The theatrics of the Gaza ceasefire deal, led by Trump and backed by complicit Arab nations, will not lay the groundwork for genuine liberation
David Hearst is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Middle East Eye. He is a commentator and speaker on the region and analyst on Saudi Arabia. He was the Guardian’s foreign leader writer, and was correspondent in Russia, Europe, and Belfast.
Cross-posted from Middle East Eye
Photo licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
When US President Donald Trump went off script in his latest speech to the Knesset, he revealed much more than was good for his administration’s interests, or Israel’s.
This was designed to be a victory lap for the two men – the emperor, Trump, and his proconsul, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
They were celebrating a victory not just over Hamas in Gaza, or Hezbollah in Lebanon, or the Revolutionary Guard in Iran – but over the last 3,000 years of history, whether real or biblical.
Giorgia Meloni, the Italian prime minister who was to meet Trump a few hours later in Egypt’s Sharm el-Sheikh, did not know it, but Trump and Netanyahu had just licked the Roman Empire as well, for having expelled the Jews 2,000 years ago.
Trump, off script, punctuated this orgy of self-congratulation with a few home truths.
He revealed how dependent Israel has become on American arms, recalling how Netanyahu pleaded for weapons that Trump did not even know the US had.
He reminded Israel of how small it was and that it could not fight world opinion.
He confirmed how he had arm-twisted Netanyahu into stopping the offensive on Gaza: “And I said, ‘Bibi, you’re gonna be remembered for this far more than if you kept this thing going, going, going, kill, kill, kill.”
He revealed how the American Jewish billionaire couple Miriam and Sheldon Adelson “had more trips to the White House” than anybody else he could think of, and how the late Sheldon – “a very aggressive man” – had been responsible for persuading Trump in his first term to recognise Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights.
Sharm el-Sheikh circus
Had this been said by anyone other than Trump, it would have caused instant outrage by pro-Israel groups in the US. To assert that a democratically elected president was directly influenced by an unelected Jewish billionaire kicking his door down would instantly be branded an antisemitic slur.
Instead, Trump and almost the entire membership of the Knesset were revelling in it. They should have kept deeply silent about how US foreign policy is formed and by whom.
Worse was to follow in Sharm el-Sheikh, where Trump arrived hours late.
Two of the Arab and Muslim leaders about whom Trump had bragged in the Knesset were on the point of boycotting the event – one in midair – when they learned that Netanyahu himself was going to turn up.
Netanyahu was not originally on the guest list, but when rumours began to circulate that Trump had forced Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to invite him, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan kept his plane in the air, and Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani began to face fierce backlash at home.
Netanyahu was quickly disinvited, and his office issued a statement saying he could not attend because it was a Jewish holiday.
Two other major Arab leaders, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed, also failed to show.
There are a number of theories circulating about their no-shows: was it pique that regional rivals Qatar and Turkey appeared to have made all the running in negotiating the ceasefire with Hamas? Were they angry with Egypt?
Or were they unhappy that Hamas had not been sidelined – and that to get a ceasefire at all, Steve Witkoff, Trump’s envoy, and Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, had to talk directly to them?
As Jordanian commentator Abdulhadi al-Majali noted: “Has Hamas grown and become the size of America, or has America shrunk and become the size of Hamas?”
Or was it their natural caution at endorsing a process that was half-baked, and for which they would ultimately end up paying?
I tend to think the latter, but one thing is clear: the Abraham Accords, so publicly flaunted in the Knesset as the model for this new “peace in our time”, lack the foundations that Trump and Kushner seem to imagine they have.
Bridge too far
It is one thing, as The Washington Post revealed, to hold joint military exercises with Israel in secret while the Gaza genocide is in full force, but quite another to have your leader photographed standing in line with Netanyahu. That is still a bridge too far.
This alone shows how aware and frightened these autocrats are of the popular sentiment, more than a decade after they crushed the Arab Spring.
It also shows you how fragile the regional consensus is for normalising with Tel Aviv – and how strong, still, the fears are that all of this could be a fig leaf for their subservience to the new regional hegemon.
Their fears have little to do with the Palestinian people, for whom they have shed few tears. This is about their own standing as leaders and their own sovereignty.
Saudi Arabia’s ambitions to be the leader of the Sunni Arab world are challenged in particular by Israel’s regional ambitions – and Mohammed bin Salman, who sees himself as the new generation of reformer, now understands how Israel can undermine his personal position, too.
The conference will be remembered for its Trumpian chaos, rather than for its speeches.
The bit players in this deal, like French President Emmanuel Macron or British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, were ignored like naughty schoolboys, once the teacher had duly recorded their presence in class.
The snub delivered to the British leader, who was called to the platform and then ignored, went viral among the Trumpian supporters of Reform UK leader Nigel Farage.
In addition, Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto was overheard on a live microphone asking Trump for a meeting with his son, Eric, who serves as an executive vice president at the Trump Organisation. Trump replied: “I’ll have Eric call. Should I do that? He’s such a good boy.”
In a few hours, Trump succeeded in humiliating everyone – even his host Sisi, who extended his hand only to see the US president turn away.
Business as usual
No sooner, of course, had this circus flown home on their 747s than Israeli forces returned to business as usual in Gaza.
Israeli drones and tanks have not stopped firing on and killing Palestinians in Gaza, in daily violations of the ceasefire. On Tuesday, Israel announced that the Rafah border crossing with Egypt would remain shut, and cut aid supplies again on the pretext that Hamas had not delivered all the dead bodies of its captives.
The difficulties in retrieving these bodies had been extensively discussed in negotiations, and a formula for discovering where they were was written into the agreement, with Hamas declaring that it would need international help to do so.
Israel had bombed Gaza so intensely that it not only killed some of its own hostages, along with their guards, but also the guards of the dead bodies of the hostages. In some cases, all contact with these Hamas units was lost.
A statement issued by the family of Tamir Nimrodi, a captive soldier whose body was returned to Israel from Gaza on Tuesday, said their son had been killed by Israeli air strikes.
Netanyahu’s propaganda that Hamas was forced into a ceasefire by the continued prosecution of the war is now falling apart.
So what does this week’s theatre amount to?
Clearly, the two-year war has stopped short of achieving its major strategic objective for Israel, which was to expel at least half of the population of Gaza permanently, thus altering the demographic balance of Jews and Arabs in all the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
Clearly, Israel failed to demolish Hamas as a military organisation. After a brief battle with northern tribes in Gaza, it has re-established control in all the territory that Israeli forces have withdrawn from – and it has done so with Trump’s consent.
Global attention
In the way the live hostages were released, Hamas demonstrated once again that it still has command and control. This was not what Israel wanted. It wanted to foment civil war, and this has clearly not happened.
It is also clear that Netanyahu was forced against his wishes to stop this war by Trump. He depended on the war for his political survival, and it also suited his ideological mission to prevent any Palestinian state, of any size or description, from forming. It cannot be clear to Netanyahu himself how he can pursue both of these goals in conditions of peace.
He will have to rely on talks about Hamas’s disarmament hitting the buffers, which they will surely do, and use that as an excuse for restarting operations. In the meantime, he is doing everything he can to scupper the deal.
But a military campaign, when it resumes, is unlikely to be of the same scale.
What is more likely is that Gaza will revert to the situation we see in southern Lebanon, where Israel feels free to continue bombing selected targets that it claims are legitimate, whether they are or not. It will also continue to suffocate Gaza by limiting aid and reconstruction supplies.
There will be both negative and positive consequences for the Palestinians.
For the foreseeable future, Israel will continue to keep the siege and suffocation of Gaza in place. But as night follows day, this action will guarantee that Gaza remains in the bullseye of global attention.
For there is a difference between this attempt at calling a halt to the conflict and what happened after the Oslo Accords were signed. Oslo shut down the Palestine issue in the global debate, under the pretence that negotiations were being conducted on setting up a fully fledged state. The same argument resurfaced in Starmer’s initial resistance to recognising a Palestinian state – that it would impede negotiations – even though he knew no such talks were going on.
This time, no such negotiations exist. All that “exists” will be Israel’s overt attempts at returning to war.
This will not only keep global demands for a Palestinian state energised. It will also expose the Qatari and Turkish negotiators who signed up to this deal. Their eagerness was all to do with what they perceived their national interest to be: staying as close as possible to Trump himself. That way, they would get their F-35s.
But this is not what the people of Turkey want, and Erdogan has shown himself in at least one election to be vulnerable to Islamist parties that cash in on Turkey’s reluctance to confront Israel. He could be vulnerable again if Israel returns to war.
The leaders who signed this deal are going to become increasingly vulnerable to public opinion at home. The only aim of the Turkish leadership is to stay in power. The attempted military coup in 2016 taught them how close to losing it they once were. It is power, not principle, that determines their actions.
Palestinian renewal
If Israel’s bombardment of Gaza goes on, and if it continues to choke aid into the territory, all Muslim and Arab countries that signed the ceasefire declaration own this deal as much as Trump does – and that is not a good place for them to be.
If Oslo was the end of the First Intifada, Sharm el-Sheikh will be the start of a new chapter of this conflict, which is open-ended.
For Palestinians who were almost totally omitted from the Sharm el-Sheikh summit, to which President Mahmoud Abbas was invited as an afterthought, the most pressing issue in this moment, after a two-year campaign of genocide in Gaza, is the total inadequacy of their leaders.
Israel refuses to release from prison the only leaders who could form a government that could unite all parties and all factions, although many other potential leaders exist in the ranks.
The continued presence of Abbas and his declared successor, Hussein al-Sheikh, is meaningless. Their only function is to preside over decay and retreat – still further from the 22 percent of historic Palestine left after former leader Yasser Arafat gave away the rest, and the right of return, when he recognised Israel.
Arafat’s legacy has since been eaten away by hundreds of thousands of Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, many of whom are now armed.
The most urgent task for Palestinians now is to force the retirement of their leaders, rebuild the Palestine Liberation Organisation and all Palestinian institutions – whether in Ramallah, Gaza, East Jerusalem or the diaspora – and present Israel and Trump with new facts on the ground.
There is no excuse for delay. They have seen how alone they are. They have seen how other countries have acted, professing sympathy and doing nothing.
They know that the occupied West Bank is being annexed, whether it is officially announced or not. They know Israel will continue to expand its borders, stifling what little sovereignty Arab nations actually have.
No white knight on a charger is going to come to their rescue. They know, and Gaza has shown them, that the only people who can shape the future of Palestine will be the Palestinians themselves.
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