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| A drone view shows a thank-you message to President Donald Trump near the U.S. Consulate in Tel Aviv on Monday. (Ilan Rosenberg/Reuters) |
| The whirlwind victory lap had many moments of exultation. President Donald Trump greeted Israeli hostages freed from Hamas captivity after he helped broker a ceasefire deal that saw their release. He basked in applause at the dais of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, for his support of Israel and vision for peace. And he soaked up praise from fellow world leaders during a brief summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, where dignitaries discussed Trump’s proposed 20-point peace plan for the region. At the Knesset, Trump spoke of his achievements with his usual ahistoricity. “This long and difficult war has now ended. You know, some people say 3,000 years, some people say 500 years,” he said. “Whatever it is, it’s the granddaddy of them all. This is the historic dawn of a new Middle East.” The joy of the hostages’ friends and family members — and the palpable relief among many Palestinians in the war-blighted Gaza Strip that two years of agony and despair may be coming to an end — are rightly worth celebrating. But, as Trump resumed meetings in Washington on Tuesday, any belief in a new dawn is premature. The Israeli military said it opened fire on Palestinians whom they accused of approaching troop positions, while Israel said it would slash the number of aid trucks allowed into the territory amid the phased release by Hamas of the remains of a number of deceased hostages. Some among Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition wanted to see the total defeat and disappearance of Hamas, but the faction endures, and has set about violently cracking down on local opponents in Gaza. No Israeli or Hamas officials attended the conference in Egypt.
The focus in Western circles remains on the future of Hamas and the demilitarization of its fighting force. Trump indicated Tuesday that the faction will be disarmed, even by force, if need be. Hamas officials fear Israel using the ceasefire as a mere pause before reviving its punishing campaign, and wanted guarantees in writing that Israel would not resume the war, according to my colleagues. Trump administration officials balked at the demand, but gave verbal assurances to regional intermediaries Egypt, Qatar and Turkey that Israel would relent. Much has been made of Trump’s ability to pressure Netanyahu into accepting a truce, no matter the desire of the Israeli leader’s far-right allies to continue the war and fully vanquish Hamas. But analysts suspect Netanyahu may find his way back into conflict as his unpopular government prepares for elections in 2026. The Israeli public rallied around the plight of the hostages and the trauma of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel, but the postwar prospects of Netanyahu — who is facing ongoing corruption trials and is reviled by a segment of the electorate — are gloomy. As has been the case for much of Netanyahu’s career, the continued antagonism of Hamas may provide welcome cover. “We’re entering a political year where everything is related to campaigns, and Netanyahu’s calculations may flip from caving to pressure to trying to ensure his political survival,” Nimrod Goren, the president of Mitvim, an Israeli foreign policy think tank, told Reuters. “If it turns out in four or five weeks that the general mood in the country is that this war was an awful round, but only another round, and Hamas is back, I can see Netanyahu trying to correct that,” Nimrod Novik, a distinguished fellow at the Israel Policy Forum, told the New York Times. “All you need is a Hamas provocation and a disproportionate Israeli reaction, and you can have a spiral.”
And then there’s the far thornier issue of building a genuine peace. Trump’s plan expressed a vague hope for a “credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood,” a resolution demanded by the Arab world and much of the international community. But it’s an outcome rejected by Netanyahu and his allies outright, and for which there’s little sign of momentum on the ground or any diplomatic track on the world stage. Regional leaders have conveyed to Trump the importance of reviving the moribund peace process between Israelis and Palestinians. “In our discussions with President Trump, he knows that it’s not just Gaza, it’s not just a particular political horizon,” King Abdullah II of Jordan told the BBC this week. “I mean he’s looking at bringing peace to the whole region. That doesn’t happen unless the Palestinians have a future.”
But Trump has spoken little of the aspirations of Palestinians and views the reconstruction of Gaza more as part of a real estate bonanza than a political reconciliation. Over the weekend, Mike Huckabee and David Friedman, respectively Trump’s current ambassador to Israel and his first-term envoy, appeared at an event for an Israeli charity and played a rendition of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama,” modified to reflect their pro-settler politics. Their adapted lyrics mocked the efforts of France and the United Nations to push for a two-state solution, and championed Trump’s support for Israeli claims for all the land. The tension between the convictions of the Israeli right and the reckoning sought by much of the rest of the world may only be building. “The big gap that I don’t think Trump or his team have really prepared the ground for … is the gap that exists between his administration and Israel on the one hand, versus the rest of the Arab world, on the longer-term questions, especially a pathway to a two-state solution,” Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, told my colleagues. “Trump has said he wants the Middle East transformed, with the Gaza deal and a quick expansion of the Abraham Accords paving the way for a shot next year at the Nobel Peace Prize he openly covets,” explained my colleague Karen DeYoung. “But now that he has ‘solved’ the war in Gaza, there are concerns his attention may lag and the administration may not have the bandwidth to stick with the day after.” That’s a view shared by Trump’s predecessors, who had no shortage of their own diplomatic travails. “Ending the war was the easiest step,” Barbara Leaf, assistant secretary of state for the region under the Biden administration, said in an interview with CNN. “They oversold, maybe deliberately, the move to normalization” between Israel and the Arabs, and “undersold the Palestinian statehood path.” | ||||||||||||||||||||||