Commentary
Pax Trumpiana didn’t disarm the fundamentalists
The siege has not been lifted. And there is certainly no shortage of pretexts for restarting hostilities.
In the aftermath of this “historic day” and the flood of rhetorical feel-good tripe that came with it, what happened was a return to the days of ordinary violence, in which the ceasefire is looking less like a cessation of hostilities and more like a “reduce fire” order in a precarious fully-armed truce, full of traps and loopholes. Not even the flow of humanitarian aid to the exhausted population of Gaza seems guaranteed.
Israel reserves the power to open, close or restrict the crossings, particularly Rafah, as a tool for blackmail or reprisal against the Palestinian side. So it will be the civilians who will continue to pay with hunger and further hardship for any pauses, impasses or second thoughts in the negotiations.
The siege has not been lifted. And there is certainly no shortage of pretexts for restarting hostilities. The first concerns the macabre issue of the remains of hostages who died in captivity. Israel wants all of them returned immediately, knowing full well – as the Red Cross has also confirmed – that this is a virtually impossible task. Under the enormous piles of rubble in Gaza, created by two years of IDF bombings, thousands of Palestinian bodies could lie, many of them likely unrecognizable and, in any case, not deemed worthy of any mention.
It should come as no surprise, then, that Hamas is struggling to quickly locate all the bodies of the deceased hostages in this devastated landscape. And besides, what interest would the Palestinian militia have in slow-walking the return of the remains, thereby handing Israel a pretext to sabotage the negotiations? For now, what is certain is that there has been a prisoner exchange, which is a good thing (as also happened between Russia and Ukraine), and a substantial suspension of fighting, which is another good thing (unfortunately this has not happened between Russia and Ukraine). And then there are the finer points of the plan imposed by Trump after Netanyahu dared to bomb Qatar, a global safe haven – points that are still to be fleshed out.
In the West Bank, however, military operations, raids, and widespread violence against the Palestinian population – particularly against the families of the released prisoners – have not slowed at all. On the contrary, they have intensified. In this Wild West, where arbitrary power and abuse are the daily norm, we see the truth of the pax Trumpiana, shed of its supposedly “historic” significance. The White House has made no comment on the dirty war being waged by IDF-backed settlers against the inhabitants of the West Bank, and it is not unlikely that this pointed silence was one of the concessions offered to Israel in exchange for forgoing the direct and immediate annexation of the Gaza Strip and the deportation strategies that would have come with it. In any event, nothing suggests the Israeli government is willing to abandon its expansionist ambitions or the aggressive ideology that underpins them.
The powder keg is far from defused. For decades, the greatest obstacle to stable peace in the Middle East has been a factor more insidious and deadly than biological warfare: the spread of religious fanaticism. Instrumentalized near the end of the Cold War to dismantle the opposing bloc, it ended up unravelling what little remained of secular rationality – on both the Palestinian and Israeli sides – that was capable of forging agreements and making progress, however haltingly, towards peaceful coexistence. Thanks in part to the unpopularity of the region’s secular, socialist or pro-Western dictatorships, fundamentalism became the dominant feature of Middle Eastern politics, with the full complicity of the Israeli right wing, which was itself increasingly driven by pro-war ideological elements.
Far from being the “opium of the people,” fundamentalism on both sides has been the amphetamine that has grotesquely magnified mutual hostility and the ruthless forms of conflict that have devastated the region. This surely comes as no surprise to someone like Donald Trump, who at home makes extensive and pragmatic use of religious fanaticism, from evangelical sects to the reactionary doctrines of Charlie Kirk, to wage war on his opponents.
In reality, the United States has always had the power to stop Israel, moderate its ambitions and correct its behavior. While it is true that there are mutual layers of dependency, the crucial point is that the purse strings and the arsenal are in Washington’s hands. The U.S. did not exercise this power as long as Tel Aviv acted in favor of its geopolitical interests without compromising America’s relations with Arab capital. Trump didn’t make any miracles: he simply indulged the muscular approach of his Israeli ally only until its isolation began to harm him. Then he put on the brakes, in a way that would have the outward trappings of a peace plan. That is what this “historic” event amounts to.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/la-pax-trumpiana-non-disarma-i-fondamentalismi on 2025-10-16