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Trump’s Middle East Focus: From the Axis of Evil to the Axis of Plutocrats
Trump’s foreign policy trip marked a stark pivot away from what had long been a neoconservative version of Middle Eastern policymaking in Washington. Will the result be peace or just profit?
May 30, 2025
Colorful career criminal Willie Sutton once may (or may not) have been asked why he robbed banks. “Because that is where the money is,” he supposedly replied. A similar principle may explain the first foreign trip of President Donald J. Trump’s second term, which was not to a traditional U.S. ally in Europe. Rather, he set off to visit the capitals of the Gulf hydrocarbon potentates Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. In royal palaces there, he feasted and was offered hundreds of billions of dollars in investments in American companies and opportunities for the Trump Organization, too. Qatar even courted controversy by giving him a $400 million Boeing 747-8 plane to serve as a future Air Force One.
And the publicity was regal. Strikingly missing, however, was a side trip to Israel or any evident consultations with the extremist government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
If Israel gets in the way of deal-making with the Gulf plutocrats, it could become an annoyance that Trump might feel he can’t afford.
Instead, Israel was frozen out and blindsided by Trump’s pronouncements. On the eve of his trip, the president took the Israelis by surprise when he abruptly announced that he would halt his (costly and fruitless) bombing campaign against the Houthis of Yemen. Israeli leaders then had to listen to Trump proclaim that the U.S. “has no stronger partner” than Saudi Arabia, with which he brokered a $142 billion deal for American arms. The United Arab Emirates has a sovereign wealth fund of $2.2 trillion, while Saudi Arabia’s is $1.1 trillion and that country’s leader, Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, has already deposited $2 billion of it in the investment firm of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund has $526 billion. And such sums don’t even include those countries’ vast currency reserves, earned by selling petroleum and fossil gas.
And in that single, several-day trip, President Trump managed to realign U.S. Middle Eastern policy to center on—and yes, it should be capitalized!—an Axis of the Plutocrats, Gulf sheikhs who are using their galactic fortunes to reshape the region from Libya to Sudan, Egypt to Syria, and who are hungrily eyeing new investment opportunities in areas like the emerging artificial intelligence industry.
Syria: A Very Strong Background
Oh, and while he was traveling Trump revealed that Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan and Saudi Arabia’s bin Salman had indeed convinced him to lift American sanctions on Syria, a step distinctly opposed by the Israelis. While in the Saudi capital of Riyadh, he even held a surprise meeting with fundamentalist Syrian President Ahmad al-Shara, who had once led an al Qaeda affiliate. Asked about whether the Israelis opposed the step, Trump replied, “I don’t know. I didn’t ask them about that.” In fact, The Associated Pressreported that, in an April meeting with Trump, Netanyahu had specifically pleaded with him not to lift those sanctions on Syria, since he claimed he feared that the new fundamentalist government there might eventually stage an attack on Israel.
Trump appears to have been entirely unmoved by Netanyahu’s plea. After meeting al-Shara in Riyadh, the president summed up his view of the former guerrilla and supporter of hardline Salafi Islam this way: “Young, attractive guy. Tough guy. Strong past. Very strong past. Fighter.” On recognizing Damascus’s new government and issuing a waiver on those congressionally mandated sanctions, Trump observed, “Now it’s their time to shine… So, I say, ‘Good luck, Syria.’ Show us something very special.” It’s worth noting that al-Shara claims he wants good relations with all his country’s neighbors and is open to peace with Israel.
You wouldn’t know it from Netanyahu’s heated rhetoric, but during the Syrian civil war of the last decade, Israel did give medical help to the Support Front (Jabhat al-Nusra) that al-Shara founded and led when it was fighting against Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorial regime. Since al-Shara’s group sometimes persecuted the heterodox Druze minority in Syria, this step outraged Israel’s own Druze minority, some of whom at one point attacked an ambulance taking a wounded Syrian rebel to an Israeli hospital, while the group’s leaders lobbied Netanyahu to cease aiding the al Qaeda-linked outfit.
Netanyahu’s recent suggestions to Trump that al-Shara, now in control of much of Syria, poses a threat to Israel, were therefore wholly disingenuous. Moreover, the jackboot is entirely on the other foot. As soon as the revolution in Damascus succeeded, Netanyahu ordered an orgy of destruction, bombing naval ships in the Syrian port of Latakia and military installations across the country, leaving Syria virtually helpless. Israeli troops then marched into Syria, occupying swathes of its territory and taking control of a dam that supplies 40% of its water. Israeli far-right cabinet member Bezalel Smotrich then pledged that Israel’s multi-front war of expansion there would only end when Syria was—you couldn’t put it more bluntly than this—“dismantled.”
Now, Israeli analysts not only fear a resurgent Syria but also worry that since Erdogan has Trump’s ear on Syrian policy, he will be emboldened. Turkey, after all, backed the rebel group that has now taken power and is their main international sponsor. Turkish fighter jets are already operating in northern Syrian air space, and Israel’s attempt to establish hegemony over its southern regions is endangered by Turkish claims that, going back to Ottoman times, Syria has always been in its sphere of influence.
Iran: No Nuclear Dust
Trump also sidelined Netanyahu during his trip by continuing to press for a new nuclear deal with Iran. His Gulf Arab hosts showed a collective enthusiasm for the ongoing talks, and Trump revealed that Qatar’s ruler, Tamim Bin Hamad Al Thani, had indeed lobbied him to begin direct discussions with Iran. The Gulf Arab monarchies fear being caught in the crossfire of any future American-Israeli war with Iran. The leaders of Qatar and the other Gulf states are anxious that the (all too literal) fallout from any aerial strikes on enriched nuclear materials in Iran could drift onto their populations, affecting their water supplies. Trump tried to reassure his hosts that “we’re not going to be making any nuclear dust in Iran,” adding that he wanted to try negotiations first in hopes of forestalling any such outcome.
During both the first Trump administration and the Biden administration, Washington’s pitch to the Gulf Arab states was that they should recognize Israel, do business with it, and form a military alliance with it against Iran. Jared Kushner succeeded in making this argument to the postage-stamp Gulf countries of the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, which signed the Abraham Accords with Israel on September 15, 2020.
Trump appears to have developed the same fascination that possessed Barack Obama when it comes to “opening” Iran the way Richard Nixon once opened China.
However, Kushner and then-President Biden failed to bring Saudi Arabia aboard. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman resisted going on a war footing with Iran, especially after the devastating 2019 attack by that country or one of its proxies on the Kingdom’s Abqaiq refinery, which underlined Riyadh’s vulnerability. Not surprisingly, then, in March 2023, the Saudi foreign minister joined his Iranian counterpart in Beijing, where the two countries restored diplomatic relations and began deconfliction talks.
Once Israel launched its total war on the Gazan population in October 2023, bin Salman could hardly sign on to the Abraham Accords. In the region, it would have looked as if he were helping to destroy the Palestinian Arabs while putting a target on Iran, one of the Palestinians’ few remaining state champions. Unlike Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia has a substantial citizen population—some 19 million people—whose opinions the government has to be at least a little bit anxious about, especially since the blood of the average Saudi is indeed boiling at the daily atrocities being committed by Israel in Gaza. Last year, bin Salman’s office leaked to Politico that he feared he would be assassinated if he recognized Israel under such grim circumstances and he insisted on the need for an independent Palestinian state (which seemed to get Washington off his back on the issue).
In addition, Trump appears to have developed the same fascination that possessed Barack Obama when it comes to “opening” Iran the way Richard Nixon once opened China. Nothing, of course, could be more unwelcome in Tel Aviv. Netanyahu has repeatedly threatened to attack Iran’s civilian nuclear enrichment facilities (though Western intelligence agencies do not believe that country actually has a nuclear weapons program). In an April meeting, Trump informed Netanyahu that he wanted to try negotiations before anybody attacked Iran and pointedly gave the prime minister a copy of his book The Art of the Deal.
Qatar: A Fundamental Role
If Qatar did convince Trump to try negotiating with Iran, then Sheikh Tamim won a major round in the contest for influence with the American president. It was a victory in keeping with Doha’s longstanding regional role as a mediator and seeker of peaceful solutions to conflict. And the rise of Qatari influence is another blow to Netanyahu, who has attempted to sideline the Gulf gas giant even though he was happy to make use of its services.
Since Hamas’ bloodthirsty October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, elements of the Israeli government and its supporters have attempted to blame Qatar for supposedly supporting and bankrolling Hamas. The allegations are breathtakingly false and serve as a smokescreen for Hamas’ actual patron (in a manner of speaking), Netanyahu himself. They were aimed, however, precisely at turning Qatar into a distrusted regional pariah, a ploy that has so far failed spectacularly.
That the fundamentalist Hamas movement came to power at the ballot box in Gaza in 2006 and could not be dislodged struck Netanyahu as a potential blessing. The bad blood between Hamas in Gaza and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) on the West Bank left Palestinians politically divided. Netanyahu made that very rivalry a pretext for preventing the establishment of a state for the 5 million stateless Palestinians under Israeli occupation. He put severe import-export restrictions on Gaza but otherwise allowed Hamas to run it as its own fiefdom. Hamas rocket fire from time to time (which seldom did any real damage) was a price Netanyahu was then willing to pay. He had a close associate act as a go-between regarding transfers of money from Qatar and Egypt into Gaza for civilian aid and administration. From 2021 on, Egypt and Qatar deposited aid money for Gaza civilian reconstruction in an Israeli bank account, and then Israel transferred it to the Gazans.
That’s right: Bibi Netanyahu was once functionally Gaza’s comptroller. Moreover, in 2011-2012, the Obama administration asked Qatar to host members of the Hamas civilian politbureau so that they could take part in indirect negotiations with both the U.S. and Israel. The favor Qatar did for Washington and Tel Aviv, however, would prove burdensome to its diplomacy. In 2018, the emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim, grew so frustrated with Hamas that he decided to kick its officials out and cease sending aid to Gaza. Terrified that his divide-and-rule approach to the Palestinians might be jeopardized, Netanyahu frantically dispatched the head of the Israeli intelligence outfit Mossad to Qatar to plead with the emir to continue the arrangement.
In 2020, The Times of Israel revealed that Mossad head Yossi Cohen had written a letter to Tamim about the Gaza money transfers, saying: “This aid has undoubtedly played a fundamental role in achieving the continued improvement of the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip and ensuring stability and security in the region.” As late as 2023, other Israeli government officials were still sending similar messages, according to that paper. The subsequent attempt of the Netanyahu government to shift blame for its disgraceful Gaza policy onto Qatar has struck few seasoned observers as plausible.
Regarding Trump’s recent visit, the Israeli genocide in Gaza was the one outstanding issue on which Gulf leaders appear to have made little headway. After a roundtable with Qatari business leaders, the president said of Gaza, “Let the United States get involved and make it just a freedom zone.” These remarks, wholly detached from reality, did not clarify whether he still agreed with Netanyahu on a plan to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip, which no one in the Arab Gulf could accept. In any case, insiders say Trump is frustrated that Netanyahu doesn’t “wrap up” the war, but that the president has not exerted the pressure necessary to stop it.
A Stark Pivot
Trump’s foreign policy trip marked a stark pivot away from what had long been a neoconservative version of Middle Eastern policymaking in Washington. In the era of President George W. Bush, some officials typically argued that Israel was Washington’s only reliable democratic partner in the Middle East and that all policy in the region should be organized around that reality. In the process, of course, they downplayed the plight of the Palestinians, claiming in 2002 that peace would only come in the region when the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein was overthrown. They gradually developed a rhetoric for stuffing Washington’s version of democracy down the gullets of Middle Eastern regimes—at the point of a gun, if necessary. They either marginalized Arab regimes or sought to scare them into an alliance with Israel. Their ultimate goal then was a war on Iran that would overthrow the government there. “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran,” they used to proclaim in a creepy combination of male chauvinism and juvenile jingoism.
Trump’s own regime is, of course, not free of either toxic masculinity or a jejune hyper-nationalism. However, unlike Bush and the neocons, the 47th president seems uninterested in kicking off long, debilitating foreign wars, which his base has come to hate. Still, think of him, at least in part, as Trump of Arabia. Of course, he’s mainly interested in making money for himself and his wealthy backers there. If Israel gets in the way of deal-making with the Gulf plutocrats, it could become an annoyance that Trump might feel he can’t afford. So far, however, the president seems unwilling to make the hard choices necessary to end the genocide and position the Middle East and the U.S. for prosperity, leaving us all in limbo with only a new Trump Tower in Dubai to show for it.
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Video Shows Girl Trying to Escape Inferno as Gaza Family 'Burned Alive' in Israeli Massacre
"What we are doing in Gaza is a war of extermination: indiscriminate, unrestrained, brutal, and criminal killing of civilians," said former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
May 26, 2025
Video footage of a young girl trying to flee an inferno caused by a Monday Israeli airstrike that killed dozens of Palestinians including her mother and siblings sparked global outrage and calls for an immediate cease-fire in what one former Israeli prime minister called a "war of extermination."
Medical officials in Gaza said that at least 36 people were killed by an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) bombing of the Fahmi al-Jarjawi School in the al-Daraj neighborhood of Gaza City. The Gaza Government Media Office (GMO) said that 18 children were killed in the "brutal massacre."
"The school was supposed to be a place of safety. Instead, it was turned into an inferno," Gaza Civil Defense spokesperson Mahmoud Basal told reporters. "We heard desperate cries for help from people trapped alive inside the blaze, but the fire was too intense. We couldn't get to them."
From the flames of the massacre committed by the Israeli criminal occupation forces at Fahmi Al-Jarjawi School in Gaza City’s Al-Daraj neighborhood — a school that had become a refuge for displaced families — comes the image of a child: Ward Jalal Al-Sheikh Khalil, the only… pic.twitter.com/FMpXlFOMN9
— حسام شبات (@HossamShabat) May 26, 2025
Video recorded at the scene of the strike showed the silhouette of a young girl—identified as 7-year-old Ward al-Sheikh Khalil—moving against the infernal backdrop as she tried to escape the blaze. According toThe National, paramedic Hussein Muhaysin rushed in to rescue the child, whom he said "was moments away from death."
"When we pulled her out, she was in shock, silent, trembling, unable to comprehend what had just happened," Muhaysin said. "We couldn't bring ourselves to tell her that her entire family was killed in the bombing."
The child's mother and at least five siblings were reportedly killed in the bombing.
"Only her father survived, and he is now in critical condition," said Muhaysin.
"We see tragedy every day, but holding a child who has lost everything, who doesn't even know yet, that's a kind of pain no one can explain," he added.
The IDF admitted to the bombing—one of 200 it said it carried out Monday—and claimed it targeted "a Hamas and Islamic Jihad command and control center." As usual, no evidence was provided to support the claim.
Meanwhile in the northern Gaza city of Jabalia, another predawn IDF strike
reportedly killed 19 people—mostly women and children—sheltering in the Abdel Rabbo family home. Medical officials told reporters that recovery operations were still underway on Monday afternoon, with charred and mangled bodies being pulled from the rubble.
Moumen Abdel Rabbo, who rushed to the scene following the attack, told The National: "It was sudden. The house was completely flattened. Ambulances barely made it through to recover the wounded and the dead. Some bodies are still trapped under the rubble."
Abdel Rabbo said that Israeli bombing continued nearby and drones buzzed overhead as first responders—who are often attacked and killed by Israeli "double-tap" strikes—dug through the ruins in search of survivors and victims.
"How can we search for survivors under fire?" he asked. "These were civilians; mothers, toddlers, elderly people. This wasn't a military target. It was our home."
The GMO said Monday that more than 2,200 Palestinian families have been entirely wiped out since October 2023.
The U.S.-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) issued a statement Monday condemning the school shelter bombing and Sunday's "barbaric" killing of two Red Cross workers—weapon contamination officer Ibrahim Eid and hospital security guard Ahmad Abu Hilal—in an IDF airstrike on their home in Khan Younis. The weekend bombing followed the March 23 massacre of 15 Palestinian first responders including Red Crescent paramedics by Israeli ground troops in Rafah.
"How many more children, women, the elderly, journalists, healthcare workers, and first responders must [Israeli Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu slaughter with American weapons before [U.S. President Donald] Trump forces him to accept a permanent cease-fire deal that ends the genocide for good and frees all captives?" asked CAIR national executive director Nihad Awad.
"Every hour that Israel's genocidal crimes continue with impunity—and with our government's complicity—adds more dishonor to a shameful period in the history of our nation and the world," Awad added.
Hamas, which led the October 7, 2023 assault on Israel that left more than 1,100 Israelis and others dead—at least some of whom were killed by so-called " friendly fire" and under the intentionally fratricidal Hannibal Directive—is believed to still be holding 23 living hostages of the 251 people it kidnapped during the attack.
On Monday, the Trump administration refuted reports that Hamas had agreed to a cease-fire proposal by Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff under which 10 hostages would be released in exchange for a 70-day truce.
Although Witkoff toldCNN Monday that the "deal is on the table" and that "Israel will agree" to it, he subsequently walked back his claims. An unnamed Palestinian official toldThe Times of Israel that Witkoff changed his mind on the proposed deal. The envoy blamed Hamas for an unspecified "unacceptable" response to proposal, which he also claimed he never proffered.
Netanyahu—who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes including extermination and forced starvation in Gaza—said Monday evening that he hopes to be able to announce at least some progress toward a hostage release deal on Tuesday and that his government "will not give up on the release of our hostages, and if we do not achieve this in the coming days, we will achieve it later."
Israeli forces are currently carrying out Operation Gideon's Chariots, a campaign to conquer, indefinitely occupy, and ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Gaza to make way for possible Jewish recolonization.
Amid IDF attacks including a Friday airstrike on the Khan Younis home of Drs. Hamdi and Alaa al-Najjar that killed nine of the couple's 10 children, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert wrote that his country's relentless obliteration of Gaza amounted to "war crimes."
"What we are doing in Gaza is a war of extermination: indiscriminate, unrestrained, brutal, and criminal killing of civilians," said Olmert, who led Israel during the 2008-09 Operation Cast Lead war on Gaza. "We are doing this not because of an accidental loss of control in a particular sector, not because of a disproportionate outburst of fighters in some unit—but as a result of a policy dictated by the government, knowingly, intentionally, viciously, maliciously, recklessly."
While Israel has nominally allowed a trickle of aid to enter Gaza—where officials say hundreds of people, mostly children and elderly, have starved to death in recent days—officials said Sunday that only around 100 of the 46,200 trucks scheduled to enter Gaza over the past 84 days have actually made it into the besieged enclave.
Hamas said Sunday that "the occupation orchestrates the crime of starvation in Gaza and uses it as a tool to establish a political and field reality, under the cover of misleading relief projects that have been rejected by the United Nations and international organizations, due to lack of transparency and minimal humanitarian standards."
On Sunday, Jake Wood, who led the controversial U.S.- and Israel-backed organization established to distribute aid in Gaza, resigned, citing concerns that the mission would violate basic "humanitarian principles."
The U.N.'s International Court of Justice is currently weighing a genocide case brought by South Africa against Israel that cites the "complete siege" among evidence of genocidal intent.
More than 190,000 Palestinians have been killed or wounded by Israel's 598-day annihilation of Gaza, including at least 14,000 people who are missing and feared dead and buried beneath rubble, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. However, a peer-reviewed study
published in January by the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet found Gaza fatalities were likely undercounted by 41%.
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Gaza Mourns Beloved Child Singer Hassan Ayyad, Killed in Israeli Airstrike
The 14-year-old boy was one of numerous children slain by Israeli bombing since Monday in what UNICEF has called "the most dangerous place in the world to be a child."
May 06, 2025
A famed 14-year-old singer was among scores of Palestinians killed by Israel Defense Forces airstrikes across the Gaza Strip since Monday as bombing and starvation fueled by Israel's ongoing siege continued to ravage the coastal enclave.
Hassan Ayyad—who was known for his songs about life and death in Gaza during Israel's genocidal assault and siege—was killed in an IDF airstrike on the Nuseirat refugee camp. Video shared widely on social media showed Ayyad singing in a haunting voice, sometimes accompanied by his father, Alaa Ayyad.
"The child who sang of death has now joined those he mourned."
"Gaza is dying, blind in the eyes of America," Ayyad intones in one clip. "With the warplanes, we tasted the flavor of death, an airstrike from land and sea. They blocked the crossings—people are dying from hunger. Bear witness, world, to what they've done."
Reacting to the boy's killing, Alaa Ayyad told Palestinian journalist Essa Syam that "Hassan was my heat, my soul, my son... my only son."
"What can I tell you about Hassan? Hassan is everything," Ayyad continued. "I ask everyone to pray for mercy for his soul."
Responding to Ayyad's killing, Gaza journalist Mahmoud Bassam wrote Monday on the social media site X that "Hassan was martyred moments ago in an Israeli airstrike, raising the death toll to over 60 since dawn."
"The child who sang of death has now joined those he mourned—his farewell was as noble as his words," Bassam added.
The Gaza Health Ministry said Tuesday that at least 22 people including numerous children were killed and more than 50 others wounded when Israeli airstrikes targeted a school-turned-shelter, this one in the Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza.
"The Bureij massacre is a heinous war crime that requires the prosecution of the occupation's leaders in international courts as war criminals," Hamas, which rules Gaza and led the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, said in a statement.
More than 185,000 Palestinians have been killed, wounded, or left missing by Israel's 578-day assault and siege on Gaza. Most of the territory's more than 2 million inhabitants have also been forcibly displaced, often multiple times, while mass starvation is rampant due to Israel's tightened blockade.
Israeli officials said Monday that U.S. President Donald Trump does not object to Operation Gideon's Chariots, a full-scale invasion, conquest, and ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip that Israel is expected to launch after Trump visits the Middle East later this month.
On Tuesday, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said he envisions Gaza "entirely destroyed" and ethnically cleansed of its more than 2 million inhabitants.
The Gaza Health Ministry said Monday that Israeli forces have killed at least 16,278 children in Gaza since October 2023—a rate of one child killed every 40 minutes. The ministry said it has recorded 57 children who have died from malnutrition amid Israel's "complete siege" of Gaza, which has fueled mass starvation and illness and is part of an International Court of Justice genocide case against Israel led by South Africa.
Last year, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres added Israel to his so-called "List of Shame" of countries that kill and injure children during wars and other armed conflicts. This, after the U.N. Children's Fund (UNICEF) called Gaza the "world's most dangerous place to be a child."
A 2024 survey of more than 500 Gazan children conducted by the Gaza-based Community Training Center for Crisis Management and supported by the War Child Alliance
found that nearly all children in the embattled Palestinian enclave believed their death was imminent—and nearly half said they wanted to die.
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