The first Trump administration reversed decades of US policies regarding Palestinians. The new one shuns genocidal atrocities. It prefers cultural genocide.

In my new book, The Fall of Israel (2025), I examine the activities of all US postwar administrations regarding the Israelis and Palestinians. The first Trump administration did not just differ from its precursors. It turned upside down five decades of US policies regarding Palestinians. In the next four years, The Trump White House will build on this reversal. 

When the new administration arrived in the White House in early 2017, Trump made David M. Friedman US ambassador to Israel. Friedman advised and represented Trump and his organization in bankruptcies involving the tycoon’s Atlantic City casinos. As a revisionist Zionist donor, he had pumped millions of dollars into illegal, extremist West Bank settlements. 

When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced Israel would lift all restrictions on settlement construction in the West Bank, Trump looked the other way. In 2016, the number of Jewish settlers in the occupied territories of the West Bank exceeded 400,000. Under Trump’s “peace to prosperity plan,” all settlements would remain under Israeli sovereignty and not a single settlement would be removed. Today, thanks to Trump and Biden administrations, the number of those settlers exceeds 750,000.

Subsequently, the US recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, moving its embassy from Tel Aviv to the Holy City. In 2018, Trump ordered the closure of the PLO office in Washington, D.C. and canceled nearly all US aid to the West Bank and Gaza, plus $360 million in annual aid previously given to the UNRWA. 

In 2020-21, the US, Israel and the United Arab Emirates formalized Israel-UAE relations in a set of bilateral deals, followed by agreements with Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco. It was the US military and intelligence ties that united the signatories of the “Abraham Accords.” For decades, Palestine had been a second thought in US policy. Now it was fading away from the map.  

Trump’s regional aspirations undermine the Palestinian state, which the UN has recognized and which has........

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