“Benjamin Netanyahu nominates Donald Trump for Nobel peace prize”– that headline seems to have been pulled straight out of the satirical news outlet the Onion. But it’s 100% real news: the Israeli prime minister who has been indicted by the international criminal court for alleged war crimes in Gaza has proposed the US president, his largest weapons supplier and strongest political backer, as a candidate for the world’s top peacemaking prize.
It’s absurd, akin to nominating one’s drug dealer for the Nobel prize in medicine. But there’s a cynical logic behind Netanyahu’s publicity stunt: he is exploiting Trump’s need for flattery to prolong Israel’s brutal war on Gaza and to continue attacking other countries in the Middle East, including Iran, Lebanon and Yemen. Before Netanyahu showed up for dinner at the White House on Monday with a copy of his Nobel nomination letter, Trump was eager to announce a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas this week.
Taken aback by Netanyahu’s gesture, Trump backed off on pressuring the Israeli leader to reach an agreement with Hamas. And Netanyahu wins yet again by playing for time, as he has done since the Hamas attack on southern Israel in October 2023. The prime minister has repeatedly sabotaged negotiations to stay in power. He wants to keep his extremist government coalition intact so he can avoid early parliamentary elections, which his Likud party is likely to lose, and to block an independent investigation into his administration’s security failures that led up to the Hamas attack. But most of all, Netanyahu wants to save himself: he’s clinging to power to avoid a bribery and corruption trial that is rooted in one of his earlier stints as premier.
Netanyahu, often dubbed “the great survivor” of Israeli politics, is an astute tactician who figured out what makes Trump tick: extreme flattery and distraction. The prime minister knows that he can’t compete with wealthy Arab petrostates, such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar, which can provide Trump’s family business with billions of dollars in real estate and golf deals, or lavish gifts like a $400m luxury jet to be used as Air Force One. But Netanyahu correctly presumed that he can appeal to Trump’s desire to be recognized as a global peacemaker.
That’s exactly what Netanyahu did when he walked into the White House this week and tapped into Trump’s sense of grievance over being passed over for the Nobel peace prize. For years, Trump insisted that he deserves the prize for his efforts during his first term as president to broker a series of diplomatic deals, known as the Abraham accords, between Israel and several Arab states. The agreements, which were negotiated in 2020 by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser at the time, included the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco. But Trump and Kushner could not convince the most important Arab state, Saudi Arabia, to sign on to a normalization deal with Israel.
The Abraham accords were built on a delusion: that Washington could solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by ignoring the reality of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation in the West Bank, and an Israeli blockade of Gaza at the time. Trump and Kushner, who both approach political dealmaking through the prism of real estate transactions, decided to avoid the Palestinians and their concerns altogether, and negotiate directly with autocratic Arab regimes that wanted to formalize their existing secret relations with Israel into more open diplomacy. In other words, the Trump administration treated the Palestinians as real estate holdouts who were refusing to accept a glitzy deal that would ignore their rights while others reaped the benefits.
It’s no surprise that Netanyahu used the flawed Abraham accords as the basis for his recommendation of Trump for the Nobel prize. “President Trump has demonstrated steadfast and exceptional dedication to promoting peace, security and stability around the world,” the prime minister wrote in his nomination letter, dated 1 July and addressed to the Norwegian Nobel Committee, which selects the annual winner. Netanyahu sent his letter a mere 10 days after Trump ordered US warplanes to bomb major nuclear facilities in Iran, briefly joining a war started by Netanyahu in mid-June, when Israel launched a surprise attack against dozens of targets across Iran.
At their White House meeting, Netanyahu piled on his fawning over Trump. “I want to express the appreciation and admiration not only of all Israelis, but of the Jewish people,” Netanyahu said as he presented Trump with his nomination letter. “You deserve it,” the prime minister added, reinforcing Trump’s belief that he has been unfairly denied the prize.
Trump was clearly pleased with Netanyahu’s gesture and sycophancy. “This I didn’t know. Wow. Thank you very much,” the president said, feigning surprise. “Coming from you in particular, this is very meaningful.”
Netanyahu also appealed to Trump’s desire to be a strong man who imposes peace through strength, as his advisers are fond of saying. And the Israeli leader knows how to make Trump feel like a winner, who has basked in the reflected glory of Israel’s military achievements against Iran and its allies in the region. Trump loves winners – and he hates to be associated with “losers” or any kind of failure, as he never tires of reminding everyone.
The problem, of course, is that if Trump truly wants a shot at winning the Nobel prize, he would first need to stop the bloodshed in Gaza. And that means using American leverage – billions of dollars in US weapons and unwavering diplomatic support for Israel at the UN and other international bodies – to pressure Netanyahu to end the war. So far, Trump has refused to use that influence over Israel, much like his predecessor Joe Biden, who provided Netanyahu with a virtually unlimited supply of arms, only to be rewarded with the Israeli leader’s scorn.
It’s difficult for Trump to make an argument for securing a peace prize when his administration continues to send Israel more than 35,000 US-made BLU-117 bombs, which kill and maim civilians indiscriminately when used against population centers. The Israeli military dropped hundreds of these 2,000lb bombs in the first month of its war on Gaza – an intensity of aerial bombardment that had not been seen since the Vietnam war.
Trump also dreams of securing his Nobel prize by negotiating a diplomatic deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia, an expansion of the Abraham accords that the Biden administration failed to achieve. But the kingdom’s crown prince and de facto ruler, Mohammed bin Salman, who is Trump’s favorite Arab leader, has vowed not to sign a deal with Israel until it commits to the establishment of a Palestinian state. One of the biggest stumbling blocks is Netanyahu, who has bragged that he spent most of his political career obstructing just that. “Everyone knows that I am the one who for decades blocked the establishment of a Palestinian state that would endanger our existence,” he said in February 2024.
While Netanyahu was wooing Trump with his Nobel nomination letter in Washington, other Israeli officials were brazen in describing their plans for the forced mass displacement of civilians in Gaza. The defense minister, Israel Katz, described a proposal to concentrate Palestinians in the territory into an internment camp on the ruins of the southern city of Rafah.
As Netanyahu fawned over Trump, the Israeli leader’s allies were laying out a blueprint for committing new war crimes.
Mohamad Bazzi is the director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies and a journalism professor at New York University
