Americanswers… on 5 Live! Has Donald Trump delivered a “historic dawn of a new Middle East”?

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0:30learns how to invest and manage money. Learn more at schwab.com. It is little after three in the afternoon on Monday. The last 20 living hostages held by Hamas in Gaza have just been taken back to Israel after more than two years' captivity. That, of course, a key part of the ceasefire arrangement that is now in place. And in exchange for those hostages, Israel is releasing Palestinian prisoners and detainees. And a key figure, the key figure he would say in all of this has been of course Donald Trump who was in Israel to talk to its parliament the Knessets earlier in the day let us hear what he said but we have if you think we settled eight wars in eight months I'm now including this one by the way if that's okay they may say well that was quick because yesterday I was saying seven but now I can say, hey, the hostages are back.

1:25The hostages are back. It is a good feeling. Isn't that nice to say? You know, I just said the hostages, first time I said the hostages are back. It sounds, it feels so good to say it.

1:41But when you settle eight wars in eight months, that means you don't like war. Everyone thought I was going to be brutal. In fact, I remember Hillary Clinton during a debate. She said, look at him, look at him. He's going to go into war with everybody. And actually, she said, he's got a personality that's all about war. No, and my personality actually is all about stopping wars. And it seems to work. There's so much to unpack, isn't there? From that speech, not least. So his controversial claim about stopping seven wars now goes on to eight. We deal with that now. And of course, there were so many questions on the Gaza ceasefire.

2:22There are so many questions on the Gaza ceasefire and on Donald Trump's part in it all that we dedicated the entire Q &A to it today when Mariana Anthony and I talked to Matt Chorley on Five Live. And I should say before we hear that, do make sure to stick around to the end because we talk in more detail then about some other aspects of Donald Trump's speech, the things he said, for instance, about Iran, which we didn't get to in questions. But without further ado, welcome to America Answers.

3:19OK, so let's kick off with where we are right now. Donald Trump's trip to Israel and then heading to Egypt. He spoke first to the Knesset, Israel's parliament, hailing the return of hostages held by Hamas. And when he stood up to speak, President Trump stressed how historic he believes today is. This is not only the end of a war. This is the end of an age of terror and death and the beginning of the age of faith and hope and of God. It's the start of a grand concord and lasting harmony for Israel and all the nations of what will soon be a truly magnificent region. I believe that so strongly. This is the historic dawn of a new Middle East.

4:10and uh while um he was uh speaking some people were wearing new red but we talked a lot about baseball caps last week but there were new ones last week it was trump 28 this week it's trump the peace president is that fair anthony i think you have to give him credit for what he has done

4:29Anthony Zurcher:in the middle east uh the hostages have been released there is a ceasefire there's still a long way to go. Donald Trump over the top, hyperbolic, promising a lot, which hasn't yet been delivered. But what he has accomplished is something that American presidents, regional partners, European allies have been trying to get for two years now, and that is a full release of the hostages and a ceasefire. So for that, he can rightly take credit. He was a force behind this, even if in the end it took Israel deciding that they were done fighting and ready to wrap up their military offensive for this to get over the finish line.

5:08We've had a question from Cheryl. She says, Hi, AmeriCast. I've been wondering about Donald Trump's ceasefire deal. How much credit does he really deserve in achieving this? Isn't he responsible for prolonging the wall so long as it has been by continuing to send arms to Israel after he came to power and therefore has some responsibility for Palestinian and Israeli casualties and any hostage deaths since? Stephanie Sussex makes a sort of connected point, saying that the peace deal is essentially Biden's deal, which Netanyahu ignored because he read the signs and calculated Trump would win. So he's getting the credit for ending it.

5:40Could he have done something sooner? Yeah, I mean, I think the one thing you could say about it is not so much support for Israel, but that stuff... You remember at the beginning of the year, that video that circulated that absolutely horrified a lot of people, also amused some people, it has to be said, the stuff about Gaza being turned into a Riviera. And essentially part of that was the idea that the people of Gaza, all of them, are either invited to leave or have to leave. And that was a really shocking thing to a lot of people. And I think to a lot on the Israeli right, by no means all Israelis, but on the Israeli right, it kind of energised them a bit.

6:16You could argue, I suppose, that that led to an elongation of the war. Let's dig into more questions from listeners now. We've had a voice note from Penny about Donald Trump's long-term plans for Gaza. Hello America, this is Penny Waterhouse speaking from Suffolk. I wondered what you thought about the Trump plan for the Middle East and call me suspicious but wondered what do you think the plan behind the plan is? I mean, what does Netanyahu get out of it? What do the Arab states get? What does Trump get? In particular, do you think we'll still see a Middle East Riviera? Do you think we'll continue to see the annexation of the West Bank?

7:03Will the Saudis get their oil terminal on Mediterranean? And will Trump's personal bank account continue to be filled up? Tell me what you think. to say yes to the last of those things, definitely, Penny. No question about it. You don't even have to be particularly suspicious to think that, not just Trump's but also his families and people who know him. I mean, they're pretty open about it. They make a lot of money out of their relationships with the various Gulf states, and they're going to make more in the future. The rest of it is, well, pretty much your guess is as good as ours because a lot of it will depend on whether Hamas can be got out of Gaza now, so whether there's any excuse for Israel to go back.

7:44And, you know, Hamas are busy at the moment. It's not top of the news because of all the other things that are going on in the peace conference, etc. But they're busy making men kneel on the ground and shooting them in the head around the place. And that seems to be an effort by Hamas to extinguish its opponents, its Palestinian opponents, before going into the next phase. Do those men who are doing the killing at the moment, can they be got rid of? Can they be persuaded to leave, which I think is part of the deal? Well, it is part of the deal. disarmed and persuaded to leave are there other places they could go to yeah potentially but yeah i mean so penny you're right to be i'm not so suspicious is is the right word but skeptical and as i think we probably all are about what how many pitfalls are ahead uh we've got liz on the line hi liz hi um so i was slightly surprised to see jared kushner appear recently in as well and i didn't think he had an official role in the second trump administration so i was just wondering if he'd had a role in recent events and if that's just the fact that he's related to Trump.

8:48Yeah, it's a really interesting one, this, isn't it? I think a lot of people were equally surprised, but actually, behind the scenes, he has become very involved again. So he's very involved, obviously, in the first term. He's Trump's son-in-law. It was then thought he was going to concentrate on his business interests. Well, lo and behold, one of those business interests, just off the top of my head, I think he made, was it two billion, Anthony will correct me if I'm wrong, something like that, of money from... Yeah. And so he has a he has a firm, a private equity firm. They needed to fund it.

9:17Where do you go? You go to the Gulf. You get a ton of money from the Gulf monarchies, including Qatar. Interestingly, so Qatar, a state that is hated by a lot of Republicans because they see it as a terrorist supporting state. So it's by no means something that a lot of Republicans would go for. But Kushner himself certainly did go for it in a money way. And actually, you know, make of this what you will. There are those he learnt at the feet of Henry Kissinger. He went to see Henry Kissinger rather famously when Kissinger was alive, was a great admirer of Kissinger. Kissinger, at least in public, was quite an admirer of Jared Kushner and maybe taught him a thing or two about keeping relationships alive, about keeping diplomacy alive.

9:57But, you know, you can take a view on whether you think Kushner is a person who has brought his own abilities to bear or whether it's just the fact that he's the son-in-law of Trump. But he has been. It is absolutely right. And that question is right. He has been a really major cog in the works this time around. It's just an example of how British politics and American politics are very different. Trump has has turned the White House into a sort of family business.

10:24Marianna Spring:Yeah. And I was going to say that, actually, because we've chatted a few times now about who are the kind of rising stars of the Donald Trump family. For example, Barron Trump, Donald Trump's son, also Kai Trump, his granddaughter. and it's interesting because some of these other characters who we knew very well the first time around when he was president, like Jared Kushner, like his wife Ivanka, Donald Trump's daughter. And Eric as well. Yeah, and Eric as well, have sort of taken a little bit more of a back seat this time and so it's interesting to see Jared Kushner in particular kind of being involved in this way and I think perhaps what it comes down to is some of those other people we've mentioned, Barron Trump or Kai Trump, they're good as in useful to Donald Trump in terms of their reach on social media, their ability to connect with different audiences.

11:07Marianna Spring:But actually, ultimately, a lot of what Donald Trump relies on is the ability to do business. And that's where someone like Jared Kushner comes in, who is very used to doing that. And that's almost how we've spoken about it before as well, but how Donald Trump treats these kind of negotiations. I think there's perhaps a tension that lies between or that there's a tension that exists between, you know, doing a deal, essentially, almost like a business deal when it comes to peace. And then also actually the devastating human toll that is being felt in Gaza and in Israel with hostages coming home as well.

11:40Marianna Spring:And I think we shouldn't lose sight of that really when we're talking about the politics because it feels like this could be such a monumental thing if it does mean that there are people who are able to sleep safely and eat and have water and all of the things that they have not necessarily been able to have for quite a long time now. Here's a question about future media coverage of Israel and Gaza in the US. This has been sent in by Total Landscaping. That's a proper... That's a deep cut. On the AmeriCast Discord server. So, the question is, who is Larry Ellison? He's one of the richest, if not the richest people in the world, and seems set to own TikTok, CNN and CBS, and is often pushed a right-wing and pro-Israel agenda.

12:18We've talked a lot about concerns with Elon Musk taking over Twitter, but this seems to be on a much larger and concerning scale. Could we see anti-Palestinian censorship on TikTok as a result of Trump's deal? So that question of sort of answering their own question of who is Larry Ellison. Marianna, who is Larry Ellison and what might him taking over TikTok, CNN, CBS? What difference might it make?

12:39Marianna Spring:Yeah, so Larry Ellison is this super rich entrepreneur. He co-founded the software company that's called Oracle. And there's been lots of discussion around him recently and being involved in the ownership of the various companies that were mentioned and particularly around TikTok. Because you might remember that at one point Donald Trump was going to ban TikTok. then kind of Joe Biden was then Donald Trump said whoa hold up actually if we can get a US consortium of owners then maybe we can not ban TikTok and that looks to be happening so it's not just Larry Ellison and Oracle but kind of mixture of different people I mean the Murdochs have been floating around as names in that in that pool of people as well and actually I think maybe here it's worth focusing on TikTok to answer the question rather than the media companies and that's not to say that the media are not as relevant as TikTok but certainly in terms of their reach and impact.

13:28Marianna Spring:And when we're talking about issues like censorship, I think that there's been a lot of questions. I mean, there's obviously been questions about media coverage of the Middle East and of Gaza and of Israel, but there have also been quite significant questions about what content is actively recommended by the algorithms on the social media sites, what content is removed, questions around shadow banning this idea that your account's not being actively recommended by the algorithms and how that can shape conversation around particular regions or areas, for example, in the Middle East. You know, we don't know what direction these US bosses could take it and i've spoken to insiders um uh these u.s investors could take it and i've spoken to insiders at the companies who say well they will have an interest in what happens ultimately a lot of that comes down to decisions made by engineers and other executives you know within the company itself and so who knows it's not necessarily the case that they'll do an elon musk and sort of rip rip it all up and then the last thing that that i just would say is i think that um uh it's important to think about, yeah, I mean, it's again this issue of accountability.

14:25Marianna Spring:It's like I can't fully answer that question because there's no transparency from these companies about what they will or won't do and what information these investors will or won't have. And Netanyahu did come out and say social media and TikTok can be a really useful weapon, basically, in war. And that's what's made a lot of people ask, oh, what's going on behind the scenes here? But we just don't know.

14:56Right, that's the end of the live stuff with Matt Chorley on 5 Live. We wanted, though, to talk a little bit more about some of the other key moments from the Trump speech. And actually, in a sense, going back to the first of the questions we were answering there, Anthony, about the speech and whether Biden could have been the man to make it, whether Biden could also have achieved this day, because it is an interesting question. There were moments where it seemed as if he was making some progress. There are similarities between the kind of deal that he might have wanted to do and he did want to do and this one.

15:28But there are differences as well. I mean, it's also partisan, isn't it? But I noted, Anthony, that Jake Sullivan, Biden's national security adviser, did openly say, look, this is this is Trump's deal and he should get the credit for it.

15:42Anthony Zurcher:Yeah, and it's always hard to argue a counterfactual, but I think it comes down to when was Israel ready for peace and Israel was not ready. They did not feel like they had accomplished their military objectives while Biden was president. I mean, they wanted to not only really get a handle on what was going on in Gaza and mortally wound, in their view, Hamas, but also they wanted to defang Hezbollah to the north in Syria and Lebanon. And they wanted to also put Iran back down in its place. And those were things that didn't happen until Donald Trump was president. And once Iran was dealt with, once it felt like Hezbollah was less of a threat, once they had yet another military incursion into Gaza, maybe at that point Israel was ready for peace.

16:39Anthony Zurcher:And then as far as Donald Trump personally, what he brought to the table that Joe Biden didn't. And we talked about and you talked about a very, very valid point that it was his relations with the Gulf states. That was very important. His ability to connect with the Emir of Qatar in particular that opened things up. His relations with Benjamin Netanyahu built over eight years, including four years in his previous term in the White House. But I think even bigger than that, it's his relationship with the people of Israel and his popularity in Israel and the trust that the people of Israel had in him because of everything he did in his first term, like moving the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, that gave him power not only to convince Netanyahu to strike this deal, but to pressure Netanyahu, because he was honestly more popular in Israel right now than Netanyahu is.

17:35Anthony Zurcher:I don't know if you saw that clip where it was Steve Whitcoff and he mentioned Benjamin Netanyahu in a speech in the in the hostage square in Tel Aviv, I believe. And everyone booed Netanyahu. And then he mentioned Trump and everyone cheered. And that kind of power over the over the Israeli people and that kind of popularity with the Israeli people and the the cachet that that brings. I think that really helped Donald Trump move this over the finish line. He also doesn't have, does he, in his own supporters. I mean, Biden always had to tread a bit carefully, partly because a lot of the Democrats have moved away from Israel and being in a kind of Israel supporting party recently.

18:13And he was very conscious of that and always trying to kind of hold together parts of his own coalition. Which strikes me that Trump, you know, there is part of the Trump coalition that is quite anti-Israel as well, particularly on the far right, as it were, on the online far right. But actually, he's able just to take no notice of them. It's another thing about Trump. He's just domestically, he just seems so much freer, doesn't he, than Biden did?

18:37Anthony Zurcher:Yeah, his support, his core support in the Republican Party among conservatives is solid. And if you look at polls, he has 90 percent approval ratings within that core base. Whereas you're right, Joe Biden had to deal with some very big fractures right down the middle in the Democratic Party, Half on one side, half on the other. Key constituencies, whether it was Jewish Democrats on one side, foreign policy hawks within his own party on one side, and then the Arab and Palestinian activists, younger Democratic supporters in particular, people on college campuses who were sharply critical of Israel, came into the scene.

19:16Anthony Zurcher:Israel as the aggressors, seeing Israel as the Western powerful nation and not the underdog. Right. Not the underdog that I think people who have been following Middle Eastern politics for longer view them as. So it is it was a challenge for Biden, one that he really had to struggle trying to keep together in a way that Donald Trump, as you point out, really didn't.

19:40Marianna Spring:Also, you mentioned just in there a bit about the fringes of the social media world, certainly of the kind of MAGA movement, the Make America Great Again movement online, and how they've been quite anti-Israel and at times accused of anti-Semitism, but how that doesn't really represent the majority of Donald Trump supporting people and certainly accounts online that I analyse and look at. Whereas on the other side, certainly when it came to Joe Biden, there's a real split in, you know, when I look at my undercover voters, the undercover voter who is furthest to the left, You know, their feed has constantly been full of pro-Palestinian content, often showing really, you know, stark images of violence and children dying and journalists being killed and very, very critical posts of Israel.

20:25Marianna Spring:And actually, a lot of people saying that they could kind of not support Biden on like the idea of Biden coming to some kind of deal with Netanyahu for them was not palatable, even if that would result in in the end of that violence. whereas then you also have people who are supportive of the Democratic Party who are much more kind of pro-Israel than those on the left. I think that split, I mean obviously that doesn't explain ultimately how a deal comes about but I think what it does explain is the kind of different pressures that Donald Trump versus say Joe Biden would have felt and did feel internally which perhaps can then affect some of your decision making.

21:01You do wonder Anthony what Trump might have done to Israel because they had this abortive attack, didn't they, in Doha, so in Qatar, when was it? It was last month now, wasn't it? When they tried to kill some of the Hamas negotiators and essentially failed. They killed one or two people, including a Qatari citizen. And Trump, you remember when Trump was doing the deal with Netanyahu, he forced Netanyahu to call the Qataris on a phone from the White House and apologize. and he's done this weird executive order, which we've discussed before, which I'm not sure amounts to anything much, but seems on paper at least to amount to a kind of Article 5 NATO-style guarantee of Qatar's future safety so the United States goes to war on behalf of Qatar if he's ever attacked by anyone again.

21:51If that was the moment that he lost patience with Netanyahu, that attack, which he didn't want to happen, what I wonder, if Netanyahu hadn't sort of come to heel then and said, OK, that's it. I'll sign up for all of this stuff. Would he have stopped all weapons supply? It's a big, big move for any president. Would he have done something slightly less than that? What would he have done to Netanyahu?

22:16Anthony Zurcher:Yeah, that's a good question, beyond just expressing his anger and calling and swearing at him on the phone. When you talk to people in this administration, they point to that attack on Qadr and the brazenness with which the Israelis launched a missile strike in Doha on negotiating teams that were involved with the Qatari officials to try to broker a peace, that pushed Trump over the edge and said, OK, he's got to knock this off right now. But what was the hammer? What was the threat behind that anger? And that's a very good question. Did he threaten to withhold arms? We don't know. Or did he threaten to use, as I mentioned earlier, his popularity with the Israelis to publicly come out and say Netanyahu is the one who's keeping the hostages from being released.

23:07Anthony Zurcher:Netanyahu is the enemy of peace here. I mean, rhetorically, would that have been enough or the threat of that would have been enough to convince Netanyahu that he needed to back away? I mean, it was, as you mentioned, a remarkable image of Netanyahu sitting there, a hat, a metaphorical hat in hand in the Oval Office with the phone apologizing, reading the apology to the Qataris. I mean, that must have been humbling for him. And I think it's kind of a reflection of who really was calling the shots in all of this.

23:39Marianna Spring:And as kind of always seems to be the case in the world and in politics, it feels like this has come, this deal and the hostages being released and this kind of tentative but hopeful prospect that there could also be peace in Gaza at the time when the Nobel Peace Prize was being given out, being decided. And there are all sorts of complicated things around deadlines and who actually could be awarded it this year and everything else. But on that exact note, we have this from Dan in Essex. Hi, AmeriCast. Do you think Donald Trump is less likely to interfere in negotiations on foreign conflicts now he's missed out on the Nobel Peace Prize?

24:16Based on his previous, do you think he will just post on Truth Social, saying the Nobel Prize is rigged and then move on to the next thing that interests him.

24:24Marianna Spring:I would just start my very quick answer to that is I actually think no, he won't, because I think that for various reasons, he kind of knows that maybe he could get it next year and not this year. Because obviously this deal was brokered like essentially at the at the same time as the award was then given out. But I don't know what you think, Anthony and Justin.