Rami Khouri: U.S. Voters Are Sick of Foreign Wars. Can Trump Strike a Grand Bargain in Middle East?

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, “War, Peace and the Presidency.” I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

One of the first world leaders to congratulate Donald Trump on his presidential victory was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He wrote a message online that read, quote, “Dear Donald and Melania Trump, Congratulations on history’s greatest comeback! Your historic return to the White House offers a new beginning for America and a powerful recommitment to the great alliance between Israel and America. This is a huge victory! In true friendship, yours, Benjamin and Sara Netanyahu.”

We’re joined right now by Rami Khouri, Palestinian American journalist, senior public policy fellow at the American University of Beirut, also a nonresident senior fellow at the Arab Center Washington DC.

Rami Khouri, welcome back to Democracy Now! Your response to the Trump victory and what this means for Israel-Palestine and for Lebanon and beyond?

RAMI KHOURI: I’m not surprised by the victory. We knew it was going to be very close, and we knew that a lot of voters were not precisely telegraphing what they were going to do. The nature of the whole electorate has changed. It keeps changing every four years, due to many reasons. And the main reason I think that Trump won is that he ran a campaign — much as people don’t like him, for valid reasons usually, he did run a campaign that emotionally connected with not only his supporters, but a lot of other Americans. And Kamala Harris was a rank amateur. She had no idea what she was doing at that level of politics, which she showed four years ago when she ran in the primaries for the Democratic presidency candidate and got nowhere. And she just — she didn’t really touch on the issues that matter, other than abortion and maybe immigration a little bit. But even there, she was just following Trump’s lead.

So it’s no surprise. Many people are shocked. The trouble with Trump is that he’s so unpredictable in many areas. But the difference between now and four years ago is that we’ve had four years of his presidency and we’ve had four years of his being outside the presidency talking about issues. So he’s not an unknown quantity like he was eight years ago. And many of the things that he is going to do, internally and internationally, are predictable, I think. So, I would just hold my horses and wait and see what happens.

The last point I’d make is that the role of the Gaza Israeli plausible genocide, as the International Court of Justice calls it, the role of that plausible genocide by Israel, which was heavily, heavily, enthusiastically, consistently and clearly supported by the United States clearly had an impact. American people have shown now, as they did when I was in college in the late ’60s, that they don’t want their country being involved in a great war overseas that kills thousands and thousands of people that doesn’t really relate to them. And this is a really powerful lesson. We can’t draw the conclusions yet of exactly what the Gaza war did, but it clearly has mobilized a constituency that goes way beyond Arab and Muslim Americans. And I was in Dearborn, Michigan, last weekend for three days at a convention of Arab Americans, and what I saw was really, really, very, very powerful.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: But, Rami, how do you see the Trump administration changing policy in the Middle East versus what Biden has done, once he gets into office?

RAMI KHOURI: You know, one of the fascinating things about watching this stuff go on for half a century now, as I have, is there are little changes here and there. So, last time Trump was in, he recognized Israel’s sovereignty over Jerusalem, the annexation of the Golan Heights. He closed the PLO offices. He stopped funding UNRWA. He did all kinds of things that Palestinians don’t like and justice supporters don’t like, and that Israelis like and the evangelical right-wing American Christian fanatic supporters of Israel like. He did a lot of these things, and then Biden kept most of them. He didn’t really change really any of them significantly. And then Biden got involved in this incredible plausible genocide, and Harris followed him completely. So, I don’t think there’s really much change. Looking back and empirically speaking, looking back over the last 40, 50 years, there are only minor cosmetic changes between Republican and Democratic administrations. The bottom line that all of them accept, with only the occasional minor adjustment, is that they will do almost anything that Israel wants, for many reasons, which we don’t have time to get into here. But the American political establishment is fully and enthusiastically supporting Israel, even in its plausible genocide.

The American public is not. So, there’s a moral issue that came out of the American people over the last year and a half. And it was not just Arab Americans and Muslim Americans in Dearborn, Michigan. It was people all over the country, progressive Jews, labor unions, students, the student movement. So, this is a movement that is still young. This is like Vietnam antiwar protests in 1965. It took a long time, another seven, eight years, to get the Vietnam War ended. And this is a similar situation.

How it impacts Trump is not clear. And this is where we have to really wait, because it’s very hard to predict what Trump is going to do. He cares about two things. He cares about drama, entertainment, and he cares about making deals. And the deals may be political deals, and they’re also commercial deals, for him and his family and his cronies and his friends and his supporters. And that’s what politicians do all over the world. There’s nothing illegal about that. It’s just how politics works in superficially democratic societies. But they are democratic, and the vote counts, and new people come to power, and they make deals, and they do dramatic things. Trump outdramatized Harris, and that’s why he won. He appealed to people’s emotions, and that’s how people vote. They don’t vote on, you know, is our democracy threatened. That was a very important line from Harris and all her millions of supporters on the American mainstream television, who look like idiots now, because they were — not because the message is bad, because the message doesn’t resonate with ordinary people all over the country, which is what we saw. So, we’ll just have to wait and see what happens.

I think the greatest arena that we should look at is that combination, which Trump sort of looked at a little bit, you know, when he was president — Iran, Israel, Palestine, Saudi Arabia and the United States — that ring of powers that have — or, they’re not all powers — that ring of actors who all have important interests at play. He pulled out of the Iran agreement, the nuclear and sanctions removal agreement with Iran. And this is one of the triggers that brought this situation of war in the region about. And he also did the Abrahamic Accords with his son-in-law Jared Kushner, who knows about the Middle East as much as I know about underwater fishing in China, which is nothing. But the Abraham Accords are one of the things that set the stage for the continued conflict and the marginalization of Palestine, which set the stage for the October 7 attacks. So, if they don’t understand the connection among all of these issues and the growth of resistance movements in Yemen and Iraq and Lebanon and Palestine, if people don’t understand that, they’ll just come down to perpetual conflict.

I think if somebody can explain to Trump that he can be a great hero by making — a great hero to everybody by making a grand bargain that gives the Iranians, the Israelis, the Palestinians, the Saudis, everybody, what they really want, which is to live in peace and a normal life. And I think it’s attainable. I think it’s possible. But you’ve got to have the level of smart, sensitive and daring statesmanship, which we have not seen from Trump in a significant way. We’ve seen it very superficially, where it helps either his political constituents or helps Jared Kushner’s bank account in terms of deals, which he of course did with the Saudis. So, this is the position we’re in. We have to really wait and see. Is a second Trump presidency going to be more sophisticated and more meaningful than his first one? He is more experienced. And we’ll just have to wait and see.

AMY GOODMAN: On Saturday, Rami Khouri, the Palestinian youth movement organized a No Votes for Genocide protest. This is Sophie, a student here in New York City.

SOPHIE: I’m not voting for the capitalist ruling class, so I’m not voting for either Kamala or Trump. I don’t think they do anything for my people. Half of — I’m half-Bengali. Half of my family are Muslim Bengali immigrants. And they actually experienced their own genocide that was funded by the U.S. And I’ve never seen any of U.S. presidents do anything for the Global South, including Bangladesh, Pakistan or any of the Middle East. The argument that a vote for Jill Stein or Claudia and Karina or third party is a vote for Trump is really frustrating. I think it’s also — it’s not a vote for Trump or Kamala. It’s a vote for neither of them. And if Kamala loses, it’s her own damn fault. You know, like, this is the one thing that’s important to me. If she were to do anything for Palestine, I would consider voting for her.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that was a protest that happened just on Saturday. And I wanted to end, Rami Khouri, by asking you about what happened after President Trump won and he got his congratulations from Benjamin Netanyahu. Just before that, he fired the Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and he installed Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz, who proposed creating an artificial island off Gaza’s coast where Palestinians could be forcibly relocated. Katz also called for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, saying, “This is a war on all fronts, and we must win it.” Are you concerned, under Trump, that Netanyahu will follow through with annexing, for example, the West Bank?

RAMI KHOURI: Yes. I mean, we have to be concerned about Trump and Netanyahu and others doing really outrageous things. They’ve done them in the past, and they’ll do them again, unless somebody checks them. And this is the missing element in this situation in Palestine and in U.S.-Israel, U.S.-Middle East relations. The Israelis — Netanyahu is quite desperate right now, so he’s doing desperate things like this, only appealing to his right-wing fascist extremists in government and to their supporters overseas, who actually don’t know much about the details of the situation, but emotionally respond to this kind of process, where Israel is strong and protects itself and defends itself. So, yes, we have to be careful about what might happen. The response to the excesses of the Israeli—

AMY GOODMAN: We just have 30 seconds.

RAMI KHOURI: Yeah, the response has to be continued mobilization, protest, solidarity and justice for both Israelis and Palestinians simultaneously. That’s the winning formula. And bring in Iran, and everybody will be on board happily, including the Saudis, too.

AMY GOODMAN: Rami Khouri, Palestinian American journalist, senior public policy fellow at the American University of Beirut.

Coming up, we look at some of the ballot initiatives that failed and won in this election season. Stay with us.