Advocates of Palestinian rights need to quickly adjust to a political landscape changed by the ceasefire agreement and Donald Trump’s ascent to the US presidency. 

The initial prisoner release, the flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza, and the pause in Israel’s genocidal violence there is cause for celebration. But what Rashid Khalidi terms The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine has not ended. It has just entered a different and very complicated stage. 

The most immediate challenge is to galvanize sufficient pressure to make sure the agreement between Israel and Hamas turns into a permanent ceasefire. Stage one of the three-stage agreement seems to be off to a good start. But the Israeli government under Netanyahu is not committed to moving on to stages two and three, the terms of which are subject to a new round of negotiations to begin no later than Feb. 6. The Times of Israel reports:  

Netanyahu has spent much of the week trying to convince [extreme right-wing Finance Minister] Smotrich that the deal will not mean an end to the war.

Netanyahu did not accomplish his goals

There is no surprise here. This agreement denies Israel the “total victory” that Netanyahu has repeatedly declared essential to stop the fighting. Israel has failed in both its stated goals—wiping out Hamas and returning all Israeli hostages by military force—and its unstated aim of ethnically cleansing Gaza to make way for Jewish settlements and annexation. This is why the most extreme component of Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition opposed the agreement and resigned from the government. It is why Netanyahu and his top aides keep hinting that he will order renewed military action, and say that both Trump and Biden have promised “full support” if negotiations for stage two fail. 

Assessing the odds that Netanyahu will try to do that is connected to determining the reasons he agreed to a deal that is similar to the one he rejected last May. Donald Trump’s stance plays a role here. We know that Trump put pressure on Netanyahu to accept the deal (which underscores Biden’s moral bankruptcy and political malpractice in not using US leverage eight months ago). We don’t know whether Trump also gave promises to Netanyahu to get his agreement, and if he did, what those promises were. 

And there are differences of opinion among close observers of this process over how much the decision had to do with Trump and how much with Israel’s inability to break the steadfastness of the Palestinian people. There is increasing war fatigue and desire for a hostage deal among the Israeli public even as that same public overwhelmingly believes Israel’s genocidal violence is justified. And there is substantial demoralization in the Israeli military due to high casualties and the perception, as one reserve officer who served 200 days in Gaza put it, that “the war is going nowhere.” At least one analyst has speculated that these are the main factors behind Netanyahu shifting course, and that blaming the shift on pressure from Trump is a smokescreen designed to get Netanyahu off the political hook with his supporters.

Another factor to be weighed is Trump’s lifting sanctions on right-wing settlers in one of his first executive orders, and the immediate escalation of settler violence and Israeli military operations in the West Bank. And just as this article goes to press, it is reported that Trump is pushing Jordan and Egypt to take in Palestinians to “clean out” Gaza, thereby aligning himself with the open ethnic cleansers in the Israeli extreme right.

To make our best guess as to how Netanyahu and Trump will proceed, and to recalibrate strategy for the long haul, we should first remind ourselves of the pillars of Israeli and US policy over the last many decades. 

Israel’s pillar role in US imperial strategy

For understanding how we reached this juncture, there is no better source than Rashid Khalidi’s 2020 book The Hundred Year’s War on Palestine, supplemented by his analyses of events since October 2023 in the articles A Paradigm Shift? (late 2023) and The Neck and the Sword (2024).

Khalidi explains that events in Palestine since 1917 result “from a war waged on the indigenous Palestinian population over different stages by a variety of great powers that were allied with the Zionist movement—a movement that was both settler colonialist and nationalist.” From the beginning, Zionism aimed to create an apartheid state based on Jewish supremacy and Palestinian subordination, preferably a state with as much land and as few Palestinians as possible. And the Western powers backing Zionism (mainly the US since World War II) regard Israel as a crucial asset—America’s (land-based) aircraft carrier —for maintaining dominance over the oil-rich and strategically located Middle East. Those are the reasons, as Khalidi documents, that “Palestinian statehood and sovereignty, and an end to occupation and settlement, have never been on the table, ever, anywhere, at any stage, from any party, the United States or Israel or anybody else.”  

Maintaining this arrangement has been at the core of Washington’s relationship with Zionism since before Israel was founded. The US used its political muscle to push the 1947 vote to partition historic Palestine through the UN. It contributed political cover and allowed financial and military aid to flow to the offensive by Zionist militias that drove at least 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland in the Nakba (“catastrophe”) and led to the formation of the state of Israel. 

This stance by Washington has been one pillar of its strategy to dominate the Middle East. Another has been ensuring that governments in the Arab world go along with, or are too weak to, resist dictates from Washington. Over the last 80 years, CIA coups, direct military interventions, covert operations fanning sectarian divisions, relentless hostility to radical Arab nationalism, and propping up dictators have all been deployed (often with Israeli help) to cover that battlefront.

Complications: “soft power” and US domestic politics

A third pillar in Washington’s strategy has evolved over time to deal with the fact that blank-check support for Israel makes it harder for Washington to keep its grip on governments in the Arab world. Alongside the desire for self-determination and freedom manifested by the residents of all Arab countries, there is overwhelming sympathy for Palestine. 

So especially since the first Palestinian intifada in the late 1980s, Washington has recognized that to keep even pro-Western and/or repressive Arab states in the fold, the US must offer some kind of program to address Palestinian rights. This is the basis for Washington’s embrace of the “two-state solution” and support for a Palestinian Authority that acts as a subcontractor for Israel’s occupation even as violence from settlers and the military explodes across the West Bank. And for US policy-makers, “two-state solution” is code for establishing some kind of less-than-sovereign Palestinian entity that is subordinate to Israel but can be “sold” to the Arab world and the broader global anti-colonial majority as a way to take the Palestinian liberation struggle off the agenda. 

Of course, the vast majority of Palestinians oppose this neo-colonial project. Another big fly in in the empire’s ointment is that trying to juggle these three pillars causes tensions within the Israel-US alliance. No segment of the Israeli leadership has been prepared to offer terms that provide even minimal face-saving to Palestinian leaders. The current in Israeli politics that has been dominant since Netanyahu first came to power in 1996 rejects the idea of any Palestinian self-governing entity; their aim is a “greater Israel” complete with annexation of Gaza, the West Bank, and parts of Lebanon and Syria (and for some, parts of Jordan and Egypt as well). On top of that, there are the realities of domestic US politics. The “Israel Can Do No Wrong” lobby has forged sympathy for Zionism among both Jews and Christians into a political force that continues to drive policy even as public support for Palestine grows. 

This is the backdrop for assessing Trump’s role in attaining a ceasefire, what his administration is likely to do going forward, and the tasks facing the Palestine Solidarity Movement. 

Trump is anti-Palestinian, but a dealmaker

Over the last year, Biden gave Israel everything it wanted, throwing international law in the garbage heap, weakening the global and US fronts against fascism, and undermining his party’s re-election prospects in the process. Still, Trump consistently accused him of selling Israel down the river. 

In choosing personnel for his campaign and then for his cabinet, Trump selected pro-Zionist Palestine-haters up and down the line. (Newly confirmed Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth: “I support Israel destroying and killing every last member of Hamas.” Nominee for Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, an advocate of Israel annexing the West Bank: “There’s really no such thing as a Palestinian.”) 

Trump wants to make Biden’s flaunting of international law even more sweeping and explicit. He’s all in with the Republican-led push sanctioning members of the International Criminal Court because of the warrant issued for Netanyahu’s arrest. And Hegseth in his confirmation hearing refused to commit to the US following the Geneva Conventions. 

Trump has cheered on the pillorying of universities for allegedly turning a blind eye to anti-Semitism (and appointed the leading crusader, Elise Stefanik, to be envoy to the UN). He has called for a harsh crackdown on pro-Palestine protests that draws on the Heritage Foundation’s  Project 2025 supplement, Project Esther, aimed at dismantling the Palestine Solidarity Movement. To gin up support for these actions, he has convinced his core base that the perpetrators of genocide are actually the victims: see Marjorie Taylor Green’s response to the ceasefire announcement: “President Trump has ended the war against Israel before he even took the oath of office!”

None of that has disappeared because Trump pressured Netanyahu to accept the ceasefire agreement. Every racist and repressive element of it will shape policy while Trump is in the White House.

But Trump also didn’t want a messy war dumped in his lap. His personal affinity for Saudi leader Mohammed bin Salman, and Gulf oil-state rulers and their petrodollars, is stronger than his bond with Netanyahu. Believing himself a master dealmaker, he may think he can get a deal that ties Saudi Arabia to the US, gives Salman the nuclear goodies he wants, and normalizes relations with Israel even without any reference to a Palestinian state. Or, more likely, Trump may think he can line up Salman to join him in making Israel an offer it can’t refuse: accept full normalization with the Sunni Arab world in exchange for some entity that can be called a Palestinian state, or face the wrath of Donald Trump. 

Whatever Trump’s plan, Netanyahu faces tough decisions in the stage-two ceasefire negotiations. Netanyahu is at risk of losing power if the war ends, but if he orders another round of fighting against Trump’s wishes, Trump in vengeance mode could bring him down. If he does decide to order the military into action, the ball moves to Trump’s court. Given the deep support for Israel in Trump’s base, going beyond targeting Netanyahu personally to implementing an arms embargo or a turnabout regarding UN resolutions or the ICC decision is almost certainly a non-starter. But intervention in Israeli politics to replace Netanyahu is not. 

The bottom line is that all these options are maneuvers designed to relegate the Palestinian people to permanent subjugation in a US-dominated Middle East. So, the Palestine Solidarity Movement must dig in for a long-haul fight even as we prepare to act with force and urgency if Israel bails on moving from today’s temporary truce to a permanent ceasefire. 

Movement in the US is of enormous importance

Even if the ceasefire holds, the challenges facing Palestine are immense: supplying massive amounts of food, medicine, and fuel to Gazans (about to be made more difficult as Israel’s banning of UNWRA goes into effect); rebuilding in Gaza; recovering from genocidal trauma physically and mentally; learning the lessons of this last round of struggle; forging unity around an effective strategy for national liberation. Activists in the US have a key role to play in providing political and material support to the recovery effort. These are the immediate challenges in the long-term fight toward our eyes-on-the-prize goal of a fundamental shift in US policy toward Israel-Palestine and the entire Middle East. In his “Paradigm Shift?” article, Khalidi points out how essential that work is:   

What happens in the hostile political, media, and institutional space in the U.S. and the West that many of us occupy matters enormously. If we accept that Israel is a settler colonial (as well as a national) project, then the U.S. and the West are its metropole. As the Irish, Algerian, Vietnamese, and South African liberation movements understood, it was not sufficient to resist colonialism in the colony. It was also necessary to win over opinion in the metropole, which often involved limitations on the use of violence, as well as the use of non-violent means (difficult as that is to do in the face of the massive violence of the colonizer). That is how the Irish won their War of Independence from 1916 until 1921, how the Algerians won in 1962, and how the Vietnamese and the South Africans won as well.

And on this front, Khalidi flags the impact of the unprecedented movement for Palestinian rights that has surged worldwide, including in the US: 

…something has shifted… There’s a vigorous contestation of the Zionist narrative, within the Jewish community in particular, with an interesting generational divide. That’s entirely new—and very important.

The outpouring of support for Palestine has won a US majority to a pro-ceasefire, stop- the-Gaza-slaughter perspective. Within that majority, there is a steadily growing anti-Zionist, anti-imperialist core. The task ahead, whatever Netanyahu and Trump do, is to keep expanding both the core of Palestine Solidarity activists and the much broader constituency that sympathizes with the Palestinian cause. Both are necessary to build sufficient political clout to first match and then exceed the influence the Israel lobby and Christian Zionism wield today.

New dangers under Trump 2.0, but also opportunities

Trump and his appointees regard all advocacy of Palestinian rights as Jew-hating and want to enforce that stance via government policy. Our basic right to speak up for Palestine is now in danger. As we play defense, there will be opportunities to expand the ranks of those who will support Palestinian rights and the number of people who will act on that basis. More people than ever—even many who vacillate in their support of Palestine—understand that attacks on the rights of pro-Palestine protesters are a wedge to undermine the right to protest on any issue. A spirit of solidarity has spread broadly; activists in every social justice movement are determined to prevent the MAGA oligarchs from picking our movements off one by one. 

Another opportunity stems from the fact that Trump’s indictment of US “forever wars,” however hypocritical on his part, does speak to sentiment that is widespread even among Republican voters. Backing Israel is a recipe for more, not fewer, forever wars. There may be openings to reach a broader audience for our message that a stable peace in the Middle East is possible only if Israel stops attacking its neighbors and ends its dispossession and oppression of the Palestinian people. 

None of this will be easy. And we need to brace ourselves for the waves of heartache and outrage that will wash over us all as the full scope of the not-yet-over genocide in Gaza becomes known. Rashid Khalidi’s closing words in The Neck and the Sword may help us stay psychologically stable and politically on track: 

I grew up in a world where there was no Palestinian voice—in the Arab world, in the public sphere in the West; none at all, it didn’t exist. Palestinians didn’t exist. My four grandchildren are growing up in a time when there are quite vigorous voices for Palestine, all over the world. So that’s an element of change for the better. I grew up in a world in which the Zionist narrative was completely hegemonic and Israel was fulsomely described as ‘a light unto the nations.’ That is no longer the case. Today it is widely, and rightly, seen as a pariah state because of its own genocidal actions. These are among the few good things that have happened in these very bad times.

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