In his speech to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday night, Donald Trump barely mentioned Gaza or the wider Middle East, making only a passing reference to bringing back US hostages held by Hamas militants in Gaza. He didn’t even expound on his plan for the US to take over the devastated territory and turn it into a “Riviera of the Middle East”, while expelling 2 million Palestinians to neighboring Arab countries.

But Trump is already going down the same failed path as his predecessor, Joe Biden, who sent Israel a virtually unlimited supply of weapons – and failed to use US political cover at the United Nations and billions of dollars in arms as leverage to stop Israel’s war on Gaza. On 1 March, the Trump administration announced it had approved $4bn in new weapons to Israel under emergency authorities, meaning the deal would bypass even a perfunctory review in Congress. A day later, Benjamin Netanyahu banned all food and other aid deliveries to Gaza, imposing a new siege that threatens to collapse a fragile ceasefire reached in January.

While he goes easy on the Israeli prime minister, Trump this week suspended all US military aid to Ukraine, days after Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy had a dramatic on-camera confrontation in the White House. Trump and his aides say they are using the suspension of billions of dollars in military support, along with a pause in intelligence sharing, as leverage to persuade the Ukrainian leader to cooperate with US efforts to end the Russia-Ukraine war.

Trump’s sudden cutoff of weapons to Ukraine proves that the US president is capable of swiftly ending arms shipments to any American ally. But Trump, like Biden before him, refuses to use that same kind of leverage to force Netanyahu to change his policies toward Gaza. Both Trump and Biden simply decided they don’t want to stop sending billions of dollars in weapons to Israel, depriving themselves of the most powerful influence they have over Netanyahu and his extremist government.

For a businessman who prides himself on his ability to negotiate tough deals with hardball tactics, Trump is being a weak negotiator. He is refusing to play his strongest cards with the Israeli........

© The Guardian