By Rajan Philips –

Rajan Philips

“BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS,” President Donald Trump exclaimed in ALL CAPS in his social media post from the White House, just before 7:00 PM on Wednesday, 8^th October. He was announcing the agreement reached a few minutes earlier but well past midnight at Sharm El Sheikh in Egypt, between Israel and Hamas on the modalities of implementing the first phase of Trump’s 20-point Peace Plan for Gaza. The opening phase will include a ceasefire in Gaza; Israel pulling back its forces beyond an agreed upon line leaving 53% of Gaza under its control; Hamas releasing all remaining 20 Israeli hostages and the handing over of the 28 who are believed to be dead; Israel releasing Palestinian prisoners and the return of their dead; and the start of uninterrupted humanitarian supplies into Gaza.

The ceasefire announcement came a day after the second anniversary of Hamas’s 2023 October 7 attack on 21 communities in Southern Israel. Nearly 1,200 people including 79 foreign nationals were killed, and another 253, including women and children, were taken as hostages. The immediate beneficiary of the attack was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who at that time was in the throes of his worst political crisis. Netanyahu seized the opportunity to consolidate himself as Israel’s wartime Prime Minister with license to attack and flatten Gaza. He went beyond Gaza and has destroyed the Hezbollah leadership and its infrastructure, silenced the Houthis and militarily crippled Iran. By then Iran had already lost the only state ally it had in the region – the discredited Assad regime in Syria.

While Netanyahu has military devastated Hamas, whom he once cultivated as an antidote to PLO and the Palestinian Authority, and eliminated all its allies, he has not been able to eradicate Hamas. It is with Hamas that Israel and the US, using Qatar and Egypt as mediators, have negotiated the latest agreement on Trump’s 21-point peace plan, even while stipulating in the same plan that there will be no role for Hamas in the rebuilding of Gaza after the ceasefire.

Netanyahu has also become the victim of his own military success. The scale of destruction in Gaza has turned the entire world, with the exception of the US, against Netanyahu and his government. Even in the US the popular support for Israel has plummeted to all time low and it is especially low among America’s young. Young American Jews in significant numbers are pro-Palestinian opponents of the Netanyahu government.      

The learned opinion in much of the world is that the attacks of the Israeli government in Gaza amount to genocide. On 21 November 2024, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu for alleged war crimes in Gaza. The warrant is still active, and just last month the Israeli Prime Minister, travelling to New York to attend the UN General Assembly session, took a roundabout flightpath to avoid flying in the airspace of countries that might intercept and enforce the ICC’s arrest warrant.

Avoiding a Pyrrhic Peace

The biggest sufferers in the whole melee have been the innocent Palestinians in Gaza. Over 67,000 have been killed, nearly 170,000 injured , and 1.9 M people have been displaced and the entire Gaza strip measuring 41 km by 6-12 km that was home to nearly 2.2 million people has been virtually razed to the ground. The main humanitarian consequence of Wednesday’s agreement in Egypt will be the inflow of medical and livelihood supplies into Gaza to meet the urgent needs of people who are on the verge of starvation and without medical supplies.

More importantly, the barriers to humanitarian aid delivery will have to be promptly removed. If not, the ceasefire and the silencing of guns will not mean anything more than a pyrrhic peace for the people of Gaza. UN Secretary-General Antonio Gutteres has said bluntly that “to turn this cease-fire into real progress, we need more than the silencing of the guns … We need full, safe and sustained access for humanitarian workers; the removal of red tape and impediments; and the rebuilding of shattered infrastructure.”

The UN has 170,000 tons of humanitarian aid already prepositioned in the region. The western countries, which recently joined the vast majority of UN members to recognize Palestinian statehood and the two state solution for the battle scarred region, are reportedly planning to flood Gaza with all the supply it needs. Israel is expected to immediately lift enough of its restrictions to allow a daily supply of 400 lorry loads.

Removing barriers and addressing the logistic challenges for receiving and distributing supplies in Gaza should be achieved as swiftly as getting supplies to the area. These challenges may expedite the start of the second phase of the peace plan which is the setting up of the “Board of Peace” and a temporary transitional committee of Palestinian Technocrats that will govern Gaza under the Board’s supervision. The responsibility for governance will eventually be transitioned to the Palestinian Authority after it is ‘reformed.’ Hamas will have no role in any of this, but more on that later.

The Board of Peace will be chaired by President Trump and former British Prime Minister is controversially included in the Board. The composition of these agencies and the future of Hamas are all knotty issues that will have to be addressed even as the first phase of the peace plan gets underway. Although President Trump’s All Caps self-congratulations is wholly understandable, there are plenty of pinch points in the process that can stall implementation and even reverse the movement.

The US President himself is expected to be in the region on Saturday, going to Egypt first, then Israel, and later even to Gaza. Apart from the obvious purpose of showering in the glory of his own achievement, there is also the more serious objective of making sure that nothing goes wrong in the implementation of the first phase, and to achieve the next of level of agreement to set up the Board of Peace and the transitional Committee of Palestinian Technocrats.

Credible Pathway

The Peace Plan by itself cannot, or does not even try to, reconcile Netanyahu’s intransigent rejection of even the idea of a Palestinian State, on the one hand, and the insistence of Hamas that it should be part of the rebuilding of Gaza and the making of a future Palestinian State. The 20-point Trump plan (paragraph #19) foresees that the redevelopment of Gaza  and the reformation of the Palestinian Authority could finally create the conditions “for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood, which we recognise as the aspiration of the Palestinian people.”

At the same time, the plan’s pathway for Hamas members, after all the hostages are released, is for them to give up their arms in return for amnesty so that they can either remain in Gaza or go to another country with assured safe passage (paragraph #6); and for them to “agree to not have any role in the governance of Gaza, directly, indirectly, or in any form” (paragraph #13). Hamas has so far been silent on these stipulations and it is not likely to fold up so easily.

There is no symmetrical provision in the peace plan for excluding Netanyahu from the implementation of the peace process even though a good majority of Israelis would want him gone, and even though much of the world is in agreement with the ICC’s indictment of Netanyahu as a war criminal and with the substantial legal opinion that his government’s actions in Gaza are tantamount to genocide.    

Trump’s Bully Diplomacy

Yet there is optimism in the air – from the storied Sinai Peninsula where Wednesday’s deal was struck, through the charred strip of Gaza where humanity has been stripped to its brutal state of nature, to the divided City of Jerusalem where political walls separate the religions of gods, to the West Bank that is forever threatened by illegal settlements of Jewish extremists, and to the East Bank of River Jordan and beyond. From Chile to China and from Russia to Australia, every country in the world has welcomed the peace plan and its unfolding first phase. Iran is the exception.

Crucial to the continuing implementation of the plan is the coalition of five Arab countries – Egypt, Qatar, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and three Muslim countries – Turkey, Indonesia and Pakistan. None of them is at the top on any western government’s list of exemplary polities or democracies. But that suits the current American President just fine. Trump’s family is business with the royal families of Qatar, UAE and Saudi Arabia. He has accepted a secondhand luxury Boeing 747 as a presidential gift from Qatar. Trump cemented the coalition of the eight in September, at the UN in New York, after badmouthing the whole world when he addressed the General Assembly. Not to mention the very launch of his political career that singled out Islam and Muslims for slander.

If ‘Fortune Favours the Bully’ might be a good epitaph for the Trump presidency in general, it would be more so if Trump’s peace plan were to be still there when the dust finally settles in Gaza. Without the fear of being bullied by President Trump, Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu and Hamas’s scattered leaders would not have agreed to accept the plan.

Trump’s peace plan is essentially the same plan that was developed during the Biden Administration, but the beleaguered Joe Biden could not cajole, coax, coerce, or bully anyone into accepting any part of his plan. Netanyahu squeezed him like a lemon and threw him away. The Arabs and the Palestinians, including Palestinian Americans, figured out that betting on the bullying Trump was better than supporting a lame-duck zombie.

There are of course other factors and forces that have helped create momentum for the plan. But every one of them is implicated by Trump’s bullying diplomacy, one way or another. In Israel, Netanyahu was already under massive pressure from the Israeli public and families of the hostages to end the war to free the hostages. Trump’s peace plan gave them the cudgel to beat Netanyahu into submission. With a thousand Israeli soldiers killed and 20,000 wounded, there was growing restiveness in the Israeli military, and the Prime Minister could not have rejected Trump’s peace plan without risking repercussions among Israel’s social army.

Netanyahu’s fatal mistake was his failed attempt to kill the Hamas leadership in Doha on 9 September. Trump was furious. Trump’s original peace plan had 21 points – one of them was to force the Israeli Prime Minister to extend an unmitigated apology to the Prime Minister of Qatar. But even before the plan was released Trump bullied Netanyahu to make the apology from the White House using Trump’s landline. So, the plan became a 20-point plan.

Trump had already issued an executive order giving Qatar an unprecedented security guarantee from any future Israeli attack. Then he got Qatar to bully Hamas to come to the table and make the agreement. Qatar’s senior leader Khalil al-Hayya who escaped the Doha attack in September, but whose son was killed, has been leading the Hamas delegation at Sharm El Sheikh in Egypt. On Friday (10^th October) afternoon, the Israeli government ratified entering onto a ceasefire with Hamas to kickstart the first phase of the long peace process. No sooner, Khalil al-Hayya, on behalf of Hamas, confirmed that he had received guarantees from Washington that the war is over. Blessed are the peacemakers!