The unresolved crises unfolding on the Israeli-Palestinian front — a growing humanitarian disaster inside of the Gaza Strip, the horrific images of emaciated Israelis held hostage by terrorists in the coastal strip, and ongoing tensions in Jerusalem and the West Bank fueled by religious extremists of all stripes — represent one of the biggest strategic challenges to stability facing the Middle East. With Israel now openly contemplating a full occupation of Gaza, this set of issues serves as an obstacle to broader regional peace and normalization efforts.
The usual blame game and finger pointing that occur at dark moments like this are already in full effect, especially in America and Israel, which both suffer from a political-and-media-industrial complex that fuels division and discord rather than facilitates pragmatic solutions centered on building broader coalitions.
But one key element currently missing in action is strong, visionary leadership from Israelis, Palestinians, the broader Middle East region, and America too. The bluster and provocation in aggressive political messaging campaigns should not be mistaken as some sort of proxy for leadership — it is a kind of Jedi mind trick used by those currently holding political positions who actually do very little to lead in the conventional sense.
Unlike their predecessors, they are not trying to achieve consensus to solve thorny problems. Instead, most of today’s “leaders” operate primarily through the politics of subtraction and division that seeks leverage by diminishing others — rather than the politics of addition that seeks to get big things done by working with as many people and perspectives as possible.
Words of advice from a seasoned Middle East diplomat on the leadership deficit
Contemplating the current predicament on the Israeli-Palestinian front, my thoughts took me back to the summer of 2023, before the horrors that unfolded after Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7. This was a period of relative hope for some progress across the region, especially in comparison to the past few years. There was talk of a possible advance toward a Saudi-Israeli normalization accord, and the G-20 put forward an idea for an India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor that called for greater regional cooperation on multiple fronts, although neither proposal offered solutions to the underlying issues causing discord in the region.
That summer, for a June 2023 episode of the MEI podcast Middle East Focus, I interviewed Itamar Rabinovich, a distinguished academic historian who has served as Israel’s ambassador to the United States, a peace negotiator with Syria, and a top foreign policy advisor to former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. We discussed his then-just-released book Middle Eastern Maze, and I asked him the main lesson he had learned from his years of involvement in Middle East diplomacy. He had a direct answer: “The importance of leadership. I think that what has made the biggest difference, positive and negative, both in Arab-Israeli relations and in great power politics in the region, was the quality — negative or positive — of the main leaders locally, regionally, and internationally.”
Rabinovich described what he felt made Rabin — someone who presided over important advances in Middle East peace in the 1990s — a historic leader at the time: “first of all, it was his ability to make courageous decisions, even going against his grain as he did in the Oslo Accords after years of opposing and depicting the [Palestine Liberation Organization] PLO in the most negative of terms. When he reached the conclusion that this was the way to go, he did [so] courageously and paid with his life for that decision.” Rabinovich described some of the qualities that made Rabin a great leader, including being straightforward, direct, open, honest — and building trust. He ascribed many of these same qualities to other Israeli leaders like David Ben-Gurion, Menachem Begin, and Ariel Sharon — and he also characterized Arab figures like King Hussein of Jordan and Anwar Sadat of Egypt as leaders who took risks for peace.
When I asked about current leaders — at the time of the podcast, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had recently regained office — Rabinovich said, “There is a decline in the quality of political leadership in general — not only at the top, and not just in Israel. I think you see it globally. Politics has become atrocious and requires a very high price. You have to procure a lot of money to run for office and then you come into office and you are beholden. The media price, the social media — it has become very difficult to be a leader or even a politician who is not a major leader.” He described this phenomenon as something not particular to Israel, but rather as an overall decline of leadership that is taking place in America and Europe as well.
This analysis echoes in my mind as we witness the travesty that has been unfolding for nearly two years in the war between Israel and Hamas — and the dearth of leaders among Palestinians, Israelis, across the wider Middle East, and in America willing to take the difficult steps to end conflicts and pursue peace despite dynamics driving toward endless wars.
Trump’s poor performance on Israeli-Palestinian issues: A continuity in US policy
In this context, US President Donald Trump’s erratic and unpredictable leadership style fits the moment but has failed to produce clear results in the broader Middle East, as my most recent assessment of the president’s first six months in office in his second term concluded. When Trump returned to office in January, he inherited a fragile cease-fire deal achieved in large part through cooperative efforts between both President Joe Biden’s departing administration and his incoming administration. But Trump’s team did not succeed in its diplomatic efforts to keep the cease-fire in place through the three outlined phases. It stood passively on the sidelines as the current Israeli government adopted an aggressive approach that has caused the growing humanitarian and hunger crisis in Gaza, and the Trump administration’s own direct diplomacy with Hamas produced few tangible strategic outcomes.
Trump’s passivity in ending the Israel-Hamas war was underscored by his recent remarks about whether he supports Israel’s possible reoccupation of the Gaza Strip. Trump said, “I can’t really say. It will be up to Israel.” This was atypical for a US president who usually seeks to provoke reactions and drive events through incendiary statements. The simple fact of the matter is that the second Trump administration has not developed a clear diplomatic game plan to bring this war to an end.
Not that Trump’s predecessor did much better on the Israeli-Palestinian front, as my assessment of Biden’s efforts one year after the Israel-Hamas war began highlighted. The Biden team’s poor performance in handling this conflict makes it difficult to listen to the advice of figures like former Biden National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, no matter how valid their arguments seem.
If there is one possible glimmer of hope in this dismal scenario, it is that a consensus has been building across the broader Middle East about the need to advance a two-state solution, and most of the leading Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia, the country that Trump and others see as the lynchpin for wider regional peace and normalization, have put forward longer-term visions of how to bring a sustainable end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
True leadership in America and Israel would look beyond the management of the current crisis to define and pursue a clearer, more positive outcome through diplomacy, rather than more conflict and war. That leadership, for the moment, is absent.
Brian Katulis is a Senior Fellow at the Middle East Institute.
Photo by Bashar Taleb/AFP via Getty Images
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