US president-elect Donald Trump’s picks for key national security and foreign relations cabinet positions have not gone down well with Washington’s Muslim partners in the Middle East and South Asia.
That is in stark contrast to Israel, which has been delighted at Trump’s appointments of staunch supporters of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to annex the occupied Palestinian territories.
Trump’s appointments and nominations thus far were “very good news for Israel’s hardliners”, said Hussein Ibish, a senior resident scholar of the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington think tank.
Trump’s nominees for the US ambassadors to Israel and the United Nations, Mike Huckabee and Elise Stefanik respectively, and “pretty much all the others are not just fans of Israel, but supporters of a greater Israeli state and annexation”, he told This Week In Asia.
So “if you think” that occupation, colonisation and annexation are good for Israel, then these selections were “excellent news”, said Ibish, who described Trump’s cabinet picks as “terrible for the Palestinian people and the prospects of their human and national rights”.
These developments are likely alarming to Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and Jordan’s King Abdullah, leaders of the first Arab states to have normalised relations with Israel three decades ago, because it augurs the mass expulsion of Palestinians from embattled Gaza and the West Bank into both countries, thereby threatening their political and economic stability.
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