By Jonathan S. Tobin
(JNS) — We don’t know yet what impact President-elect Donald Trump’s bombshell statement about the fate of the Israeli hostages still held by Hamas will be. But in one post on his Truth Social site, he neatly summarized what has been lacking in terms of American leadership when it comes to the fight against Iranian-funded Islamist terrorism for the past four years.
Trump’s post — with its characteristic bombastic tone and use of capital letters for emphasis — was very different from the public statements of the Biden administration foreign-policy team in recent months on the same topic or that of any other world leader. The United States has condemned Hamas, but in the last year has been primarily focused on pressuring Israel to give up its campaign to eliminate the terrorists and agree to a ceasefire with only a partial release of the hostages. That would effectively hand the perpetrators an undeserved victory for the massacre of 1,200 men, women and children in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Instead, Trump put the onus for achieving the release of the hostages — something all decent people should support — on the Palestinians. They were responsible for that rampage of mass murder, torture, rape and kidnapping. But by specifying that the “All HELL TO PAY” would be felt throughout the Middle East, he was also sending a powerful message to Hamas’s foreign backers. Iran, as well as nominal U.S. allies like Qatar and Turkey, who have provided the terrorists with aid and diplomatic cover are also now on notice to secure the hostages’ freedom lest they, too, face Trump’s wrath once he returns to the White House on Jan. 20.
It’s true that the Biden administration has been working on trying to broker a deal that would lead to the release of at least some of the 101 hostages (approximately 60 are believed to be alive) that are still unaccounted for. But there has been no such unambiguous message from Washington about what it expects from the Hamas terrorist organization or its allies in the Muslim and Arab worlds. Instead, and in keeping with its consistent efforts to undermine and topple the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu since Israelis elected it in November 2022, Biden has wanted Netanyahu to make concessions that wouldn’t return all the hostages at once and that would hand over Gaza to the weak and corrupt Palestinian Authority, which has, despite its rivalry with Hamas, never condemned the atrocities that took place on Oct. 7. That is a formula to ensure that Hamas would soon return to power there, leaving Israel in as much danger as it was when the Palestinians started this war.
Trump has made no secret of his desire for a clean slate in the Middle East when he takes office, with Israel having completed its wars against both Hamas in the south and Hezbollah to the north. While that puts Netanyahu on notice that the next administration is hoping not to be distracted from its domestic priorities by conflict in the Middle East, Trump was equally clear that he had no compunctions about the severity of Israeli military actions in Gaza or Lebanon. He just wants the Israelis to “finish” and achieve “victory” over Hamas — an idea that the Biden team has consistently opposed. Once that victory is achieved, Trump is obviously hoping to pick up where he left off when he left office four years ago by building on the 2020 Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and four Arab and Muslim-majority nations.
Many of Trump’s critics were predictably appalled by his hostage post because of its tone and what they consider to be his bias in favor of Israel and against the Palestinians. Despite starting the war with barbaric atrocities and sticking to their goal of wiping Israel off the map and committing genocide against the Jews, Hamas and its supporters — a category that includes what may well be a majority of Palestinians as well as their cheerleaders in the international media and on American college campuses — expect themselves to be depicted as the sole victims in the conflict.
Biden’s willingness to kowtow to that mindset has undermined his administration’s efforts to end the war.
He did so in part out of an instinctual desire to curry favor with the international community, which is prejudiced against the Jewish state. It also reflected a feckless desire to curry favor with Muslim and Arab-American voters prior to the November presidential election. Much to the dismay of Democrats, that gambit failed. Many of them chose not to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris against Trump largely out of spite because they and others in his party’s left-wing intersectional base deemed Biden, who zigzagged between support for the Jewish state’s right of self-defense and harsh criticism of its exercise of that right, insufficiently anti-Israel.
No matter his motivation, the mixed signals sent by Biden, and later by Harris as well, about the war only served to encourage Hamas to refuse to negotiate seriously. Rather than acknowledge defeat and end the suffering of the Palestinian population of Gaza that they used as pawns and human shields, the terrorists stuck to their demands that a ceasefire would entail a return to the pre-Oct. 7 status quo, where they would be in charge in Gaza. And they did this while claiming that it was Israel’s fault for refusing to surrender to them.
Sadly, that false claim has been echoed by some of Netanyahu’s domestic political opponents. The anti-Bibi resistance largely hijacked the cause of the hostage families. These partisans have sought to place all the blame for their remaining in captivity on the prime minister who had to balance their plight against his obligation not to endanger other Israelis by paying a price for their freedom that would lead to more Oct. 7-like assaults.
While Israelis remain deeply divided about Netanyahu, there’s no sign that this debate extends to his policy of carrying the war to Hamas and Hezbollah. There is a broad consensus that Hamas cannot be allowed to threaten Israel again. And there will be no way to do that if the Israel Defense Forces don’t maintain a presence inside the Gaza Strip even after the mopping up of the remaining Palestinian terrorists is eventually finished.
Whether they intended to or not, Biden’s and Harris’s often severe criticism of Israel’s conduct of the war as being too harsh or resulting in too many Palestinian casualties only stiffened the resolve of the remnants of Hamas and other terrorist movements in Gaza. Combined with their continuing desire to appease rather than to confront Iran and their ineffectual response to the terrorist attacks being conducted by their Hezbollah and Houthi proxy forces, the administration’s pressure on Israel made the goal of a hostage deal at any price even less likely.
Iran is key to solving this puzzle, as is the behavior of Turkey and Qatar, the Gulf state that is a major supporter of Hamas and Tehran while also playing the hand of serving as an American ally. Hamas’s remaining cadres are confident that as long as they retain foreign support, they need not consider giving up a hopeless struggle not just to hold onto parts of Gaza but to eventually destroy Israel.
Yet everything Biden has done in the Middle East has been tainted by his administration’s ongoing desire to avoid antagonizing Iran. That was reflected in their attitudes towards Hezbollah’s control of Lebanon and their warnings to Israel to avoid strikes on Iran’s nuclear program or its ability to ship oil even after Tehran directly attacked Israel twice in 2024. This is a policy that everyone on Biden’s team has treated as a priority dating back to their time working for President Barack Obama and his efforts to achieve a rapprochement with Tehran while creating more “daylight” between Washington and Jerusalem.
Sending a warning
Trump’s threats may not be enough to convince Hamas to give up their fight to hang on in Gaza. But they have given the Iranians, as well as Qatar and Turkey, a lot to think about. Whether or not they succeed in the short term, the president-elect has served notice to the region that those who have enabled the continuation of the war on Israel that began last Oct. 7 may be forced to pay a very high price for continuing to do so.
What does that mean?
Certainly, it will entail a return to the “maximum pressure” campaign on Iran that Trump employed to bring its economy to its knees before he left office in January 2021. Their plight was only relieved by Biden’s foolish lifting of sanctions on Tehran and transferring billions of dollars in formerly frozen funds to the Islamist regions. But the ayatollahs and their Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps shock troops must also worry about the threat of a “green light” from Trump to Israel to take out their nuclear program and capacity to ship oil to foreign customers who are keeping the regime afloat.
It is also a warning to Qatar and Turkey that they, too, might suffer from Trump’s disfavor.
Rather than being a weakness, Trump’s blunt talk on issues of foreign policy, coupled with his unpredictability and unwillingness to brook insults from rogue states, are some of his greatest strengths when operating on the international scene. It is also crucial to understanding why events such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as well as the Oct. 7 attacks enabled by Iran, didn’t happen on Trump’s watch.
Moreover, it was also Trump’s moral clarity on the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians that led to his success in expanding the circle of peace via the Abraham Accords. Only by making it crystal clear that Israel had America’s full backing could Muslim and Arab nations be persuaded to drop their resistance to normalizing relations with the Jewish state. Rather than set the region on fire, Trump’s move of the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem — plus the recognition of Israeli sovereignty on the Golan, the legality of Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, and by holding the Palestinian Authority accountable for their support for terrorism — brought the region closer to peace.
Some people are put off by Trump’s bluster and disinterest in diplomatic niceties. But it is precisely a return to his unorthodox style that enabled him to ignore the advice of the foreign-policy establishment and its self-styled “experts” who have been wrong about the Middle East for decades.
What the world needs is more Trumpian threats and less of Biden’s blind faith in multilateralism, appeasement of Iran and diplomacy for its own sake. Whether or not his demand for the prompt release of hostages held captive for a full 14 months, including a baby, is heeded, his return to the White House is good news for supporters of Israel. It’s also a reason for those who have been enabling the terrorists to reconsider their vile and ultimately foolish stand.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate).