|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
By Meir Jolovitz
The Art of the Deal, ‘Principle #4: Know Your Target Audience’.
It’s the fourth of eleven principles that make up Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal – first published in 1987 and fast establishing him as a household name, long before he became the president who was the self-proclaimed “master negotiator.” It is the one principle that we ought to be concerned about. We’ll get to that in a moment.
But first, a parable.
President Donald Trump visits the Middle East, accompanied by his wife Melania, as he seeks to negotiate a peaceful resolution to the conflict between Arabs and Israelis, and Israelis and Palestinian Arabs. After all – for Trump, every problem has a solution, and everything is negotiable. Especially for him, with his eleven winning negotiating principles. The only question: Do those principles apply to the Middle East?
President Trump takes a stroll through the Arab market, the shuk full of every imaginable product that one might want. For Trump, it is a fancy carpet. When the president walks by a shop specializing in carpets, he tells his wife to stand aside, and watch him do his magic with the merchant who was barking out the prices. “Five thousand shekels!” Trump approaches, points to the carpet and barks back: “One thousand shekels.” The Arab merchant, seeing that he has a customer who seems to want desperately that particular carpet, begins the negotiations. “Four thousand shekels.” Trump, with a wink directed at Melania offers a loud “Two thousand shekels.”
The carpet merchant, feigning a bit of anger at the westerner’s low bid, responds: “Three thousand shekels.” Trump, a self-professed negotiator par-excellence offers a final bid: “Two thousand five hundred shekels, and not a shekel more!” The Arab – with a look of defeat on his face – surrenders the exchange and accepts President Trump’s offer of two thousand five hundred shekels. The president – proud of his accomplishment – pays the merchant who rolls up the carpet for an easier carry, and walks up to Melania and whispers, “See, I told you. I just bought a five thousand shekel carpet for half the price” – as they walk away beaming with a self-congratulatory pride, anxious to hold a press conference to announce proof of his success as the master negotiator everywhere in the world.
The Arab merchant goes home early, and as he enters his home, looks at his wife and proclaims: “You aren’t going to believe – I sold a rug that was worth fifty shekels for two thousand five hundred shekels to some western fool desperately shopping for a carpet.”
That is the art of the deal – as it is practiced – by the Arab Middle East. Where the world’s foremost negotiator was bested because he failed to understand his own ‘Principle #4: Know Your Target Audience’.
Trump does not.
This is not a parable, it is a true story, in evidence every time a western diplomat engages in negotiations with the real masters of political chicanery.
Let’s address first the preamble to the issue at hand – the very role of negotiating a settlement to the hostage crisis in the forefront of the current multi-front war that Israel is prosecuting – whether it be a temporary tactical cease-fire, or a long-term strategic end of hostilities. Or – as Trump is quick to proclaim about Gaza: the one deal leads to the others. And then peace ought to logically follow.
Even with Israel’s greatest friend now re-occupying the White House there is much cause to be uneasy.
It all begins with President Donald Trump’s belief that all things – all problems – can be negotiated. The Trumpian version of conflict resolution is the skill and the savvy to push the right buttons at the right time with the right offers, concessions and counter-concessions.
-Perhaps. In the New York real estate world. Not so the Middle East.
-Perhaps. With like-minded, well-intentioned, western minds. Not so with those breast-fed or otherwise weaned on an Islamic genocidal religious ideology.
Fact: In negotiations, it is always the side that is most desperate for settlement that is, axiomatically, the weaker party. Both sides know it, and it is everywhere in evidence; but never more than in the endeavor to end hostile conflict by the party that seeks “peace at any cost’.
An example: the delusional Leftist protestors in the streets of Israel demonstrating against the Netanyahu government are Exhibit 1 – willing to have Israel sacrifice anything to quiet the Arabs; undeniably true, but only a footnote to this analysis.
Donald Trump, certainly the best American president the Jewish State has ever known, campaigned as the one person who can end conflicts – wars – everywhere in the world. He has frequently referred to himself as a “unifier” and “peace-maker” – somewhat naïvely, as it seems to the fact that wars have always been an endemic element of human (and therefore, international) relations.
We submit the following as Exhibit 2:
Trump begins a second term as president with great expectations. Expectations that he has set for himself. Noble and quite daring promises, they will not be fulfilled. A world free of conflict. First of all, the odds are against him. The historical record – as a precedent – is quite clear. Will and Ariel Durant offered this in “The Lessons of History”, published in 1968: “War is one of the constants of history, and has not diminished with civilization or democracy. In the last 3,421 years of recorded history only 268 have seen no war.” Allow me to update those numbers: It is now, in 2025, “in the last 3478 years, only 268 have seen no war.”
Donald Trump will end his second tenure in office with this: In the last 3482 years, only 268 years will still remain the number that will have seen no war. The president – and his team of foreign policy advisors and decision-makers – can help bring a measure of quiet to the Middle East. They cannot force – or even successfully broker – a real peace. And yet, he seems committed to the task.
Peace – in the Middle East. With Israel surrounded by enemies looking for a good deal that will only weaken Israel.
Donald Trump recently appointed Steve Witkoff as the US Special Envoy to the Middle East. An absolute pro in dealing with the Manhattan real estate market, and an absolute amateur dealing with the quest for that elusive peace in the Middle East – notwithstanding that Qatar seems at the epicenter of both.
Witkoff has read everything that one needs to read about the commercial real estate industry – and perhaps, as well, the book penned by his dear friend Donald Trump. He has not read the Koran – penned by the implacable enemies of the Jewish State. It is the one that is read, re-read, and memorized by the very people with whom he has brokered real estate deals, and with whom he is now negotiating the fate of innocent hostages held captives by less than innocent savages.
Savages that Qatar helped finance. They are one and the same.
Witkoff, in step with the thinking of his new boss, believes everything is negotiable. Both simply believe that all the right buttons need to be pushed – an evolutionary process that will shepherd one from a state of war to a normalization of relations, and then to a possible, or probable, peace.
We will spare for a future op-ed the longer discussion of why intelligent people can be so stupid, or why so many smart and decent people end up on the wrong side of right. Hint: it lies somewhere as the axis between gullibility and delusion.
Which brings us to the disastrous and ill-fated hostage deal – already described by the US president this past week as “the first step to a Middle East peace” and described once by his designated envoy as “a peace deal.” It is neither. It is certainly not the “there will be Hell to pay” that the president threatened several times if the hostages were not released before January 20. It is instead an absolute lifeline to Hamas.
Intellectual integrity would demand that few would argue with that.
Trump is a pit bull. In every good sense. Witkoff, his special envoy and soon to be the lead diplomat to the matter of Iran (as Trump announced this past week as well) – is a poodle. In every bad sense. An occasional mouthpiece for his boss, his star is ascending. While taking a victory lap on a terribly misbegotten deal, they both continue to shower praise on Qatar and Egypt – two players whose very involvement in ‘all-matters-Gaza’ is an injurious stab in the back of Israel.
For over a year these disreputable brokers of negotiations for the hostages have been inundated with ovations – first by Team Biden and now by Team Trump – for having participated in the ongoing discussions of the deal. Yes, they were indeed prominent in getting Israel to spend two thousand five hundred shekels for a fifty shekel rug.
Egypt allowed the shipments of Qatari arms to reach Hamas via tunnels, Qatar financed Hamas. Both refuse to take in Gazans. Israel paid for all that with over 800 soldiers’ lives, thousands of wounded, and hundreds taken hostage.
On January 22, in an interview with Fox News, Steve Witkoff was asked to comment on the statement made to The New York Times by Hamas’s Abu Marzouk, who said: “We’re prepared for dialogue with America and achieving understandings on everything.” And the poodle responded with “I think it’s good if it is accurate; I think President Trump’s policy ‘peace through strength’ – they work.” Some Hell to pay!
Lost in that same interview was this confession by Witkoff: “We (the Trump Administration) had nothing to do with the mathematics behind the prison release, the hostage release. That was set eleven, twelve, months ago under the Biden Administration. Our job was to speed up the process.”
Quite a revelatory confession indeed!
Yes, let’s recall Trump’s ‘Principle #4: Know Your Target Audience’, and translate the Arab doublespeak, because neither he nor his real estate confidant seem to understand it: you do not know the Arab merchants with whom you do business.
In his magnum opus, Donald Trump wrote the following: “Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That’s how I get my kicks.”
In the coming years, we do not need Trump – who is indeed a true and proven friend to the Jewish State – to get his kicks by pressuring Israel into negotiations with, say, Saudi Arabia, which has already informed us that its opening salvo to any discussions will be based on pursuing the feasibility of establishing a two-state delusion. That, of course, would reward the very people who celebrated Hamas – before, and after, October 7.
That is a carpet – like the bad deal – no one should want to buy.
Meir Jolovitz is a past national executive director of the Zionist Organization of America, and formerly associated with the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies.
