The Four Horsemen of Farce

Picture four horsemen galloping toward a geopolitical cliff. One horse carries a polished ringmaster; another, a reality-TV tycoon playing diplomat; a third, a finance minister with a bulldozer complex; and the fourth, a national-security minister handing out rifles as if they were parade candy.

From a Palestinian perspective, the coordinated—and individual—interventions of Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu, Itamar Ben-Gvir, and Bezalel Smotrich have not simply intensified hardship. They have helped turn what was presented as a temporary military occupation into a more permanent legal, physical, and political reality—one marked by existential absurdity.

Welcome to the Fantastic Four of Farce: a disastrous quartet whose idea of “policy” leaves wreckage in its wake.

As finance minister, with unusually expansive authority over parts of the occupied West Bank, Smotrich has played the role of suburban developer with a god complex. Palestinians see the project for what it is: a deliberate bureaucratic machine designed to fragment the West Bank into disconnected, nonviable enclaves.

The practical effect is grimly straightforward. Restrict movement, undermine economic continuity, expand settlements, and make the territorial basis for a viable Palestinian state increasingly remote. In that landscape, ordinary travel, commerce, family life, and civic planning become exercises in navigating a maze whose walls are continually being moved.

Then there is the national-security minister, a man who appears to regard more firepower as the answer to every social and political conflict. Ben-Gvir’s policies and rhetoric have emboldened far-right settler groups and promoted wider civilian access to weapons.

For Palestinians living near settlements and outposts, the consequences are not abstract: more intimidation, more property damage, more violence, and more pressure on vulnerable rural communities to leave. When armed ideological movements are given greater latitude and political cover, “security” becomes a word that can conceal insecurity for everyone else.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is the duct tape holding these volatile elements together. In order to preserve a fragile ruling coalition, he has repeatedly accommodated the demands of his far-right ministers, allowing them extraordinary influence over conditions on the ground.

The irony is hard to miss. Netanyahu can present a composed, statesmanlike face in international forums, including the United Nations, while his dependence on Smotrich and Ben-Gvir helps ensure that a two-state outcome is not merely stalled but actively made harder to imagine. He is trying to put out a fire with gasoline—while smiling for the cameras.

Trump completes the quartet: the reality-TV tycoon cast as diplomat. His approach to the conflict has repeatedly treated fundamental questions of rights, sovereignty, displacement, and international law as though they were bargaining chips in a televised deal.

That style of politics rewards spectacle over accountability. It gives powerful actors permission to frame coercion as pragmatism and unilateralism as peace-making. For Palestinians, the message is familiar: their future may be discussed at the highest levels while their agency is treated as optional.

Trump, Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir, and Smotrich have woven together a record of contradiction, cruelty, and logistical absurdity so profound that it seems to defy political gravity.

They may believe they are building a legacy of strength. In reality, they are constructing a monument to myopia—one that makes peace more distant, deepens dispossession, and ensures that the Palestinian struggle is not erased but sharpened into an even more undeniable reality.

To the architects of this catastrophe: your plans are as flimsy as your moral claims. Your “peace” is a punchline, and your legacy risks becoming a cautionary tale about hubris, impunity, and the human cost of treating domination as strategy.

May the horses carry you somewhere worse than the cliff toward which you keep guiding everyone else.

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