Trump has won, but are there any winners in the Middle East?

A week after the ‘shock’ re-election of Donald Trump to the Whitehouse and over a year into one of the most blood-soaked periods of the Middle East’s tortured modern history, the question is, what has been lost and has anything been won, and what impact might Trump II have on the situation?
Did Hamas and Islamic Jihad’s abhorrent October 7 massacre of 1200 and kidnapping of around 240 mostly unarmed civilians take Palestinians any closer to justice and self-determination?
Has Israel Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and the IDF’s criminally disproportionate response, which has shocked the conscience of the world in the callous killing of what is reported by the Gaza health ministry as over 43,000 people, taken Israel any closer to sustainable security as a Jewish state?
And has Iran and its ‘resistance axis’ helped the Palestinian cause at all, or more to the point, has they successfully blocked their regional adversaries – Israel, the United States and the Gulf States – from implementing the Abraham Accords, which was their main concern.
The answer to all these questions is probably one word, no.
Despite what some Israelis (intoxicated with perceived military victories) or Palestinians (encouraged by apparent groundswells of global support) might hope, the aspirations of both national movements are more distant today than at any time in the past 76 years of struggle.
The two-state solution, dead as a feasible option since President Obama’s failed efforts of 2009-2016, is fast being joined in the dustbin of diplomatic history by a binational one-state solution.
As hate and insecurity among communities in greater Israel-Palestine spirals to unprecedented heights, only dark thoughts of genocide and ethnic cleansing remain. It is important to understand there are two genocides to consider.
One is the genocide that is being openly sought and brutally prosecuted by the right wing messianics at the heart of Netanyahu’s government, who are already planning the violent resettlement of Gaza and the formal annexation of the West Bank.
This genocidal faction, led by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itmar Ben Gvir, is increasingly unbridled. Opposition figures who proposed some form of Palestinian self-rule after ‘defeating’ Hamas, have been consistently purged from the decision-making circle – the latest being the firing by Netanyahu of Defence Minister Yaov Gallant. (The latter is nonetheless likely guilty of serious war crimes as shown recently in the Israeli – Palestinian collaborative publication +972 Magazine.)
The other genocide is the one that lingers in the sub-conscious of Israeli Jews (and many other Jewish people), as a deep psychological wound that was torn open by the October 7 terror attack, and every time since when they see a Palestinian flag – the flag of Arab ethno-nationalism – and hear the chant ‘from the river to the sea’.
 A scene in a Hamas propaganda video imploring Palestinians to stay supportive, shows the phrase in Arabic on a blackboard with the number 27,027km2 – the exact land area of the entirety of Israel-Palestine.
Whether a reasonable fear or not, the fact remains that this awful imagining of another Jewish holocaust, constantly buttressed by the rhetoric and rockets of the Islamic Republic of Iran and others for decades, serves to pique the insecurity of Israelis and tighten the grip of Netanyahu and extremists like Smotrich and Ben Gvir on power in Israel so that they can continue their actual genocide.
It might be useful at this point to recall how at the end of their civil war in 1990 all the Lebanese communities understood, after 15 nightmare years, that there were, and could be, ‘no victors and no vanquished,’ only shared despair and destruction. Nobody was going anywhere, and when the dust settled, they still had to live together regardless – a creed that Lebanese have tried to uphold since, albeit Hezbollah has tested it severely in recent decades.
The politics of Israel-Palestine has been poisoned on all sides by corruption and fear. My Palestinian colleague from Gaza used to tell me about the corruption and hypocrisy of the Hamas leadership, who were fat on Gulf ‘aid’, lived lavishly in luxury villas while ordinary Gazans suffered under the inhumane Israel-Egyptian blockade of the Gaza Strip.
Most of those leaders are now dead and gone, but for ordinary Gazans, the consequences of their decisions endure.
In a conversation recently, he told me that for his family trapped in southern Gaza and unable to get through the Rafah Crossing to safety in Egypt, “now, life is worse than death”.
Within this ‘geopolitical pressure’ cooker, as the late New Zealand emeritus Professor of Middle East studies, William Harris, once adroitly put it, it becomes necessary to consider how Donald Trump might approach Middle East affairs?
As Italian playwright Vittorio Alfieri wrote in the late 18th century “fear is the mainspring of tyranny” and in today’s Middle East fear is in abundance, something that could play into the hands of Trump and his Middle Eastern allies in Israel and the Gulf.
Part 2: Trump II and the coming ‘golden age’ of tyranny in the Middle East will appear on Thursday November 14