Donald Trump: There is no Nobel Peace Prize for sayings

When Benjamin Netanyahu stood in the White House next to Donald Trump in February, the Israeli Prime Minister looked joyfully surprised by the plans of the US President. At the time, Trump announced that he wanted to convert the Gaza Strip into the “Riviera of the Middle East”. He sounded like the real estate entrepreneur of yore. Trump even did not rule out military violence to forced the Palestinians. Netanyahu looked incredulously.

When the global community reacted with horror, the White House justified the considerations. Trump thinks “outside the norm” that he had weighed this proposal for a long time. How long Trump wants to think is not known. Politically, however, he was not well thought out. There was no plan where the Palestinians should be brought. There was no initiative so that other Arab states accept or support them. Donald Trump had just hit one.

Typical Trump? This could be dismissed if it were not about the life of more than two million Palestinians in Gaza. Trump’s proposal may have been chatter, but he encouraged Netanyahu. Because the message was brutal and clear: the life of Palestinians is so little worth that it could be driven out of an area that is due to them under international law. Trump has not only approved the inhumane warfare of the Israeli government, but strengthened. Netanyahu practically implements what Trump thought at the time, but in a worse variant. People are not only driven out, but starved.

The Republican likes to talk about himself as a president of peace during media appearances. Again and again Trump says that he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize, unlike Barack Obama in 2009. Between Pakistan and India. And that the US military strike against Iran would have created an “eternal” peace. (Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs sees it differently.)

What lets Trump omitted is the fact that he failed due to a peace plan for Ukraine. And that he has no plan for Gaza and never had one. There is only one constant in the Middle East policy of Washington: the US President has Netanyahu granted. Israel is allowed to convert the region with war remedies as it wants. Trump looks at – or rushes to help, see Iran.

It also fits that the president made an old friend a Middle East special envoy. Steve Witkoff is a real estate investor, as Trump was once. According to “Forbes”, the New Yorker is said to have a fortune of at least one billion US dollars. Witkoff was initially responsible for the Middle East, later also for Russia. The idea that Russia could attack other European countries described Witkoff as “absurd” in spring. Putin is also not interested in bringing the entire Ukraine under his control. “Why should you want to swallow Ukraine?” Russia only strives for “stability”. Witkoff is a man who has no diplomatic experience or expertise. In his function as a special envoy, he is a misconception.

Witkoff is a symptom of Trump’s Gaza policy. If the President would be serious about the promise to create a permanent peace in the region, he would have a professional negotiated for the United States. With Foreign Minister Marco Rubio, he would have at least a cabinet member who understands the processes and processes in the Middle East.

Instead, Witkoff has now announced that the US delegation from Katar’s capital Doha withdraws from the negotiations with Hamas about an armistice. Hamas is not willing to reach a ceasefire, Witkoff wrote to X. “We will now check other options to bring the hostages home and try to create a more stable location for people in Gaza.” Of course, Hamas plays with the need for its own population and the well -being of Israeli hostages. But suffering has accepted an extent that no longer justifies a delay.

For the people in Gaza, none of this means anything good. The Europeans are too dessert to be able to play an important role in the region. France wants to recognize Palestine as a state, Germany does not want that. So there is only one player who would have the political force to influence Netanyahu and his government to end the humanitarian disaster in Gaza – and that is Donald Trump. There is no reason to assume that the US President should meet this responsibility.

And therefore the following applies: Trump is complicit in this suffering.