In the Middle East, crises are not managed through carefully designed programs or strategic visions, but through improvised experiments conducted on bodies exhausted by wars. It is as if the region—with all its historical and political complexities—has, during Donald Trump’s second term, been transformed into a primitive laboratory where novice politicians learn the basics of the trade on human beings who have no right to object or refuse.
“They learn veterinary medicine on donkeys of light” is not merely a sarcastic folk expression; it is an accurate description of an administration that handles the world’s most sensitive issues with a real-estate dealmaker’s mindset—where peoples are reduced to numbers, history to erasable maps, and justice to a balance sheet of profit and loss.
The new-old American administration possesses no real knowledge of the Middle East, nor any understanding of its social, psychological, or symbolic fabric. All it has is the illusion of control and an overconfidence that brute force alone is enough to tame chaos. Thus, the Palestinian cause becomes a heavy burden rather than a historical injustice, an obstacle to “quick peace” rather than the very core of the conflict.
Trump sees Palestine only through Israel’s telescope, and hears Gaza merely as background noise in a grand project titled “stability through force.” His administration is a blend of businessmen, ideological advisers, and former generals who deal with the region as if it were a failing company in need of restructuring—not peoples searching for stability and dignity.
In this climate, the same failed recipes are tried again: normalization without peace, deterrence without justice, and threats without horizon. Crises are managed the way real-estate disputes are managed—pressure and blackmail, followed by the imposition of faits accomplis. But the Middle East is not an abandoned plot of land, and the Palestinian cause is not a clause that can be struck from a political contract. This is not a lack of information born of ignorance, but a conscious refusal to understand—an administration of the conflict rather than its resolution. Gaza thus becomes a testing ground, the West Bank a postponed file, and Jerusalem an electoral slogan. The problem is that those who pay the price for this “learning” are not the decision-makers in Washington, but the peoples of the region, left to bleed while the new learners boast of the success of their experiments.
In the end, a complex illness cannot be treated with primitive tools, nor can a region burdened with history be managed with a broker’s mentality. The Palestinian cause is not excess baggage in the Middle East project; it is its beating heart. Whoever ignores this truth will discover too late that they learned nothing about politics—only botched an experiment on a living body.
They manipulate definitions and labels to align with the mythology-driven government in Israel: a “Peace Council” instead of the Security Council; a “national committee to administer Gaza” instead of the Palestinian National Authority; “Rafah Crossing 2” instead of the original Rafah Crossing; advisory bodies and endless offshoots as substitutes for UN organizations. All of this serves one purpose: to entrench a reality that no longer needs emphasis—the stripping of legitimacy from the Palestinian cause and of legal status from those who represent it. The reference point becomes Donald Trump and the bodies he created; and if further validation is needed, international organizations will be used merely to grant additional legitimacy when convenient.
In Davos, Kushner showcases his skills in the language of artificial intelligence presentations: rubble turned into an investment pitch, maps without blood, cities without memory, an economy without people—just an empty space on a map, ready to be redesigned according to market logic. It is a vision that excludes the human being, reduces the conflict to a management problem, and ignores the fact that reconstruction without sovereignty is nothing but another form of control. Gaza does not need an economic “vision”; it needs the dismantling of the causes of its destruction. Any conception of its future that bypasses occupation, blockade, and rights is merely a softer extension of the same violence—less noisy, colder in tone.
Donald Trump did not descend upon the world from the sky; he is an aberrant product of an aberrant global system that has reached a dead end—a system designed to monopolize opportunities and enforce the dominance of the greenback. The decision was made to confront emerging powers challenging this dominance and push them out of America’s neighboring zones of monopoly. A collision was inevitable—not only with China’s rising influence, but with the Eurozone as well—driving the targeted powers to form counter-alliances outside the familiar order.
Venezuela was nothing but a precise translation of all this, and the talk of Greenland and Canada merely confirms it. As for Iran—around which mobilization is underway to replicate the Venezuelan model—it represents a translation of a hidden struggle for influence and interests. Even if it is framed as destabilization in the Gulf region and a threat to Israel’s security, its ultimate outcome serves the logic of using America’s overwhelming power to redraw and entrench zones of monopoly and the dominance of the greenback.
Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel’s ruling right have placed all their eggs in Donald Trump’s basket and that of the neoconservatives in the United States, believing that after October 7 the moment had come to decisively resolve their existential crisis within the framework of the neoconservative project and its vision of subjugating the world by force. They now act toward their neighbors with the same logic. The deliberate Israeli obstruction of the Palestinian, Lebanese, and Syrian files can only be understood as a waiting game—anticipating the outcomes of Trump’s policies in the major arenas, foremost among them the Iranian file and the priority of toppling the existing regime there.
The worst is yet to come for the Middle East and the world at large. The collision of the major projects launched by Donald Trump has effectively become the last lifeline for Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel’s ruling right. All indicators suggest these projects will collide with internal constraints within the United States—limitations on their ability to press forward—as well as objective constraints tied to the fragmentation of traditional U.S. alliances and the resilience of those targeted by them. This will determine the future of the Middle East and the world as a whole, in which Palestinians and Israelis alike may become minor details—until Donald Trump and his entourage finish learning veterinary medicine on donkeys of light.
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