Netanyahu awards Trump 'Israel Prize' as Trump lavishes him with praise

There may not have been concrete deliverables on Gaza from the meeting between US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday, but one thing is for sure: Trump is receiving yet another trophy. 

Netanyahu said he is awarding Israel's highest cultural honour, the Israel Prize, to the US president "for his tremendous contributions to Israel and the Jewish people". 

It has never been awarded to a non-Israeli citizen before.

Not to be outdone, Trump lavished Netanyahu with praise, repeatedly calling him a "wartime prime minister at the highest level". 

"He can be very difficult on occasion, but you need a strong man," Trump conceded when asked about his personal relationship with Netanyahu, as he welcomed him at the doorstep of his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida.

"If you had a weak man, you wouldn't have Israel right now... with most other leaders, [Israel] would not exist." 

Their meeting came as the Trump-branded ceasefire plan, which went into effect on 10 October in Gaza, is effectively stalled until - according to the Israelis and Americans - Hamas disarms. 

Before their sit down on Monday, Trump indicated to reporters that while he still wants to see Hamas lay down its weapons per his 20-point plan, he may consider pushing for reconstruction projects in Gaza before that happens. 

After their meeting, he adopted a more assertive tone.

"They're going to be given very short period of time to disarm, and we'll see how that works out," Trump said.

"If they don't disarm as they agreed to do, there will be hell to pay for them. And we don't want that. We're not looking for that. But they have to disarm within a fairly short period of time."

Trump did not provide a deadline. 

He suggested there are countries "outside the Middle East" signed on to his Gaza ceasefire plan who would be willing to send troops to disarm Hamas themselves. He did not mention any names.

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"They said let us do it for you... they want to do it because it's the right thing to do," Trump told reporters. 

The US president is the self-appointed chair of what he has called the Board of Peace for Gaza, though its membership roster has yet to be unveiled. 

"It's been a mess for a long time. It's seems to be born for that," he said of Gaza, which he has previously compared to a "demolition site".

But we're going to straighten it out," he added, offering no details. 

A 32-page PowerPoint presentation entitled the "Sunrise Project", drawn up by US envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has put the cost of reconstructing Gaza into a high-tech urban centre at more than $112b.

The plan, first reported by The Wall Street Journal earlier this month, proposes that the US pay 20 percent of that cost. The project is estimated to take 10 years to bring to fruition. 

Unnamed US officials who spoke to Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth expressed scepticism that something like that could ever be implemented, especially with nearly two million Palestinians still living in Gaza.

A less ambitious project was first reported by The Atlantic, suggesting a housing development called "Alternate Safe Communities" could be built behind the Israeli "yellow line" in Gaza - areas largely along the southern and eastern ends of Gaza, militarily occupied by Israel today. 

Palestinians who want to move there would have to be "screened" for "anti-Hamas sentiment", the US proposal by a top general suggested. 

Meanwhile, Trump said on Monday that he is convinced "more than half" of Gaza's residents would leave if given the chance, citing a Gallup International poll. 

Gallup itself has a disclaimer attached, saying that most Palestinians do not wish to leave permanently. 

Erdogan

When asked if Turkish troops could be stationed in Gaza as a buffer force, Trump said that he would like to see that happen, despite Netanyahu's strong prior objections to the matter. 

A reporter later pressed Trump on the viability of such a move, given Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's previous comparison of Netanyahu to Adolf Hitler.

"He's a very good friend of mine, and I believe that, and I do respect him, and Bibi respects him, and they're not going to have a problem," Trump said. 

Erdogan also helped "very much get rid of a very bad ruler of Syria," Trump added of Turkey's staunch backing and grooming of Syria's current president, Ahmed al-Sharaa. 

"He never wanted the credit for it, but he really gets a lot of credit. Bibi agrees with that." 

Netanyahu did not comment.

As the press conference wrapped up, Turkish reporters wanted to know if Trump would approve the sale of the highly sought-after F-35 fighter jets to Ankara.

"We're thinking about it more seriously," Trump said. 

"They'll never use them on Israel," he added as he walked out.

Fragile ceasefire

The US president has given indications for two months now that phase two of the ceasefire is going to roll out "very soon" - but as the deal's guarantor, his administration has not been willing to keep Israel in line. 

The Gaza Government Media Office said there have been 1,000 ceasefire violations by Israel in two and a half months. More than 400 Palestinians have been killed, including the commander of Hamas's military wing, the Qassam Brigades.

The White House reportedly scolded Netanyahu for that particular strike, which was viewed as an escalation in Gaza. 

Israel still militarily occupies 58 percent of the strip, shooting anyone who gets close to the yellow line.

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It has also not allowed unfettered access to aid, the United Nations confirmed, as the ceasefire deal stipulated.

On Hamas's part, 254 of the 255 Israeli captives held in Gaza - both dead and alive - have been handed back to the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Only the remains of one captive have yet to be released. 

"I'm not concerned about anything that Israel is doing. I'm concerned about what other people are doing, or maybe aren't doing," Trump said in response to a question about whether Israel was moving fast enough to implement his plan. 

"Israel's lived up to the plan 100 percent." 

'Total disarmament is unacceptable'

An overwhelming majority of Palestinians are opposed to Hamas's disarmament and are deeply sceptical that Trump's peace plan will lead to a permanent end to Israel;s war on Gaza.

About 70 percent of Palestinians polled across the occupied West Bank and Gaza just two weeks after the ceasefire was declared said they staunchly oppose the disarmament of Hamas, even if that means a return to Israeli attacks, according to a poll conducted by the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR). 

The notion is a non-starter for Netanyahu. 

Hamas has already offered to "bury" its weapons in exchange for a guaranteed decade-long truce with Israel that can allow Gaza to rebuild, and for a Palestinian state to be established.

This is particularly in light of the United Nations and most industralised democracies in the world now recognising the State of Palestine in an effort toward a long-term solution.  

"The idea of total disarmament is unacceptable to the resistance. What is being proposed is a freeze, or storage [of weapons]... to provide guarantees against any military escalation from Gaza with the Israeli occupation," Hamas senior representative Khaled Meshaal told Al Jazeera earlier this month.

Now, in an effort to move along his own ceasefire plan, which bears his name, Trump could try to temporarily sidestep this thorny issue by persuading Israel to allow reconstruction projects to begin in the strip. 

It's no secret that Trump wants oil-rich Gulf states to invest heavily in that effort. 

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In November, Trump put the matter to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman at the White House, but the Saudi leader was noncommittal on reconstruction. 

Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani also ruled out funding Gaza's reconstruction.

"We are not the ones who are going to write the check to rebuild what others destroyed... Israel flattened this land," he said at an interview in December at the Doha Forum. 

A political settlement that can actually endure would have to involve the recognition of a Palestinian state for the 7.5 million Palestinians across the occupied territories, experts say. 

And while Trump's 20-point plan alludes to an aspiration for statehood, the administration's staunchly pro-Israel approach - led by Christian Evangelicals that do not use the term "Palestinian" - could not be further away from recognition, as its closest allies have done. 

Amr Hamzawy, the director of the Carnegie Middle East programme, said in October that Egypt has already asked the US to help organise a reconstruction summit for Gaza, but that "the current political conditions [are] ambivalent, ambiguous, unclear".

"We do have a reconstruction plan which has been developed by Egypt [and] adopted by the Arab League," he noted of the document first unveiled in March, and signed in July. 

"The plan is out there. Its implementation comes down to political will on the Israeli side and a regional and international reconstruction issue."

Iran

Bishara Bahbah, the founder of the group previously known as Arab Americans for Trump - now rebranded as Americans for Global Peace - told Middle East Eye on Monday that he is certain Trump "will demand the entry of phase two" during his meeting with Netanyahu.

Bahbah, a Palestinian-American businessman and academic, played a key role in the lead-up to the ceasefire as an intermediary between Witkoff and Hamas leadership. He spent most of this year in the region. 

Netanyahu, he told MEE, "will have no choice but to go along".

"However, what will Bibi get in return is the key question," Bahbah said of the prime minister.

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"Clearly, concessions on an Iran strike and replenishment of Israel's anti-missile interceptors." 

Outside his Florida resort and gesturing to the Israeli prime minister, Trump told reporters: "We just won a big war together." 

"You know, if we didn't beat Iran, you wouldn't have had peace in the Middle East, because nobody would have been able. The Arab countries, who have been fantastic, would not have been able to make a deal if we didn't wipe out their nuclear [capability]."

Iran - one of the top agenda items for the Trump-Netanyahu meeting - disputes that Israeli and US bombings in June "obliterated" its nuclear sites. 

"I hear that Iran is trying to build up again, and if they are, we're going to have to knock them down... We'll knock the hell out of them," Trump said. "But hopefully that's not happening. I heard Iran wants to make a deal. If they want to make a deal, that's much smarter."

But the US president made the same overture back in March, and even kickstarted direct talks between Washington and Tehran in Oman, before turning around and backing Israel in its 12-day war against the Islamic Republic. That culminated in unprecedented surprise US air strikes on Iran's three major nuclear facilities. 

"Trump appeared to have adopted the Israeli narrative on Iran hook, line, and sinker," Trita Parsi, the executive vice president at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, told MEE on Monday.

"Every time he's done that, even if he initially didn't intend to go to war on Israel's behalf, he's ended up doing exactly that." 

"Would you support the overthrow of the Iranian regime?" a reporter asked Trump.

"I'm not going to talk about overthrow of a regime," he said.

"They've got a lot of problems. They have tremendous inflation. Their economy is bust... Every time they have a riot, or somebody forms a group, little or big, they start shooting people... There's tremendous discontent."