Eurasia Press & News
Amid the immediate joy of the hostage families, and the victorious crowing of the American President, Gaza’s peace plan may yet produce a long truce. Beyond the politicking of outsiders — Donald Trump’s quest for personal glory, Qatar’s desire to draw closer to the White House — fatigue among the combatants has brought an end to the fighting for now. And from a distance, certainly, neither Hamas nor the Palestinians envisioned the damage Jerusalem would unleash after militants slaughtered and kidnapped Israeli civilians two years ago.
Contrary to the way this agreement has been sold by the White House and Benjamin Netanyahu, then, it offers Hamas an opportunity to assess, while not being bombed, the ways and means for it to continue its rule over Gaza. Given the carnage, the Islamist outfit will likely remain on a tightrope, playing Palestinian hatred of Israel off against the desolation it has provoked. Islamic history offers a long record of martyrdom losing its appeal when the unrighteous prove stronger and more fierce than expected. Hamas is calculating that with both Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners safely exchanged, fear of a long-lasting insurgency will keep it in power. It’s a decent bet.
With any luck, the 250 Palestinians in jail for life, and who are now being released, might also reenergise the resistance. Hamas’ stubborn fearsomeness, fortified by all those tunnels, has certainly guaranteed that outsiders will approach Trump’s indispensable idea of an “international stabilisation force” for post-war Gaza as a worthy recommendation best staffed by others. Are American, Emirati, Saudi, Egyptian, Jordanian, European, or, least likely of all, Palestinian Authority (PA), forces really going to patrol the Strip if Hamas fighters remain there to ambush them?
If Trump can finally get a stabilisation force into the Strip — and that’s a big if — a slow but bloody harassment would likely be enough to keep the force’s effectiveness similar to that of a typical UN peacekeeping mission: basically useless. If Qatar calls off Al Jazeera, and the Saudis tell their myriad press outlets to limit Gazan reporting, Hamas may find it hard to show the world that other Arabs are thumping on Palestinians. But that potential advantage is nonetheless unlikely to convince them from jumping into the Gaza morass, especially when everyone from the Gulfies to Egypt held their distance from the Palestinian imbroglio.
The biggest beneficiary of such a force, at least in the short term, would be the Israelis. The burden of policing Gaza would be lightened. Lots of Arabs now deal with the Jewish state, those within the Abraham Accords pretty publicly. The Gaza conflict may not have changed those exchanges much: given the private distaste that many Arab leaders have for Palestinians. The recent leaked Pentagon documents about regional cooperation against Iran and other threats since October 2023 surely reflect what’s been true since at least the First Iraq War in 1991, when many Palestinians sided with Saddam Hussein. But no Arab ruler has ever asked their soldiers to bleed for the Israelis — or the Palestinians. Across each of their four wars with Israel, Arab rulers definitely weren’t vying to create a Palestinian state. So unless the Gazans bring down Hamas from the inside, the group will likely rule the Strip’s rubble since no one else is going to volunteer.
The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) obviously need a break from two years of constant combat. Even among the most hawkish of Israelis who believe the Palestinians — not just Hamas — share the guilt for what happened on October 7, war weariness is almost universal. In Gaza and on the West Bank, Israel hit the ceiling of how much manpower it can continuously deploy. It’s now crystal clear that most Israelis adamantly don’t want to reoccupy Gaza. Most Israelis would probably love to see an international stabilisation force move in, even if such a deployment curtailed Israeli actions. Jerusalem obviously can’t trust Cairo to keep arms from crossing over the Egyptian-Gaza border. The Israelis might trust the Americans to stop arms from flowing through Hamas tunnels, but that would mean turning US troops, who would have to build a substantial security perimeter, into both an occupying force and a target for Hamas.
“It’s now crystal clear that most Israelis adamantly don’t want to reoccupy Gaza.”Limited Israeli occupation therefore still seems inevitable. Walling off the Palestinians in Gaza didn’t work brilliantly before. Rebuilding the Strip will offer ample opportunity to Hamas, or indeed other militants, to divert materials for underground bunkers. Unless the Israelis can check everything that comes into the Strip, Hamas or others could also begin to reconstitute crude but deadly missiles and mortars. The opportunities here for corruption and anti-Israeli sympathies, especially if Arab forces given policing duties, would surely be more than Israel could bear. Jerusalem might accept Americans, maybe Europeans, to verify Palestinian behaviour. But if Hamas regains freedom of movement throughout all of Gaza — if Israel doesn’t have internal checkpoints from which to launch rapid operations — the IDF could once again find itself committing much larger forces later: with all the death and destruction that’ll inevitably entail. Without a Western-led stabilisation force, willing to commit to years in Gaza, the Israelis will somehow need to fill the void.
All the while, Israelis hope the cessation of hostilities will make their country less of a pariah. They have traditionally had a close relationship with Europe, and would eagerly welcome less hostility. Images of Gaza in rubble likely won’t animate as much anger as those of active urban warfare. All Israelis would like to see the erosion of American support stopped; Netanyahu has no interest in bushwhacking the President’s peace-making. Trump’s current Gaza plans, as vague as they are, seem to be less delusional than his first-draft, “Las-Vegas-by-the-Sea” dreamscape. The harsh realities of postwar Gaza will tax Trump’s attention span, however, especially once it becomes obvious the stabilisation force has zero chance of working without US troops entering harm’s way. Nor will a ceasefire resuscitate the lost affection on the American Left for Israel, especially worrying when their critiques increasingly cut to the very heart of the Zionist project. Pro-Israeli sympathies on the American Right may be somewhat safer — unless Trump actually sends US troops off on yet another Middle Eastern adventure.
For the moment, then, all Trump has actually achieved so far is the hostage-prisoner exchange. Netanyahu has agreed to the release of several stone-cold killers, though drew a red line at Marwan Barghouti, a significant player in the Second Intifada whom an Israeli court found guilty of the murder of five Israelis. Politically talented even behind bars, and fluent in Hebrew, Barghouti is undeniably charismatic. Since he’s been in jail for 23 years, he’s also untouched by the rampant malversation that defines the Palestinian Authority under Mahmoud Abbas, Yasser Arafat’s successor.
Were Barghouti freed, he might try to force new presidential and legislative elections. Palestinian democracy died in 2006, when Fatah, the most powerful member of the secular Palestinian Liberation Organisation, refused to recognise Hamas’s victory in legislative elections: something Fatah achieved with the approval of both Israel and the United States. Today, though, Barghouti might well triumph in a similar vote.
With more access to the press, Barghouti could make a lot of noise in favour of a two-state solution; unlike a growing number of Palestinians, and just about all Israelis, he still seems to like the idea. Israelis surely fear his disruptive potential: even without an election victory, Barghouti might be able to engineer a third intifada on the West Bank, especially when violence by Jewish settlers only ever seems to worsen. The IDF and the internal security service, Shin Bet, have deployed a lot of manpower to the far side of the Jordan to ensure that another insurrection doesn’t happen.
Most Israelis and Palestinians, let alone all those in the West who’ve watched the Gaza war with horror, will surely cheer if the bloodletting truly ceases. It’s likely, however, that what’s left of the Hamas leadership and Netanyahu, the IDF, and Shin Bet are all looking down the road, trying to figure out how “peace” might reward the enemy. In his peacenik aspirations, President Trump appears well-intentioned. But good intentions really don’t matter, least of all in the Holy Land. Money doesn’t actually matter that much either, once the fighting actually starts. If it did, the Sunni Arab Gulf states would be powerhouses, easily a match for Iran and capable of suppressing Yemen’s ragtag Houthis.
As for Gaza and the West Bank, the preeminent question today is whether the Palestinians’ physical and emotional exhaustion leads them to recalculate the costs of their beliefs and actions. They have by far lost the most since October 7, 2023. If they have changed, and that finally depletes Hamas’s reserves of manpower, then Trump’s diplomacy might actually be the start of something positive, far-Right Israeli intransigence notwithstanding. Then again, optimism is usually a very bad bet in the Middle East.
