The Turbulent World with James M. Dorsey

US President Donald J. Trump’s Gaza plan could change the nature of the Gaza war and prolong rather than end the hostilities. Amid calls for a unified Arab response to Mr. Trump’s plan to resettle or ethnically cleanse Gazan Palestinians, according to many Middle Easterners, officials, journalists, analysts, and social media activists are mulling options. The options under discussion range from approaches that would give US companies a significant stake in Gaza’s reconstruction to the fuelling of a Hamas-led armed guerilla-style resistance.

Hamas has released the fifth batch of hostages to the Red Cross. In exchange, Israel will release 183 Palestinian prisoners, some convicted of involvement in attacks that killed dozens of people, including 18 serving life sentences, and 111 detained in Gaza during the war, according to Hamas. James M. Dorsey, an adjunct Senior Fellow, at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies give us more analysis on the story.

US President Donald J. Trump’s call for the permanent resettlement of Gazan Palestinians has focused regional minds, even if the White House and senior officials have walked back key elements of the president’s proposal

US President Donald J. Trump’s plan to expel Palestinians and take control of Gaza threatens to render second phase ceasefire negotiations to the dustbin of history and kill prospects for Saudi recognition of Israel. So has Mr. Trump’s suggestion that he would decide in the next month whether to endorse Israeli annexation of the West Bank occupied by Israel since 1967. Mr. Trump’s propositions take Palestinian aspirations off the table. They fulfill visiting Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s wildest dreams.

Donald Trump’s Oval Office could be Binyamin Netanyahu’s brick wall. That is if the president uses Tuesday’s meeting with Mr. Netanyahu, the first foreign leader to visit Washington since Mr. Trump returned to office, to ensure a successful Israeli-Hamas negotiation of the Gaza ceasefire agreement’s second phase.

US President Donald J. Trump’s approach to managing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict may have legs, even if Arabs and Muslims reject his call for the resettlement of Gazan Palestinians. Egypt, Jordan, and Palestinians have rejected resettlement in no uncertain terms. So have non-Arab Muslim countries like Indonesia and Albania, who the United States reportedly approached with a request to take in Palestinians. Palestinians say they voted with their feet with hundreds of thousands of Gazans returning this week to their ruined homes in the north of the Strip. Even so, Egypt and Turkey, a more strident Middle Eastern state, see geopolitical and geostrategic advantage and commercial opportunity in working with the Trump administration on a plan first tabled during Mr. Trump’s first term in office that falls short of Palestinian aspirations but would serve Egyptian and Turkish interests.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Israel’s ultra-nationalists and ultra-conservatives have turned Israel into a ‘haven’ for some Jews rather than all Jews. Not only by encouraging an intolerant, supremacist domestic environment hostile to vigorous public debate and equality for all but also by endorsing the far-right’s flirt with language and imagery that risks stoking ant-Semitism, and efforts to rewrite the history of the Holocaust, Jews’ worst calamity in modern history.

US President Donald J. Trump risks putting relations with Saudi Arabia and other US partners in the region on a knife’s edge, sending the Middle East into a tailspin, and complicating, if not undermining, negotiations to make the three-phase Gaza ceasefire permanent rather than temporary by advocating the removal to Egypt and Jordan of 1.5 million Gazan Palestinians.

US President Donald J. Trump has foreign governments, domestic constituencies, journalists, and pundits running in circles as they attempt to identify his Middle East policy.

US President-elect Donald J. Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu may soon diverge in their approaches to a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yet, the Trump administration is set, as a ceasefire takes effect in Gaza, to cement suppression of criticism of the Jewish state, a pillar of Israel’s long-standing effort to manipulate US and international public opinion and squash public censure.

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu may welcome two Middle East policy goals articulated by US President-elect Donald J. Trump in response to the Gaza ceasefire but may not like what it will take to achieve them. The same is true for the Palestinians, including the West Bank-based, internationally recognised Palestine Authority and Hamas.

Decimating Hezbollah and ousting President Bashar al-Assad were the first steps in a Middle Eastern power struggle that is likely to define not only who wields the most influence in Syria but also who will emerge as regional hegemons. Turkey, Israel, and Iran are prime candidates, with countries like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar playing catch up, at least in Syria. The line-up in Syria reflects the likely longer-term divvying up of influence regionally in a complex jigsaw puzzle.

Saudi Arabia brings out the worst in the world of international sports in terms of politics and greed. FIFA’s awarding Saudi Arabia the 2034 World Cup hosting rights is just the tip of the iceberg. The awarding violated the world soccer body’s human rights policy and mocked the sports world’s fiction that sports and politics are separate rather than Siamese twins joined at the hip. The Olympic Council of Asia’s earlier awarding of the 2029 Asian Winter Games to Saudi Arabia, even though the kingdom lacks a qualifying winter season and intends to hold the tournament in a troubled mega science fiction project that is under construction, is another example of politics and money trumping sports.

With Donald j. Trump two weeks away from returning to the White House, Iran and its Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) fear that recent setbacks could open a Pandora’s box. Israel’s puncturing of Swiss cheese-sized holes in the Iran-backed Axis of Resistance has upended the Islamic Republic’s forward defence strategy, raised questions about the future of the IRGC’s Quds Force, its foreign operations arm, and risks turning Iran into a tradeable geopolitical commodity.

Israel’s once-vaunted military faces an uncertain future. Not just because the International Court of Justice (ICJ) is set to judge Israel's Gaza war conduct and the issuance by the International Criminal Court (ICC) of arrest warrants for Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant. But also due to assertions that the military is unable or unwilling to enforce discipline, questioning of the military’s capacity to investigate itself, a long-held US-supported holy grail of the military’s self-perception as “the world’s most moral army,” and the rise of an officer corps infused by religious ultra-nationalism. In addition, several recent books by Israeli veterans of the Gaza war belie the military’s moral claim and document the traumatic fallout of Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack on Israel that killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, as well as 15 months of combat in the Strip.

Israel’s demolition of the ill-equipped Syrian military and the recent occupation of additional Syrian territory beyond the Golan Heights it conquered in the 1967 Middle East war is just one obstacle. So is a daunting list of challenges that, if unresolved, threaten the new Syrian rulers’ ability to rebuild an economy ravaged by 14 years of civil war and, potentially, the country’s territorial integrity. The challenges include Turkey’s military presence in northern Syria, fighting between a pro-Turkish militia and Syrian Kurds, differences over whether Syria should be a centralised state or a federation, the failure of large numbers of Al-Assad conscripts to turn in their weapons despite being promised amnesty, and concerns about the place of religious minorities in the future Syria.

The new leadership in Syria has dispatched officials to Saudi Arabia, for the first official visit outside the country. The delegation is being led by Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shibani, the defense minister and the head of intelligence services. James M. Dorsey, a senior fellow at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, discusses the importance of the Syrian government's efforts to rebuild ties with Arab nations.

Once viewed as a breeder of religious extremism, Saudi Arabia earned brownie points as the international community sighed a sigh of relief when Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom’s de facto ruler, substantially reduced global funding of ultra-conservative strands of Islam and started to propagate a socially more relaxed interpretation of the faith. Almost a decade later, the benefits of the change far outweigh the costs.

Much like Hezbollah miscalculated with its 15-month-long war of attrition against Israel, Yemen’s Houthi rebels risk being the next target in Israel’s campaign to rewrite the Middle East’s political map. “We will act with strength, determination, and ingenuity. Even if it takes time, the result will be the same as with other terrorist arms,” said Prime Mi Netanyahu said on Monday. Some Israelis suggest that to effectively target the Houthis, Israel should simultaneously emasculate Iran, already on the defensive because of the loss of ousted President Bashar al Assad’s Syria, the weakening of Lebanese Shiite Muslim militia Hezbollah, and severe Israeli damage inflicted on the Islamic Republic’s air defenses.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s fall has seemingly turbocharged Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s neo-Ottoman dreams.