While Trump despises Hamas and wants to please Republicans who support Israel‘s actions against its enemies, the Middle East is just one of dozens of concerns on the president’s overflowing agenda. 

“As he made clear in his inaugural address, in which he mentioned the hostages but not Israel, the president’s primary concern is America First, which includes an aversion to foreign entanglements,” Dov S. Zakheim, senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote in the January issue of the Jerusalem Strategic Review.

Trump wants to bring stability to the Middle East quickly so he can focus greater attention on domestic matters. That’s something Netanyahu and Palestinian leaders “would do well to bear in mind,” Zakheim wrote.    

As things stand now, Trump appears preoccupied, even obsessed, with the Middle East. On the campaign trail, he vowed to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear bomb and to stop attacks by the Houthis, an Iranian-backed terrorist militia in Yemen, on Israel and ships in the Red Sea. When he was president-elect, Trump promised that “all hell would break out in the Middle East” if Hamas did not release the hostages it kidnapped into Gaza during its Oct. 7, 2023, massacre by Inauguration Day.

Hamas and Israel took Trump’s demand for a ceasefire seriously: The day before Trump was sworn into office, they began to implement a three-phase ceasefire, exchanging three Israeli hostages for 90 Palestinian prisoners. Using the ceasefire as their pretext, the Houthis stopped launching missiles at Israel, and the anti-Israel rhetoric from Iran has been uncharacteristically muted.

During Trump’s first week in office, he reversed former President Joe Biden’s sanctions against extremist Jewish settlers, and the Pentagon informed Israel that the United States would soon release 1,800 of the 2,000-pound bombs Israel paid for, but which Biden withheld to pressure Israel.

In a surprise move, Trump also asked the leaders of Egypt and Jordan to consider accepting at least a million Palestinians from Gaza to “just clean out” the embattled territory, much of it uninhabitable and reduced to rubble.     

Gaza is “literally a demolition site right now. Almost everything’s demolished, and people are dying there, so I’d rather get involved with some of the Arab nations and build housing in a different location where I think they could maybe live in peace for a change,” he told reporters on Air Force One.   

Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, who dreams of reestablishing Israeli settlements in Gaza, praised Trump’s “excellent idea.” Egypt and Jordan, which each receive more than a billion dollars annually from the U.S., flatly refused to take in more Palestinians. Hamas said transferring Palestinians amounts to ethnic cleansing.      

Yoav Fromer, founding director of the Center for the Study of the United States at Tel Aviv University, said Israelis “shouldn’t confuse gestures” such as the first Trump administration’s decision to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem or recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights with the president’s unconditional support.  

“The majority of Israelis wanted Trump to be president, but if they think he will let us do whatever we want, such as annexing the West Bank or cutting aid to Gaza, that’s a huge mistake,” Fromer said. “Trump’s goal is a Palestinian state. He wants the war over. He’s said it again and again.”

If Trump insists on laying the foundation for a future Palestinian state (which Netanyahu vehemently opposes) or a normalization deal with Saudi Arabia (which Netanyahu yearns for) in return for promises of Palestinian autonomy, for example, the Israeli right-wing will find it difficult to refuse, Fromer said.

“Trump has more control over the Israeli right than any Democratic president ever had. They’re afraid of him. He has legitimacy in a way that Obama never had. Netanyahu will not be able to tell Trump, ‘My hands are tied because I have a right-wing coalition,’” he said.

Nor will Netanyahu, who in Washington on Feb. 4 became the first foreign leader to meet with Trump during his second, non-consecutive White House term, be able to sway the hard-line conservatives he has long relied on in Congress, Zakheim predicted.  

With a few exceptions, Republicans in Congress “would be unlikely to challenge Trump” should he choose to pressure Israel to implement all three phases of the agreement. “Moreover, they could well be joined by the growing number of Democrats who have become critical of Israeli operations in Gaza and have little love for Netanyahu.”

Netanyahu “would thus have created a powerful bipartisan coalition that is hostile to an Israeli government in place of the nearly unconditional and long-standing near-unanimous congressional support for the Jewish state,” Zackheim wrote.

Nimrod Novik, an Israel fellow at the Israel Policy Forum, believes that regional stability has a chance of succeeding under Trump’s second administration.

While previous administrations treated the Israeli Palestinian matter as something only Israelis and Palestinians can resolve, Trump will likely call on countries such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, Egypt, and Jordan to create a more comprehensive peace plan, said Novik, who served as a senior policy adviser to the late Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres.  

“What we hear from both the U.S. administration and the region is that all hinges on a change of policy in Jerusalem. Until now, Jerusalem has been hostile to any Palestinian Authority involvement in patrolling and rebuilding Gaza, and certainly to a two-state solution,” he said.

If Trump can convince Netanyahu — or the prime minister who may succeed him — that both the U.S. and an axis of Arab countries are truly committed to Israel’s legitimate security needs, will demilitarize Hamas and normalize ties with Israel in return for some sort of guarantee of Palestinian autonomy or independence, the future could look much brighter, Novik said.

“It won’t happen tomorrow morning. We are just coming out of the trauma of Oct. 7. It requires a gradual process that will be based on benchmarks and the gradual acclimation of the public to the new reality,” he said.

However, based on Trump’s pro-Israel track record, “Israelis have confidence he will not suggest something that undermines Israeli security,” Novik said.

Michele Chabin is an Israel-based journalist. Her work has appeared in, among other outlets, Cosmopolitan, the Forward, Religion News Service, SCIENCE, USA Today, U.S. News & World Report, and the Washington Post.