After anger comes concern. Palestinians were enraged by the Biden administration's calls for a ceasefire in Gaza, all while supplying Israel with the weapons it needed to wage its war. Now, they fear Donald Trump's return to the White House. Admittedly, on the subject of the Middle East, the president-elect had summarily declared, in April, that he wanted to "return to peace" and "stop killing people." Yet he risks doing so in a way that exclusively benefits the Israelis, alongside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with whom he spoke again at his Mar-a-Lago residence, in Florida, in July.

"Netanyahu has stalled until Trump's election, and it paid off. Now there's nothing standing in his way," said Palestinian political scientist Nour Odeh, adding: "He can wage his war as he sees fit, especially as he has just sacked his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, who had opposed him. As for Trump, he's not interested in the Palestinian Authority [PA], the state of which is getting worse all the time, nor in a dialogue with Mahmoud Abbas, because they've already fallen out. He's going to do whatever Israel wants. And international law won't hold him back any more than American law will."

Just like his peers in Arab countries, the PA's president was quick to congratulate the Republican candidate. In a statement released on Wednesday, Abbas "expressed his aspiration to work with President Trump for peace and security in the region," and said he was "confident that the United States will support, under your leadership, the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people." Yet there was little chance that his message would have any effect across the Atlantic. Things had certainly gotten off to a good start between Trump and Abbas, the patriarch of the Mouqata'a, the PA's headquarters in Ramallah. Trump has said he remembers their first meeting, in 2017, at the end of which he had described Abbas as "almost like a father."

Yet by the following year, 2018, the relationship between the two men had soured, due to a series of blunt measures from Washington: Cutting off US contributions to the UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees; suspending the $200 million annual aid payments to the PA; and moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The final blow came in January 2020, when the White House presented a "peace plan" that legalized almost all of the Jewish settlements in the West Bank, and cemented Jerusalem as being under Israel's exclusive authority.

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