Donald Trump’s obsession with winning a Nobel Peace Prize — and his recent nominations from Israel and Pakistan — is, in Kenneth Roth’s estimation, “laughable.”
Yet it’s also not entirely out of reach. The former executive director of Human Rights Watch tells Analyst News that if Trump made a seismic move — force Israel to end its genocidal assault on Gaza and help create a Palestinian state — he could, in theory, earn the world’s most prestigious peace honor.
Having served as Human Rights Watch’s chief for almost three decades, Roth has seen the best and worst of humanity. Under his leadership, the leading human rights non-governmental organization shared the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize as a founding member of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines.
Given Trump’s record of backing Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, Roth argues that reshaping his legacy to be seen as a legitimate peacemaker on the global stage would require radical action. Cutting off U.S. military aid to Israel and forcing an end to the genocide wouldn’t be enough — but leading the creation of a Palestinian state would do the trick.
“You don’t get a Nobel Peace Prize for aiding and abetting genocide and finally getting it to stop,” says Roth, who left HRW in 2022 and is now a visiting professor at Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs and author of Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments. “Will his personal ambition [and] fragile ego push him to do something that no other president has done?”
It may seem an unlikely path forward for a government that’s put Israeli interests above its own citizens’ for decades — and has, since October 2023, sponsored and defended the killing of some 200,000 Palestinians, including more than 20,000 Palestinian children. But Roth suggests that no other world leader has ever been better positioned to stand up to Israel and create a Palestinian state.
Analyst News spoke to Roth about the souring relationship between Trump and Netanyahu, the role of international law in addressing the devastation in Gaza and the misuse of antisemitism to silence criticism of Israel.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Watch the full interview on YouTube.
You served as the executive director of Human Rights Watch for 30 years. How does the humanitarian situation in Gaza compare to what you’ve seen over the years?
What is happening in Gaza today is absolutely horrible. You have a completely modern military supplied largely by the United States. And it’s using this complete superiority to pummel Palestinian civilians of Gaza — ostensibly to fight Hamas, but doing it in a way where the civilian population is a completely predictable victim of all of this.
And indeed, the Israeli government seems to be virtually indifferent to civilian suffering, and often that’s the point of its action. When it is imposing starvation for weeks or months at a time, that’s not aimed at Hamas, that’s aimed at ordinary civilians. When it bombs even a military target, it accepts that there are civilian casualties. They say they are going after some low-level Hamas fighter, that 20 civilians can be killed, and that is deemed acceptable, somehow proportionate. This shows an utter disregard for civilian life.
That’s what is so disturbing about this: that you have nothing like a fair contest. It’s almost unfair to call it a war. Hamas is there in some residual form fighting back, but mostly this is just Israel pummeling Gaza — and doing it in large part knowing, and sometimes intending, for civilians to be the target.
So you believe that Israel is deliberately targeting civilians?
Certainly with starvation, yes — that’s the whole point of it.
When Israel drops these huge 2,000-pound bombs on Palestinian neighborhoods, it knows Palestinian civilians will be killed. When it fires even on military targets, accepting a hugely disproportionate civilian toll, it is accepting this civilian death rate.
So the line between intending versus utter indifference, it’s often hard to draw — but in some ways it doesn’t matter. What Israel is doing is clearly systematic war crimes and quite fairly characterized as genocide.
Let’s take the beach cafe that was recently hit with a 500-pound bomb. I don’t know what Israel was targeting there; presumably some Hamas fighter — we never really know. But to choose such a large bomb in a cafe that was known to be filled with civilians — it’s almost impossible to imagine why that was deemed to be a proportionate civilian toll.
You can say the same thing about targeting the hospitals, where Israel always says, “Oh, there was a Hamas command center there.” They never prove this. When there is some examination of what’s there, it’s a single tunnel with a handful of rifles. Nothing that would justify depriving Palestinian civilians of urgently needed medical care in the middle of a war.
So we have to stop pretending that this is a mistake. This is clearly a very deliberate policy.
Despite the existence of international humanitarian law and institutions like the United Nations and the International Criminal Court, Israel is still getting away with it. How is this still happening?
I think there’s good reason here to think that we’re dealing with a blatant violation, but not a problem of law.
If you look at international institutions, they are all responding quite vigorously. The U.N. General Assembly has repeatedly denounced what Israel is doing. The U.N. Human Rights Council has done the same thing and is issuing numerous reports and conducting investigations. The International Court of Justice is hearing South Africa’s genocide case. The International Criminal Court has charged Prime Minister Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Gallant with war crimes of starvation and the deprivation of the civilian population.
Is there more that could be done? Yes, I’d like to see the International Criminal Court charging senior [Israeli] officials for the bombings. That hasn’t happened yet.
The Netanyahu government is able to just ignore all of this because it has a critical constituency of one, which is the U.S. president. Even Biden would periodically say, “Oh, please stop starving civilians. Please stop bombing civilians.” But he would continue to deliver U.S. military aid, with the exception of his suspension of those awful 2,000-pound bombs that were devastating neighborhoods.
Trump comes into office and renews the delivery of the 2,000-pound bombs and basically gives Netanyahu the green light. Now, in those circumstances, the Israeli government figures, we’re just going to keep plugging ahead.
We have a Trump problem. We have a U.S. president problem. Given the power of the U.S., given Israel’s extraordinary dependence on the United States, Israel is able to thumb its nose at international law and international institutions.
There is some reason to think that even Trump is souring on this. We see him differing with Netanyahu on a variety of things, whether it’s lifting the sanctions on the new Syrian authorities; cutting a deal with the Houthis that doesn’t involve any promise on their part to stop attacking Israel; negotiating with Hamas; negotiating for a while with Iran; pressing Netanyahu a couple of times for ceasefires and trying to push through a ceasefire.
So there is some tension there between Trump and Netanyahu. But Trump hasn’t really used the leverage that he has in those circumstances. That’s the problem.
The international institutions are doing what they can. But there is no international police force. There’s no international military. International law is dependent on nation-states to enforce it. And here, the state with the greatest ability to influence Israeli conduct, the U.S. government, is still giving Netanyahu a green light. So that’s the problem.
We have a Trump problem. We have a U.S. president problem. Given the power of the U.S., given Israel’s extraordinary dependence on the United States, Israel is able to thumb its nose at international law and international institutions. But we shouldn’t say this is the demise of international law. This is the utter amorality of the Trump administration, which I hope changes, but for the time being hasn’t.
What is the point of international law, then, if there’s no enforcement of it and powerful states can simply defy it?
The ability to spotlight the discrepancy between a government’s claim to respect human rights law and the often ugly reality is embarrassing. It’s shameful, it’s delegitimizing, and governments go to great lengths to avoid having that discrepancy spotlighted. It is a significant source of pressure.
In the case of Israel, we’re finding that the stigmatization of the Israeli government because of its genocide in Gaza has become extreme. We’re seeing even within the United States. Already, I think, a majority of Democratic voters are opposed to what Israel is doing and growing numbers of Republicans, too.
Israel has a real long-term problem in the United States. The fact that we can’t shut off the genocide today doesn’t mean that nothing is happening.
There is a huge loss of Israel’s esteem around the world, and most significantly, in the United States. I think we have to look at this as a work in progress — a work that is even affecting Trump. He can’t afford to be utterly indifferent to public opinion, and as public opinion says, “Why is the American government aiding and abetting genocide?” That’s a tough question to answer when you’re Trump. So I do think that Israel is in trouble.
And even Trump, who for the moment is backing Israel, is not a guy who has a long-term commitment to anything other than himself. And if he feels that his personal critical interests are not advanced by his continued support for Israel’s genocidal conduct in Gaza, he could turn on a dime, and things could be very different tomorrow. I do think the pressure is growing on Netanyahu and Trump to begin doing something differently.
How do you think this genocide will end?
Will there be a lasting ceasefire right now? That’s the first question. The long-term question is: Will there be a Palestinian state?
Trump does seem to be pushing for a ceasefire. The far-right Israeli government’s position is that we’ll stop and we’re going to push everybody into some tiny little concentration camp in some utterly ruined section of Gaza, and hold them there in decrepit conditions, hopefully until they realize that there’s no life for them in Gaza and they flee.
What the far right wants in Israel is another Nakba, another massive ethnic cleansing — so it doesn’t have to worry about Hamas because there won’t be anybody left in Gaza. That’s their dream.
Trump articulated that when he came into office. That was his idea of a Gaza Riviera: a massive war crime, a crime against humanity. Fortunately, the Egyptian and the Jordanian governments, the potential would-be recipients of these forced refugees, have said no. They want nothing to do with it. Despite their dependence on U.S. military aid, they’ve said a flat no. So Trump is not pushing this anymore. But is he going to stand up to the far right and prevent it? Unclear.
What I hope happens is that the fighting stops and people in Gaza begin to be able to rebuild their lives. That’s not going to happen without very significant financial assistance, probably from the Arab Gulf states. And are they going to plough massive money into Gaza if it’s just going to be destroyed again in another five years? Probably not.
You hear even the Saudi crown prince saying, “Look, I’d like to normalize relations with Israel. I’d like to help out here, but I need to see concrete steps for a Palestinian state.” Now, Netanyahu’s view has forever been “over my dead body.” He’s devoted his political career to avoiding that.
Again, the wild card in this is Trump. It’s almost laughable that he wants a Nobel Peace Prize. Netanyahu, who’s no dummy, goes to the White House and says, “I nominated you for a Nobel Peace Prize,” even though Netanyahu himself is the biggest obstacle to Trump getting that — because you don’t get a Nobel Peace Prize for aiding and abetting genocide and finally getting it to stop.
This is not a guy who has any love lost for the Palestinians. But he loves himself, and would that self-regard lead him to do the right thing for the wrong reason? Maybe. I think that, sadly, is our best hope at this stage.
If he wants a Nobel Peace Prize, he’s got to create a Palestinian state. And Trump knows that. Will his personal ambition and fragile ego push him to do something that no other president has done?
The reason that’s not unthinkable is that other presidents have always had to worry about being attacked from the right — particularly the Christian evangelicals, who in the United States are the biggest supporters of Israel. Trump doesn’t have to worry about attacks from the right. He owns the right. So he actually has more political leeway.
This is not a guy who has any love lost for the Palestinians. But he loves himself, and would that self-regard lead him to do the right thing for the wrong reason? Maybe. I think that, sadly, is our best hope at this stage.
The Israeli narrative is often that we’re doing this for the defense of the Jewish people, the Jewish home. As the son of a Jewish refugee who fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s, how do you feel that today Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians in the name of the Jewish people?
My father fled Nazi Germany as a 12-year-old boy in July 1938 for New York. So I grew up with stories about what it was like to be a young Jewish boy living under the Nazis. I was very aware of the evil that they did. It’s part of what pushed me to devote my career to defending human rights.
I do think there are a number of super problematic aspects here. The fact that Israel was created as a haven for the Jews after the Holocaust, after one genocide, clearly in no way justifies the second genocide. That is an utterly outrageous use of history.
Israel still hides behind this halo of: “How can we do any wrong? We are here as a refuge from the Holocaust.” But in fact, they’re doing horrible things wrong. We can no longer allow what happened to the Jews in the late ’30s and early ’40s to justify today’s awful atrocities against Palestinians.
Ironically, what many supporters of the Israeli government and the government itself do is that they charge people who criticize the Israeli government with being antisemitic. And this is such a blatant misuse of the concept.
I think we have to recognize that, today, Jews around the world are threatened by antisemitism. But when the Israeli government starts using charges of antisemitism just to defend its own atrocities in Gaza, that cheapens the concept of antisemitism at a point where it’s really needed. It basically says that defending us, the Israeli government, is more important than defending you Jews around the world.
It throws Jews around the world under the bus in the name of protecting Netanyahu.
So we have to look at the cynicism here. This is not representing the Jewish people. This is harming the Jewish people in the name of keeping Netanyahu in power and letting him avoid the corruption charges that are pending against him. It is so awfully cynical.
And the fact that he is willing to sacrifice not only tens of thousands of Palestinian lives in pursuit of his own very narrow self-interest is actually jeopardizing Jews around the world by this misuse of charges of antisemitism — this shows just the utter sick cynicism of the man Netanyahu.
