Photo: Michael Kappeler/dpa/picture alliance via Getty Images
The cease-fire between Israel and Hamas is still holding, at least for now. The 20 living Israeli hostages in Gaza have been welcomed home and have begun to share their horrifying stories — though the timeline for the return of the remains of two dozen former hostages who died in captivity is still far from clear. Nearly 2,000 Palestinians held prisoner by Israel — including 1,700 people detained without charges during the war — have been released and some are sharing their stories, as well. And in a speech to the Knesset on Monday, President Donald Trump proclaimed the end of the Gaza war and heralded “the historic dawn of a new Middle East” before heading to Egypt for a peace summit with 20 world leaders regarding the future of Gaza. Trump isn’t happy with his new Time cover but is otherwise basking in the news of his success as a peacemaker and racking up plaudits wide and far — even from Joe Biden. Meanwhile, the sticky details of the rest of the peace process are up in the air, and the debate over what can and will come next rages on. Here’s a roundup of some of the latest commentary and analysis.
What will the new normal be in Israel?
Local Call’s Oren Ziv writes for +972 Mag about the road ahead for Israelis now that the hostages are home:
Many now hope for a return to normalcy. But there are serious obstacles to that hope — chief among which is the catastrophe Israel has wrought in Gaza. Israeli society, aided by the mainstream media, has largely managed to ignore the genocide and the dire humanitarian situation created by Israel’s onslaught. Even after two years, most Israelis are wilfully unaware of the full extent of Israel’s crimes in the Strip. Others do know and blame it all on Hamas.
They now hope Israel’s international isolation will fade, that solidarity protests with Palestine will cease, and that everything can go back to how it was on Oct. 6, 2023. But that seems unlikely. When Gaza will be reopened to international media in the near future, reports of the horrors committed there will continue making headlines. And the millions around the world who have been horrified by the daily massacres will not forgive or forget in a hurry.
Some of the hostages released in previous ceasefires tried to warn the Israeli public about Gaza’s condition, revealing in interviews that their greatest fear in captivity was not their captors but the Israeli army’s airstrikes that threatened their lives. Small groups of radical left-wing activists also tried to break the wall of denial, regularly holding photos of Palestinian children killed in Gaza on the sidelines of hostage protests, or demonstrating at the fence encaging the Strip. They, too, were met with violence from both police and the right-wing public.
But even internally, Israel will struggle to return to “normal” after two years of war. Over 450 soldiers were killed in Gaza, on top of the 1,200 soldiers and civilians killed on October 7. Many thousands more are severely traumatized. Evacuees in the south and north have yet to return to their homes. Kibbutzim attacked on October 7 have seen little real rebuilding.
Is Trump’s vanity a pathway to peace?
At the Conversation, University of Birmingham international-politics professor David Hastings Dunn notes that “aspiration is no substitute for detailed agreement and at this point Trump’s claims appear to be a case of premature congratulation” — though he suspects some of the world leaders who attended Trump’s peace summit are also playing a longer game with their flattery:
The French president, Emmanuel Macron, UK prime minister, Keir Starmer and Canada’s Mark Carney might be forgiven for wondering why their presence was required as extras in this performative political theatre. Behind their smiles and applause, they must have been acutely aware that such optics are damaging to the way they are viewed by their domestic public and press — and that their presence there will be criticised as evidence of supplication to Trump’s adulation. The presence in Sharm el Sheikh of Hungary’s Victor Orban added to the impression that Trump had gathered what he considers his fan club to Egypt.
Most notably, they are keen for Trump to embrace his self-identification as a “peacemaker” in order to pressure the Russian president Vladimir Putin to end his aggressive war against Ukraine. Like most second-term US presidents Trump is concerned for his legacy. If flattering his ego into directing his energies towards this end achieves this goal, then their part in this iteration of the Trump Show should probably be judged by history as worthwhile.
Is Hamas really going to disarm and demobilize?
It’s a major part of Trump’s peace plan and one with far-from-certain prospects for success, as former National Security Council counterterrorism director Javid Ali explained to ABC News:
Ali said it’s going to take a great deal of time before Hamas lays down its weapons as required in Trump’s proposal. “It’s still not clear who is going to actually oversee that demobilization, demilitarization, whether it’s the Israel Defense Forces or this international security body that’s still not comprised and on the ground,” Ali said.
Ali said there have been other examples throughout world history of rebel groups cooperating with peace accords after long periods of fighting. He noted that the Irish Republican Army did so in the late 1990s after a long struggle with the British government, and that the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, a guerrilla group also known as FARC, agreed to disarm in 2016 after signing a ceasefire accord with the Colombian government.
“You literally have to account for the fighters, the people who would take up arms for these organizations, ensure that they don’t have the weapons and the capabilities to conduct and further acts of terrorism or militant operations,”
Palestine’s future can’t be dictated by outsiders
In an essay at The New Yorker, Palestinian journalist Mohammed R. Mhawish explains the political reality on the ground in Gaza and insists that self-determination is the only viable path forward
Reconstruction that restores roads but not representation will only re-create dependency. The next phase of Gaza’s life must be shaped by those who have lived through its collapse. If the world tries to govern Gaza from abroad, Palestinians must insist on governing themselves from within. The rubble is already being cleared for a new administration. The question is whether Palestinians can transform the ruins of a political order into the foundation of another that belongs to them.
In December, 2023, an Israeli air strike destroyed my home in Gaza, and it collapsed on top of me and my family. I fled to Egypt in 2024, and have been living in exile since. I have lost family members in Gaza. I have lost friends and colleagues. Even so, I count myself among those who have lost the least. I am not asking for pity, or charity, or anything in return. None of us is. The world will not make it up to us, and we are not waiting for it to try. What matters now is a restoration of Gaza’s political life. In my lifetime, Palestinian political participation has been almost nonexistent. Older generations in Gaza have voted once or twice, but I have never had the chance to take part in any political exercise. Most young people have had no say in who leads them or how policy is made in Gaza or in the West Bank. The only thing we ask for now is the right to chart our own political future on our own terms.
There is no faster poison than despair declared permanent. For Palestinians, refugee camps have hardened into towns, and checkpoints into landmarks. The ration boxes meant to feed the hungry have become a generation’s economy. We grew up knowing walls better than schools. We were instructed to believe that ruins were homes, breadlines were governance, and silent misery was “calm.” Fear has been institutionalized—budgeted, distributed, sold as peace. Submission was repackaged as maturity. The cruellest occupation is not of land but of the imagination.
We as Palestinians are often congratulated for our resilience. It has become the badge pinned on us—the costume of the noble victim. Our ability to breathe under rubble is praised as a virtue, when it’s actually an indictment of the world that put us there. If it does not lead to freedom, resilience delivers only another day of captivity. Survival is the most meagre inheritance. To call us resilient is to praise the caged bird while ignoring the cage’s latch. Surviving destruction is not the same as defeating it. There’s cruelty in this praise. It tells the world to marvel at our strength while ignoring the cost paid in blood and hunger. Our pain is romanticized, and our survival treated as the whole story—when it is only the beginning.
Read the rest of Mwhaish’s essay here.
Maybe there’s hope, too
The Atlantic’s Graeme Wood spoke with 76-year-old Palestinian philosopher and former Al-Quds University president Sari Nusseibeh:
Israel demands that Hamas disarm and vanish. Hamas still refuses. I told Nusseibeh I feared that the hiatus would not last, that Hamas would pop up from the rubble and blow up an Israeli military vehicle, and that the war would resume. He chided me for my pessimism: Hamas had little to gain from spoiling the peace at this point, and the Israelis would not be foolish enough to expose themselves to attacks of this sort. (A U.S. official in Israel told me that keeping Israel from responding to such a provocation is a high-priority task assigned to Secretary of State and National Security Adviser Marco Rubio.) The Trump plan calls for a force, made up of “Arab and international” partners, to keep the peace under the guidance of the United States military, and a “technocratic, apolitical Palestinian committee” to run Gaza.
Nusseibeh told me he felt a “paradoxical optimism” after the catastrophe of Gaza, and thought the new temporary government had “a good chance” of not returning to war soon. “We have paid an enormous price,” he told me. “Israelis have too. But that means people will be willing to look at things differently.” Now it was time to lightly chide his former self. “Before, everyone—including me—believed we could have a two-state solution overnight,” he said. Now, he said, no one could fool himself into thinking that peace could be effortlessly maintained, or that statehood could come suddenly. The security framework now coming into focus, he said, might work. And if it does, it could create new possibilities, including in the West Bank. He acknowledged the weirdness of how this path became possible, by the efforts of “this strange guy in the White House” who came from nowhere, “like Superman,” somehow imagining what can be, unburdened by what has been. Previous presidents hadn’t done much.
I am not used to being told by Palestinians to cheer up. Nusseibeh expressed concerns, too, particularly that Gaza, although newly peaceful, might end up permanently split from the West Bank. But his contemplation of the possibilities of the current moment was not a daydream.
Has Israel lost the American public?
At Foreign Policy, Michael Koplow says a reckoning is now at hand:
The Gaza war has brought a seismic shift in Americans’ relationship to Israel. Polls show a majority of U.S. voters now oppose military support for Israel, while a plurality sympathize more with Palestinians than Israelis and believe that Israel intentionally kills civilians. Among Democrats, it has become increasingly mainstream to advocate restrictions on security assistance to Israel. And the most influential voices in the MAGA-verse — from Tucker Carlson to Steve Bannon to Candace Owens — speak about Israel in dark terms as a drain on U.S. resources. There is little question that the U.S.-Israel relationship is going to change. The only question is how much.
While the Gaza war was going on, it was easy to dismiss Israel’s faltering status as a short-term dip driven by the daily news images and to argue that everything would go back to the status quo ante with the war’s end. Now that the war is over, Israelis are likely to discover that the opinions developed by many Americans over the past two years will not easily dissipate. Israelis will have to develop new ways to explain their country to Americans, new arguments for why Israel is an important and worthy ally, and new strategies for operating in a world where U.S. support is not necessarily as fulsome or automatic.
Israel may be able to win over some of the skeptics on the question of Israel’s strategic value. This will be particularly true if improved relationships between Israel and its neighbors allow the United States to reduce its presence in the Middle East and if Israel is seen, as with Russia during the Cold War, as a critical bulwark against China.
It will be harder to convince skeptics about Israel’s democratic values and participation in the rules-based order amid genocide accusations, International Criminal Court indictments of Israeli leaders, and the ongoing effort of the Israeli right to pursue annexation and transfer in the West Bank. If Israeli leaders rely on the old saws about Israel being the only democracy in the Middle East or the Israel Defense Forces being the most moral army in the world without making a genuine shift in policy, they will only compound the problems that the country is already facing.
Succeeding where Biden failed
[A] stark question facing Democrats is why the Biden administration could not achieve a version of this agreement during the entirety of 2024. Jake Sullivan and Antony Blinken, the architects of Biden’s foreign policy, must answer for their failure. More crucially, though, Democrats must consider why Biden himself could not do more. One discomforting possibility is that the elderly president simply wasn’t mentally fit enough to conduct aggressive foreign policy. Biden’s capacity was much diminished — this was apparent as early as 2022, though most Democrats pretended otherwise — and it’s in the foreign arena in which an executive’s weakness is most felt. Domestically, presidents can farm out a good deal of governing to advisers, Cabinet members, and congressional leaders. Top Biden aides like Ron Klain and Jeff Zients could effectively serve as shadow presidents, working in concert with Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi. Abroad, the president as an individual matters much more. If Biden himself cannot cajole or threaten Netanyahu, his aides can only do so much.
This does not absolve Blinken, Biden’s secretary of State, or Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser. There’s little evidence to suggest they were ever willing to pressure Netanyahu and force him to pull back. Biden had great reverence for Israel, and he could never evolve to understand that Netanyahu commanded a reactionary government. His aides weren’t up for convincing him of this reality, either. As Biden faded, Netanyahu escalated the war, and he never feared Biden might come to treat Israel for what it is: an American client state. Trump still defers far too much to Netanyahu, but he began to grow impatient in the past few months. The war in Gaza wasn’t benefiting Trump politically. He had become interested in winning the Nobel Peace Prize, and sometimes venal self-interest can do a little good. Without such a laurel dangling in front of Trump, he might not have tried so hard.
Read the rest of Ross’s column here.
Will Trump now be inspired to seek peace at home?
CNN’s Stephen Collinson doubts that Trump has learned much from his peacemaking success abroad that could prompt him to take a more moderate approach to domestic politics:
Given the track record of an acerbic president obsessed with vengeance and slaying establishments, it’s probably too much to hope that he might become a leader who heals domestic divides rather than slashing open new ones. Indeed, there were signs that Trump has concluded from his big win that he needs to be even less cognizant of the rule of law than he already has been. …
Trump seems happier in the company of corrupt Middle East despots who, like him, have no compunctions about mixing personal business and political interests than with democratic allied leaders. “I like the tough people better than I like the soft, easy ones. I don’t know what the hell that is,” Trump quipped in Egypt. “That’s a personality problem, I suspect.”
His contempt for the law also shone through a stunning moment in his speech to the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, when he urged President Isaac Herzog to pardon Netanyahu — who denies corruption after facing allegations of taking gifts from overseas businessmen. “Cigars and champagne, who the hell cares,” he said.
Trump’s Middle East triumph is the kind of legacy win that can change presidents. But his reverence for unconstrained power and his envy of leaders immune from legal and political constraints that he’s eroded — but that still exist in the United States — explain why it probably won’t.
After all, he really doesn’t want to change.
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