Yair Rosenberg
When Donald Trump arrived in Israel last week to celebrate his Gaza agreement, Israelis of all stripes fell over themselves to thank him for his efforts to end the war and bring hostages home. The Knesset was lit up in red, white, and blue; its members gave the president a two-and-a-half-minute standing ovation when he arrived. A Tel Aviv beach was decorated with a giant silhouette of his face. Isaac Herzog, Israel’s president, announced that Trump would be awarded the country’s Presidential Medal of Honor, its highest civilian commendation. But one notable person didn’t join the festivities. In fact, she boycotted them.
The day before, Limor Son Har-Melech, a far-right member of Parliament, had declared that she was “not interested in joining the applause” and announced that she would not attend the president’s Knesset speech. “President Trump presented the current deal as a peace agreement,” she wrote. “It is not. It is a shameful agreement.” Har-Melech’s outrage was sharp but not surprising. Since October 7, 2023, she had been one of the chief advocates for the Israeli resettlement of Gaza. Just two months after the Hamas massacre, she said she told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that “the only image of victory in this war is that we will see Jewish homes in Gaza. Victory will be when we see the children of Israel playing in the streets of Gaza.”
Polls showed that most Israelis opposed this land-grabbing plan. But Netanyahu was beholden for his political future to the radical minority that supported it, and constantly catered to their whims. As the war in Gaza dragged on, and Israel plunged deeper into the Palestinian territory, the settler right appeared poised to obtain its prize. Trump called to “clean out” Gaza and relocate its population to make way for a “Riviera of the Middle East.” Nearly two dozen lawmakers in Netanyahu’s coalition signed a letter to Israel’s defense minister urging him to permit activists into Gaza itself to scout possible settlement locations.
The pieces were falling into place. That is, until Trump halted the war and imposed a peace plan that explicitly rejected any Israeli territorial designs on Gaza.
It wasn’t supposed to go this way. When Trump was reelected, members of the Israeli right rejoiced, believing that he would happily facilitate their aspirations. Instead, he has begun to frustrate them. The first blow came on September 25, when the president categorically ruled out any attempt to extend Israeli sovereignty over the occupied West Bank, which Palestinians claim for their future state. “I will not allow Israel to annex the West Bank,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “It’s not gonna happen.” The president’s Arab allies had made clear that annexation could shatter the Abraham Accords forged in Trump’s first term; faced with the potential unraveling of one of his signature achievements, the president acted quickly to curb the Israeli right’s ambitions.
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