targets in Gaza and Lebanon, over the past year far outweighs the U.S.’ own use........

© Common Dreams