It seems paradoxical to look to Donald Trump to save the Palestinians, yet no recent American president has been better placed to insist that the Israeli government stop its extraordinary repression and brutality. Trump so far has largely given Israel carte blanche to continue its genocide in Gaza, but Benjamin Netanyahu would be remiss to count on the fickle and self-serving American president. And there may be a way to turn Trump around.

Most US presidents have stuck with the Israeli government regardless of its atrocities because the political fallout of deviating was too high. Any pressure on Israel would be sure to trigger outrage from Christian evangelicals (Israel’s largest group of supporters in the US) and the conservative segment of American Jews represented by the lobbying group Aipac.

Trump is less susceptible to such pressure because there is no major political figure to his right. Israel’s supporters can complain, but they have no place to turn.

Trump has already used that latitude to differ from the Israeli prime minister on a range of issues. He lifted sanctions on the interim Syrian authorities when Netanyahu preferred a crippled neighbor. He struck a deal with Houthi forces in Yemen to stop attacking shipping without insisting on an end to attacks on Israel. He authorized direct negotiations with Hamas, which Netanyahu considered anathema, and initially pursued negotiations with Iran while Netanyahu preferred immediate bombing. He visited the Arab Gulf states without stopping in Israel. And he put pressure on Netanyahu twice to agree to temporary ceasefires in Gaza.

In other respects, Trump has supported the Netanyahu government. He authorized renewed delivery of the 2,000-pound bombs that Joe Biden had suspended because Israel was using them to decimate Palestinian neighborhoods. He vetoed a UN security council call for an unconditional ceasefire. He imposed sanctions on the international criminal court (ICC) prosecutor for charging Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant with the war crime of starving and depriving Palestinian civilians. He also sanctioned two ICC judges for affirming the charges, and a UN special rapporteur for accurately reporting on and denouncing Israel’s genocide.

But Netanyahu could find it perilous to count on Trump. Despite the periodic shows of mutual support, there seems to be no love lost between the two men. Moreover, Trump’s mood changes with the weather. He can turn on a dime with barely a blush. His loyalty is foremost to himself. His only lodestar is his political or financial self-interest.

There are plenty of reasons for the transactional Trump to sour on Netanyahu. While Trump bellyaches about the funds spent to defend Ukraine’s democracy from Vladimir Putin’s invasion, the US government has sent more than $22bn to Israel to sustain its war in Gaza, with no end in sight (more than $300bn since Israel’s founding in 1948). Netanyahu seems to treat an open spigot from Washington as an entitlement, but Trump can easily develop an allergy to such enormous expenditures.

Then there is Trump’s ego. Netanyahu’s pronouncement during his White House visit this month that he had nominated Trump for a Nobel peace prize was cringe-worthy in its pandering, especially from a man whose willingness to relentlessly kill Palestinian civilians as a vehicle to retain power and avoid pending corruption charges is the main obstacle to a ceasefire.

But Trump seems genuinely to want a Nobel peace prize. That won’t happen by underwriting the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, which Trump initially proposed and Netanyahu’s far-right ministers, who are capable of collapsing his governing coalition, are demanding. Nor will it come from sequestering Palestinians in a “concentration camp”, as former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert describes the proposal of the Israeli defense minister, Israel Katz, to confine Palestinians on the ruins of a corner of Gaza.

Trump would deserve accolades for truly ending the conflict and enabling the rebuilding of Gaza. But the conflict is unlikely to truly end, and the Gulf Arab states will be reluctant to pony up the billions needed for reconstruction, for a mere return to the apartheid that Israel has imposed on Palestinians in the occupied territory. A Nobel-worthy end to the conflict would be a Palestinian state living side-by-side with an Israeli one.

Netanyahu has devoted his career to avoiding that possibility. The massive settlement enterprise is designed to preclude it. But because none of the alternatives – mass expulsion, endless apartheid or equal rights in a single state – is morally or politically viable, a Palestinian state is the best option.

It is difficult to imagine Trump pushing for a Palestinian state. He has appointed an ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, whose vision for a state is to put it anywhere but in Palestine. But if Trump’s quest for accolades, his bid for the history books, takes priority in his mind, which is entirely possible, we should not discount this turn of events.

Trump turned on Putin last week when he proclaimed: “We get a lot of bullshit thrown at us by Putin, if you want to know the truth. He’s very nice all the time, but it turns out to be meaningless.” That describes Netanyahu to a T.

Why does Trump let Netanyahu keep playing him the way Putin did? How can Trump proclaim himself the Master Negotiator when he can’t manage to use his enormous leverage over Netanyahu to get him to stop bombing and starving Palestinian civilians? Is Trump not sophisticated enough to move from real-estate deals to international negotiations?

I’m sure that Trump would hate to be asked these questions. The sycophants around him won’t. Others can and should. Trump’s fragile ego, his insatiable need for praise, may be the Palestinians’ best chance of turning him in a constructive direction.

Why is it so difficult for some to accept that the Israeli government is committing genocide in Gaza? The case for genocide is compelling, but some governments and members of the public resist acknowledging it. The reason lies in not only Israel’s history as a haven for the Jewish victims of genocide but also an unduly narrow understanding of the meaning of the term, by both the public and the international court of justice (ICJ).

Israel benefits from a halo effect associated with the Holocaust. Because the state of Israel was founded in response to the Nazi genocide, it is harder to accept that the Israeli government in turn would commit genocide. One obviously does not preclude the other, but Israel benefits from the cognitive dissonance.

One would have hoped that a history of genocidal victimhood would yield an appreciation for human rights standards that prohibit oppression, but some leaders seem to have drawn the opposite lesson. They interpret the vow “never again” to mean that anything goes in the name of preventing renewed persecution, even the commission of mass atrocities. Indeed, they weaponize the genocidal past to suppress criticism of their current atrocities.

That was the experience in Rwanda. The genocidal slaughter of some 800,000 Tutsis in 1994 was stopped by the Tutsi-led Rwanda Patriotic Front, an exile rebel group based in neighboring Uganda. Under the military leadership of Paul Kagame, who went on to become Rwanda’s long-serving president, the RPF executed some 30,000 Rwandans during and immediately after the genocide.

Kagame’s government went on to repeatedly invade neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire), ostensibly to chase remnants of the genocidal forces that had fled there but, these days, mainly to capitalize on Congo’s mineral wealth. An estimated 6 million Congolese have died from the violence and resulting humanitarian crises. Meanwhile, the Rwandan government imprisons critics on the spurious grounds that they are promoting a vaguely defined “genocide ideology”.

The Israeli government has followed a similar logic, using increasingly brutal means to crush any perceived threat. Like Kagame, Benjamin Netanyahu and his predecessors have used ostensible self-defense as a pretext for a land grab. Israeli settlements have gradually cannibalized large portions of the occupied West Bank, and the prime minister is now threatening to forcibly deport 2 million Palestinians from Gaza. Meanwhile, the government and its partisans dismiss critics as “antisemitic”.

Israel also benefits from a public misconception of what genocide is. The Genocide Convention, which 153 states have embraced, prohibits various acts with the intent to destroy a specified group “in whole or in part” as such. The proscribed acts of greatest relevance to Gaza are “killing” or “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”.

Both the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide were examples of genocide targeting a group “in whole”. After a certain point, the Nazis in Germany and the Hutu extremists in Rwanda tried to kill as many Jews or Tutsis as they could get their hands on. Genocide was the primary purpose.

But what does it mean to target a group “in part”? That requirement might be met when the killing is not targeted at every member of a specified group but at enough to accomplish another goal. For example, in 2017 the Myanmar military executed some 10,000 Rohingya to send 730,000 Rohingya fleeing for their lives to Bangladesh. Genocide in that case was a means to the end of ethnic cleansing.

That is a better way to understand what the Israeli government today is doing in Gaza. Although the Netanyahu government has displayed a shocking indifference to Palestinian civilian life there, it has not tried to kill all Palestinians. Rather, it has killed enough of them, and imposed conditions of starvation and deprivation that are sufficiently severe, to force them to flee, if things go according to plan. The far-right Israeli ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir have openly articulated that goal, as has Netanyahu.

There is little doubt that Israel’s actions are sufficient to meet the requirements for genocidal conduct. More than 57,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since Hamas’s attack of 7 October 2023. A November 2024 study found that nearly 70% of those killed at the time had been women and children, and clearly many male victims were not combatants either. The number of civilians killed thus far exceeds the 8,000 killed by Bosnian Serb forces in Srebrenica in 1995, which an international tribunal found to constitute genocide.

Although many of the dead in Gaza were not deliberately killed, their deaths were the product of Israel’s disregard for Palestinian civilian life – for example, by devastating Palestinian neighborhoods with enormous 2,000-lb bombs, attacking military targets knowing that the civilian toll would be disproportionately high, or repeatedly killing starving Palestinians as they seek food.

Meanwhile, Israel has imposed a punishing siege on civilians in Gaza, blocking access to food and other necessities for lengthy periods. In addition, at least 70% of the buildings have been leveled. It confines surviving Gazans to primitive camps that it regularly moves or attacks. And it has destroyed the civilian institutions needed to sustain life in the territory, including hospitals, schools religious and cultural sites, and entire neighborhoods. These conditions are believed to have contributed to several times the official death toll in indirect deaths.

When the ICJ considers the merits of South Africa’s genocide case against Israel, the key contested issue is likely to be whether Israel has taken these steps with the requisite genocidal intent – does it seek to eradicate Palestinian civilians in whole or in part as such? Some genocidal statements by senior Israeli officials have become notorious. Isaac Herzog, the Israeli president, said about Hamas’s 7 October 2023, attack that “this rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved” is false because civilians “could have risen up” against Hamas (which is a brutal dictatorship). The former defense minister Yoav Gallant spoke of fighting “human animals” – not, as some claim, referring to only Hamas but in discussing the siege, which affects everyone in Gaza. Netanyahu himself invoked the biblical nation of Amalek, in which God is said to have demanded the killing of all “men and women, children and infants”.

Yet other Israeli officials in their public utterances hew more closely to legal requirements to spare civilians. So the ICJ will likely also examine whether genocidal intent can be inferred from Israel’s conduct in Gaza. That is where the court’s conservative jurisprudence introduces a complication.

In its 2015 decision in Croatia v Serbia, the court ruled that genocidal intent could be inferred from conduct if it “is the only inference that can reasonably be drawn from the acts in question”. Because the killing in that case was also committed with the aim of forced displacement, the court ruled it could not give rise to an inference of genocidal intent.

Ignoring the possibility of two parallel intents – one to commit genocide, another to advance ethnic cleansing – the court’s ruling suggests, anomalously, that the war crime of forced displacement could be a defense to a charge of genocide. That makes no sense. The issue should be whether a charge is conclusively proved, not whether it is the only criminal activity under way.

The ICJ will have a chance to correct its jurisprudence in the Gambia v Myanmar case about the Myanmar military’s attacks on the Rohingya, which should be decided before the Israel case. The court would be well advised to find that Myanmar committed genocide against the Rohingya for the purpose of ethnically cleansing them – that forced mass deportation was a motive, not a defense, for genocide. That would lay the groundwork for a similar ruling against Israel.

Why would the ICJ have adopted this rule in the first place? It never explained, so we can only speculate. But its rationale may have rested in part on the view that genocide should be about killing maximally – killing “in whole”, like the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide – rather than killing or creating deadly conditions “in part”, as a means to an end. But that’s not what the Genocide Convention says. And that is not how we should assess Israel’s conduct in Gaza. That there is an illicit purpose to Israel’s unspeakable cruelty should not be a defense to the charge of genocide.

Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch (1993-2022), is a visiting professor at Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs. His book, Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments, was published by Knopf and Allen Lane in February

Israel’s Defense Minister said on Monday that he has instructed the military to prepare plans to force all Palestinians in Gaza into a camp where they will be imprisoned by Israeli soldiers. Minister Israel Katz told reporters that the Israeli government was planning to establish a so-called “humanitarian city” in southern Gaza, on what used to be Rafah until Israel decimated the city. Israel would first force 600,000 Palestinians into the area, and eventually the entire population of over 2 million.

Israel would screen people for entry into the camp, Katz said. If the plans allowed, the camp would be established during a temporary, 60-day ceasefire currently being discussed by the U.S. and other officials. Haaretz reports that the perimeter of the camp would be guarded by the Israeli military, and that Katz says that he is “seeking international partners to manage the zone.”

It’s unclear whether this plan, announced by Katz amid a visit by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House, has support from other Israeli ministers. Netanyahu and the U.S. have been collaborating on a plan for the forced expulsion of all Palestinians from Gaza, but Haaretz reports that Israeli officials don’t believe that the plan will go forward, and that other countries have not agreed to receive expelled Palestinians.

According to Reuters, the U.S.-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) has prepared a plan to create “Humanitarian Transit Areas” that would effectively constitute large camps to concentrate Palestinians into, supposedly with the goal of “replacing Hamas’ control over the population in Gaza,” the proposal for the plan reads. The plan would be carried out with the goal of advancing U.S. President Donald Trump’s “vision for Gaza,” planning documents say, referring to Trump’s “riviera” plan for the ethnic cleansing of the Strip.

Rights groups and experts have likened GHF’s plan and Katz’s announcement to a “modern-day concentration camp.” “Between this sociopathic proposal and the daily massacres of Palestinians seeking aid, it is now beyond clear that the GHF is nothing more than a U.S.-backed arm of the Israeli government’s efforts to ethnically cleanse and kill as many Palestinians as possible,” said the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

Human rights experts have said Katz’s “humanitarian city” plan would be a blatant war crime. “[Katz] laid out an operational plan for a crime against humanity. It is nothing less than that,” Israeli human rights lawyer Michael Sfard told The Guardian. “It is all about population transfer to the southern tip of the Gaza Strip in preparation for deportation outside the Strip.”

“While the government still calls the deportation ‘voluntary,’ people in Gaza are under so many coercive measures that no departure from the strip can be seen in legal terms as consensual,” Sfard went on.

Palestinians have already been crammed into smaller and smaller areas of the Strip, with 85 percent of Gaza under evacuation orders or turned into a fully militarized zone by Israel, according to the UN. Overcrowding, starvation and a lack of water and other basic needs have made these areas effectively uninhabitable.

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor has said that Palestinians are squeezed into such a small area that there is less space per person in Palestine than is afforded to prisoners in Guantánamo Bay — a prison that is notorious for torture and abuses. “Confining the population between bombing, hunger, and disease on one hand, and preventing them from returning to or even remaining near their destroyed homes on the other, makes it clear that the measures imposed in the Gaza Strip are not a temporary emergency displacement, but part of a permanent and premeditated policy of forced displacement,” the human rights group wrote in a report on Tuesday.

“This policy aims to bring about a comprehensive demographic transformation in the enclave by depopulating it, placing it under full military control, and encircling it with an unprecedented blockade,” Euro-Med Monitor went on.

U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders sharply criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday as the fugitive from the International Criminal Court met with lawmakers ahead of a second White House meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump to advance plans for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the embattled Gaza Strip. “As President Trump and members of Congress roll out the red carpet for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, let’s remember that Netanyahu has been indicted as a war criminal by the International Criminal Court for overseeing the systematic killing and starvation of civilians in Gaza,” Sanders (I-Vt.) said in a statement.

“This is the man Trump and Congress are welcoming this week: a war criminal who will be remembered as one of modern history’s monsters,” the senator continued. “His extremist government has killed more than 57,000 Palestinians and wounded almost 135,000, 60% of whom are women, children, or elderly people. The United Nations reports that at least 17,000 children have been killed and more than 25,000 wounded. More than 3,000 children in Gaza have had one or more limbs amputated.”

“At this moment, hundreds of thousands of people are starving after Israel prevented any aid from entering Gaza for nearly three months,” Sanders noted. “In the last six weeks, Israel has allowed a trickle of aid to get in, but has tried to replace the established United Nations distribution system with a private foundation backed by security contractors. This has been a catastrophe, with near-daily massacres at the new aid distribution sites. In its first five weeks in operation, 640 people have been killed and at least 4,488 injured while trying to access food through this mechanism.”

Trump and Netanyahu—who said Monday that he nominated the U.S. president for the Nobel Peace Prize—are expected to discuss ongoing efforts to reach a new deal to secure the release of the 22 remaining Israeli and other hostages held by Hamas since the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, as well as plans for giving Gazans what the prime minister described as a “better future” by finding third countries willing to accept forcibly displaced Palestinians.

Critics said such euphemistic language is an attempt to give cover to Israel’s plan to ethnically cleanse and indefinitely occupy Gaza. Observers expressed alarm over Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz’s Tuesday affirmation of a plan to force all Palestinians in Gaza into a camp at the southern tip of the strip.

“There is no such thing as voluntary displacement amongst a population that has been under constant bombardment for nearly two years and has been cut off from essential aid,” Jeremy Konyndyk, president of the advocacy group Refugees International and a former senior official at the U.S. Agency for International Development, told Reuters.

Most Palestinians are vehemently opposed to what they say would amount to a second Nakba, the forced displacement of more than 750,000 people from Palestine during and after the 1948 establishment of the modern state of Israel. “This is our land,” one Palestinian man, Mansour Abu Al-Khaier, told The Times of Israel on Tuesday. “Who would we leave it to, where would we go?”

Another Gazan, Abu Samir el-Fakaawi, told the newspaper: “I will not leave Gaza. This is my country. Our children who were martyred in the war are buried here. Our families. Our friends. Our cousins. We are all buried here. Whether Trump or Netanyahu or anyone else likes it or not, we are staying on this land.”

Officials at the United Nations—whose judicial body, the International Court of Justice, is weighing a genocide case against Israel brought by South Africa and supported by around two dozen countries—condemned any forced displacement of Palestinians from Gaza. “This raises concerns with regards to forcible transfer—the concept of voluntary transfers in the context that we are seeing in Gaza right now [is] very questionable,” Ravina Shamdasani, a spokesperson for the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, said Tuesday.

Donald Trump’s obsession with winning a Nobel Peace Prize — and his recent nominations from Israel and Pakistan — is, in Kenneth Roth’s estimation, “laughable.”

Yet it’s also not entirely out of reach. The former executive director of Human Rights Watch tells Analyst News that if Trump made a seismic move — force Israel to end its genocidal assault on Gaza and help create a Palestinian state — he could, in theory, earn the world’s most prestigious peace honor.

Having served as Human Rights Watch’s chief for almost three decades, Roth has seen the best and worst of humanity. Under his leadership, the leading human rights non-governmental organization shared the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize as a founding member of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines.

Given Trump’s record of backing Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, Roth argues that reshaping his legacy to be seen as a legitimate peacemaker on the global stage would require radical action. Cutting off U.S. military aid to Israel and forcing an end to the genocide wouldn’t be enough — but leading the creation of a Palestinian state would do the trick.

“You don’t get a Nobel Peace Prize for aiding and abetting genocide and finally getting it to stop,” says Roth, who left HRW in 2022 and is now a visiting professor at Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs and author of Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments. “Will his personal ambition [and] fragile ego push him to do something that no other president has done?”

It may seem an unlikely path forward for a government that’s put Israeli interests above its own citizens’ for decades — and has, since October 2023, sponsored and defended the killing of some 200,000 Palestinians, including more than 20,000 Palestinian children. But Roth suggests that no other world leader has ever been better positioned to stand up to Israel and create a Palestinian state.

Analyst News spoke to Roth about the souring relationship between Trump and Netanyahu, the role of international law in addressing the devastation in Gaza and the misuse of antisemitism to silence criticism of Israel.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Watch the full interview on YouTube.

You served as the executive director of Human Rights Watch for 30 years. How does the humanitarian situation in Gaza compare to what you’ve seen over the years?

What is happening in Gaza today is absolutely horrible. You have a completely modern military supplied largely by the United States. And it’s using this complete superiority to pummel Palestinian civilians of Gaza — ostensibly to fight Hamas, but doing it in a way where the civilian population is a completely predictable victim of all of this.

And indeed, the Israeli government seems to be virtually indifferent to civilian suffering, and often that’s the point of its action. When it is imposing starvation for weeks or months at a time, that’s not aimed at Hamas, that’s aimed at ordinary civilians. When it bombs even a military target, it accepts that there are civilian casualties. They say they are going after some low-level Hamas fighter, that 20 civilians can be killed, and that is deemed acceptable, somehow proportionate. This shows an utter disregard for civilian life.

That’s what is so disturbing about this: that you have nothing like a fair contest. It’s almost unfair to call it a war. Hamas is there in some residual form fighting back, but mostly this is just Israel pummeling Gaza — and doing it in large part knowing, and sometimes intending, for civilians to be the target.

So you believe that Israel is deliberately targeting civilians?

Certainly with starvation, yes — that’s the whole point of it.

When Israel drops these huge 2,000-pound bombs on Palestinian neighborhoods, it knows Palestinian civilians will be killed. When it fires even on military targets, accepting a hugely disproportionate civilian toll, it is accepting this civilian death rate.

So the line between intending versus utter indifference, it’s often hard to draw — but in some ways it doesn’t matter. What Israel is doing is clearly systematic war crimes and quite fairly characterized as genocide.

Let’s take the beach cafe that was recently hit with a 500-pound bomb. I don’t know what Israel was targeting there; presumably some Hamas fighter — we never really know. But to choose such a large bomb in a cafe that was known to be filled with civilians — it’s almost impossible to imagine why that was deemed to be a proportionate civilian toll.

You can say the same thing about targeting the hospitals, where Israel always says, “Oh, there was a Hamas command center there.” They never prove this. When there is some examination of what’s there, it’s a single tunnel with a handful of rifles. Nothing that would justify depriving Palestinian civilians of urgently needed medical care in the middle of a war.

So we have to stop pretending that this is a mistake. This is clearly a very deliberate policy.

Despite the existence of international humanitarian law and institutions like the United Nations and the International Criminal Court, Israel is still getting away with it. How is this still happening?

I think there’s good reason here to think that we’re dealing with a blatant violation, but not a problem of law.

If you look at international institutions, they are all responding quite vigorously. The U.N. General Assembly has repeatedly denounced what Israel is doing. The U.N. Human Rights Council has done the same thing and is issuing numerous reports and conducting investigations. The International Court of Justice is hearing South Africa’s genocide case. The International Criminal Court has charged Prime Minister Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Gallant with war crimes of starvation and the deprivation of the civilian population.

Is there more that could be done? Yes, I’d like to see the International Criminal Court charging senior [Israeli] officials for the bombings. That hasn’t happened yet.

The Netanyahu government is able to just ignore all of this because it has a critical constituency of one, which is the U.S. president. Even Biden would periodically say, “Oh, please stop starving civilians. Please stop bombing civilians.” But he would continue to deliver U.S. military aid, with the exception of his suspension of those awful 2,000-pound bombs that were devastating neighborhoods.

Trump comes into office and renews the delivery of the 2,000-pound bombs and basically gives Netanyahu the green light. Now, in those circumstances, the Israeli government figures, we’re just going to keep plugging ahead.

We have a Trump problem. We have a U.S. president problem. Given the power of the U.S., given Israel’s extraordinary dependence on the United States, Israel is able to thumb its nose at international law and international institutions.

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There is some reason to think that even Trump is souring on this. We see him differing with Netanyahu on a variety of things, whether it’s lifting the sanctions on the new Syrian authorities; cutting a deal with the Houthis that doesn’t involve any promise on their part to stop attacking Israel; negotiating with Hamas; negotiating for a while with Iran; pressing Netanyahu a couple of times for ceasefires and trying to push through a ceasefire.

So there is some tension there between Trump and Netanyahu. But Trump hasn’t really used the leverage that he has in those circumstances. That’s the problem.

The international institutions are doing what they can. But there is no international police force. There’s no international military. International law is dependent on nation-states to enforce it. And here, the state with the greatest ability to influence Israeli conduct, the U.S. government, is still giving Netanyahu a green light. So that’s the problem.

We have a Trump problem. We have a U.S. president problem. Given the power of the U.S., given Israel’s extraordinary dependence on the United States, Israel is able to thumb its nose at international law and international institutions. But we shouldn’t say this is the demise of international law. This is the utter amorality of the Trump administration, which I hope changes, but for the time being hasn’t.

Kenneth Roth speaks during a interview with Reuters in Geneva, Switzerland in 2018. REUTERS/Pierre Albouy

What is the point of international law, then, if there’s no enforcement of it and powerful states can simply defy it?

The ability to spotlight the discrepancy between a government’s claim to respect human rights law and the often ugly reality is embarrassing. It’s shameful, it’s delegitimizing, and governments go to great lengths to avoid having that discrepancy spotlighted. It is a significant source of pressure.

In the case of Israel, we’re finding that the stigmatization of the Israeli government because of its genocide in Gaza has become extreme. We’re seeing even within the United States. Already, I think, a majority of Democratic voters are opposed to what Israel is doing and growing numbers of Republicans, too.

Israel has a real long-term problem in the United States. The fact that we can’t shut off the genocide today doesn’t mean that nothing is happening.

There is a huge loss of Israel’s esteem around the world, and most significantly, in the United States. I think we have to look at this as a work in progress — a work that is even affecting Trump. He can’t afford to be utterly indifferent to public opinion, and as public opinion says, “Why is the American government aiding and abetting genocide?” That’s a tough question to answer when you’re Trump. So I do think that Israel is in trouble.

And even Trump, who for the moment is backing Israel, is not a guy who has a long-term commitment to anything other than himself. And if he feels that his personal critical interests are not advanced by his continued support for Israel’s genocidal conduct in Gaza, he could turn on a dime, and things could be very different tomorrow. I do think the pressure is growing on Netanyahu and Trump to begin doing something differently.

How do you think this genocide will end?

Will there be a lasting ceasefire right now? That’s the first question. The long-term question is: Will there be a Palestinian state?

Trump does seem to be pushing for a ceasefire. The far-right Israeli government’s position is that we’ll stop and we’re going to push everybody into some tiny little concentration camp in some utterly ruined section of Gaza, and hold them there in decrepit conditions, hopefully until they realize that there’s no life for them in Gaza and they flee.

What the far right wants in Israel is another Nakba, another massive ethnic cleansing — so it doesn’t have to worry about Hamas because there won’t be anybody left in Gaza. That’s their dream.

Trump articulated that when he came into office. That was his idea of a Gaza Riviera: a massive war crime, a crime against humanity. Fortunately, the Egyptian and the Jordanian governments, the potential would-be recipients of these forced refugees, have said no. They want nothing to do with it. Despite their dependence on U.S. military aid, they’ve said a flat no. So Trump is not pushing this anymore. But is he going to stand up to the far right and prevent it? Unclear.

What I hope happens is that the fighting stops and people in Gaza begin to be able to rebuild their lives. That’s not going to happen without very significant financial assistance, probably from the Arab Gulf states. And are they going to plough massive money into Gaza if it’s just going to be destroyed again in another five years? Probably not.

You hear even the Saudi crown prince saying, “Look, I’d like to normalize relations with Israel. I’d like to help out here, but I need to see concrete steps for a Palestinian state.” Now, Netanyahu’s view has forever been “over my dead body.” He’s devoted his political career to avoiding that.

Again, the wild card in this is Trump. It’s almost laughable that he wants a Nobel Peace Prize. Netanyahu, who’s no dummy, goes to the White House and says, “I nominated you for a Nobel Peace Prize,” even though Netanyahu himself is the biggest obstacle to Trump getting that — because you don’t get a Nobel Peace Prize for aiding and abetting genocide and finally getting it to stop.

This is not a guy who has any love lost for the Palestinians. But he loves himself, and would that self-regard lead him to do the right thing for the wrong reason? Maybe. I think that, sadly, is our best hope at this stage.

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If he wants a Nobel Peace Prize, he’s got to create a Palestinian state. And Trump knows that. Will his personal ambition and fragile ego push him to do something that no other president has done?

The reason that’s not unthinkable is that other presidents have always had to worry about being attacked from the right — particularly the Christian evangelicals, who in the United States are the biggest supporters of Israel. Trump doesn’t have to worry about attacks from the right. He owns the right. So he actually has more political leeway.

This is not a guy who has any love lost for the Palestinians. But he loves himself, and would that self-regard lead him to do the right thing for the wrong reason? Maybe. I think that, sadly, is our best hope at this stage.

The Israeli narrative is often that we’re doing this for the defense of the Jewish people, the Jewish home. As the son of a Jewish refugee who fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s, how do you feel that today Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians in the name of the Jewish people?

My father fled Nazi Germany as a 12-year-old boy in July 1938 for New York. So I grew up with stories about what it was like to be a young Jewish boy living under the Nazis. I was very aware of the evil that they did. It’s part of what pushed me to devote my career to defending human rights.

I do think there are a number of super problematic aspects here. The fact that Israel was created as a haven for the Jews after the Holocaust, after one genocide, clearly in no way justifies the second genocide. That is an utterly outrageous use of history.

Israel still hides behind this halo of: “How can we do any wrong? We are here as a refuge from the Holocaust.” But in fact, they’re doing horrible things wrong. We can no longer allow what happened to the Jews in the late ’30s and early ’40s to justify today’s awful atrocities against Palestinians.

Ironically, what many supporters of the Israeli government and the government itself do is that they charge people who criticize the Israeli government with being antisemitic. And this is such a blatant misuse of the concept.

I think we have to recognize that, today, Jews around the world are threatened by antisemitism. But when the Israeli government starts using charges of antisemitism just to defend its own atrocities in Gaza, that cheapens the concept of antisemitism at a point where it’s really needed. It basically says that defending us, the Israeli government, is more important than defending you Jews around the world.

It throws Jews around the world under the bus in the name of protecting Netanyahu.

So we have to look at the cynicism here. This is not representing the Jewish people. This is harming the Jewish people in the name of keeping Netanyahu in power and letting him avoid the corruption charges that are pending against him. It is so awfully cynical.

And the fact that he is willing to sacrifice not only tens of thousands of Palestinian lives in pursuit of his own very narrow self-interest is actually jeopardizing Jews around the world by this misuse of charges of antisemitism — this shows just the utter sick cynicism of the man Netanyahu.

We must persuade Trump to do the right thing – securing peace in the Middle East – for the wrong reason

March 26, 2025

‘Israel’s aim may be to advance the project of expelling Palestinian civilians from Gaza, the longtime dream of the Israeli far right.’ Photograph: Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters

Donald Trump ’s instinctive deference to the Israeli government is at odds with his self-image as an expert dealmaker . Much as it may seem laughable that the president wants the Nobel peace prize, his quest may be the best chance we have for securing any US government regard for the rights and lives of Palestinians in Gaza .

Trump currently seems to endorse the strategy of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu , of trying to pummel Hamas into accepting defeat. To force Hamas to release its remaining hostages and to disband its diminished military force, Netanyahu has resumed Israel’s strategy of starving and bombing Palestinian civilians. In less than a week, about 600 Palestinians have already been killed.

The second phase of the ceasefire was supposed to have led to the release of Hamas’s last hostages in return for the freeing of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel, the complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza, and a permanent end to the fighting. Instead, the Israeli government has unilaterally changed the terms. It wants the hostages released and Hamas dismantled without committing to end the war. Hamas has rejected that one-sided ultimatum, evidently worried that Netanyahu would then resume attacking Palestinian civilians unimpeded.

This is not an idle fear. The point of the renewed attacks may not be simply to wrest concessions from Hamas.

The vast majority of the hostages freed so far have been released after negotiations rather than by military action, and most families of the hostages, prioritizing survival of their loved ones, want a negotiated solution.

Rather, Israel’s aim may be to advance the project of expelling Palestinian civilians from Gaza, the longtime dream of the Israeli far right. Already the defense minister, Israel Katz, is threatening to seize and annex parts of Gaza, and Netanyahu is reportedly planning a new and larger ground invasion. Now that Trump has endorsed the forced permanent deportation of 2 million Palestinians from Gaza – a massive war crime and crime against humanity – Netanyahu may feel he has a green light to pursue that callous strategy.

Tellingly, the far-right Israeli politician Itamar Ben-Gvir has rejoined Netanyahu’s governing coalition as police minister now that the temporary ceasefire, which he opposed, has ended. Head of the pro-settler, nationalist-religious Jewish Power party, Ben-Gvir has long been unabashed about his desire to “solve” the conflict in Gaza by getting rid of the Palestinians. And we should recognize that Gaza would most likely be just a prelude to the occupied West Bank.

In these circumstances, a deal with Hamas seems unlikely. Why would Hamas capitulate if that would permanently separate the Palestinian people from their homeland?

Netanyahu and Trump may calculate that overwhelming military force, if applied with sufficient brutality, would force Hamas’s hand. That has long been the Israeli strategy. Trump has even resumed delivery of the enormous 2,000lb bombs that Joe Biden had suspended because Israel was using them to indiscriminately decimate entire Palestinian neighborhoods.

The international criminal court prosecutor has already hinted that this indiscriminate bombardment may be the next focus of his war-crime charges. Trump himself would be at risk of being charged for aiding and abetting these atrocities – an eventuality that would not lead to his immediate jailing but would severely limit his ability to travel to the 125 governments that as members of the ICC would have an obligation to arrest him.

(Trump might ask Vladimir Putin about how it felt not to be able to attend the August 2023 Brics summit in South Africa for fear of arrest.)

Hamas has so far shown no inclination to succumb to this war-crime strategy, and the surrounding Arab states have rejected becoming a party to another Nakba, the catastrophic forced displacement of Palestinians in 1948. The big question is whether Trump comes to recognize that a deal, not forced surrender, is the most likely way out of the current horrors in Gaza that he had vowed to end.

For now, Trump’s deference to Israel seems firm, but one should never take anything for granted with Trump.

If there is any constant to his rule, it is that his self-interest overcomes concern for others.

That’s where the Nobel prize comes in. If Trump wants to be known as the master of the deal, it won’t be by underwriting more Israeli war crimes.

Trump alone has the capacity to force Netanyahu to adopt a different approach. Despite Israel’s dependence on US military assistance, Netanyahu got away with ignoring Biden’s entreaties to curb the starvation and slaughter of Palestinian civilians because the Israeli leader knew that the Republican party had his back. But Trump has become the Republican party. If he pressures Israel, Netanyahu has nowhere to the right to turn.

That is how Trump played a decisive role in securing the temporary ceasefire that began shortly before his 20 January inauguration. He could do the same thing now to force Netanyahu toward a more productive, less inhumane path.

What might that look like? The best option remains a two-state solution – an Israeli and Palestinian state living in peace side-by-side. The main alternatives would be rejected by Israel (recognition of the “ one-state reality ” with equal rights for all) or most everyone else (the apartheid of endless occupation).

The Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, has said that he will not normalize relations with Israel, which Trump craves, without a Palestinian state. Both the Saudis and the Emiratis have also insisted on a state as a condition for financing the rebuilding of Gaza.

But wouldn’t a Nobel peace prize for Trump be preposterous? No more so than the one granted, however controversially, to Henry Kissinger. He had directed or approved war crimes or mass atrocities in Vietnam, Cambodia, East Timor, Bangladesh and Chile, but the Nobel committee honored him nonetheless for concluding a peace deal with Vietnam and withdrawing US forces. A Trump pivot away from Netanyahu’s endless war would be no more surprising than Kissinger’s about-face.

Admittedly, it would be foolhardy to bet on Trump becoming an advocate for a Palestinian state, but it is worth recognizing that his personal ambitions could lead him in that direction. It speaks to the topsy-turvy world of Trump that the Palestinians’ best hope in the face of an Israeli government that respects no legal bounds is to play up what it would take for Trump to secure his coveted Nobel. We must persuade Trump to do the right thing for the wrong reason.