Netanyahu’s reshaped Middle East aligns neatly with Trump’s new world order

The Turbulent World with James M. Dorsey

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s effort to reshape the Middle East aligns neatly with US President Donald J. Trump’s notion of big power geopolitics. In 2023, Mr. Netanyahu outlined elements of his vision in an address to the United Nations General Assembly. The prime minister held up a map that erased Palestine and showed the Golan Heights, captured from Syria in the 1967 Middle East war, as part of Israel. Mr. Trump’s plan to resettle Gaza’s 2.3 million Palestinians elsewhere and turn the war-ravaged Strip into a high-end beachfront real estate development has allowed Mr. Netanyahu to officially embrace the notion of ethnic cleansing for the first time, even though ultranationalist members of his Cabinet have long propagated expelling Palestinians from the territory. US and Israeli officials said concern that Hamas may repurpose some 30,000 unexploded ordnances was one reason why Mr. Trump proposed resettlement. Even so, Mr. Trump’s plan fits a pattern, following his recognition in his first term as president of Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. Since then, Mr. Netanyahu’s big power vision of the Middle East has evolved substantially as a result of the toppling in December of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad by rebels led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a Turkish-backed group with jihadist antecedents.