Trump Will Decide The Outcome Of the War In Gaza

It’s all up to President Donald Trump.

That is the only way to characterize the situation facing Israel’s government as it seeks to implement the terms of the plan that the White House has set down for ending the war in the Gaza Strip. If the president sticks to the plan that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed to in Washington last week, then the remaining hostages held by Hamas will soon be freed, and the terrorists will disarm and relinquish control of every part of the Strip.

That is what he says he will do. He has made it clear that Hamas must agree to the same terms the Israelis signed off on or face “complete obliteration” if it tries to cling to their weapons and power in Gaza. Decent people who hope for a world rid of Islamist murderers like those of Hamas must pray that he sticks to his word.

It’s also true that a lot of people who hate Israel will be happy if he lets Hamas wriggle off the hook. And it’s far from impossible to imagine scenarios like that happening.

If he is so eager for the plaudits due to a peacemaker, or if he is willing to listen to or be influenced by malign actors in the Middle East like Qatar, Turkey, and other Muslim and Arab states—or domestic right-wing antisemites like far-right political commentator Tucker Carlson—then it is possible that he will let Hamas wriggle out of the trap they have set for themselves.

A familiar pattern

That is, after all, what has happened every time representatives of the Palestinians have dealt with American presidents and their foreign-policy teams before Trump. In the past, the Palestinian Authority and Hamas have treated U.S. presidents and their representatives as easy marks. They said “no” to peace deals and arrangements that could have bettered their people’s predicament and then waited for the Americans to sweeten the pot, and even after agreeing to deals, they backtracked and brazenly violated them.

That happened repeatedly during the 1990s under the Oslo process. Rather than holding them accountable, then-President Bill Clinton and the peace processors in the White House and the U.S. State Department turned a blind eye to blatant breaches of the peace accords by PLO leader Yasser Arafat and placed the onus for “progress” on Israel, meaning continual pressure for the Jewish state to make concessions to the Palestinians with little or no reciprocity.

After a brief period when the administration of President George W. Bush sought to hold Arafat and the Palestinians accountable for their role in fomenting, planning and financing terrorism, it, too, fell prey to the same mistake with regard to his successor, Mahmoud Abbas, pretending that he was different. Since then, the administrations of Barack Obama and Joe Biden have often gone down the same path, allowing themselves to be played by the Palestinians, who were never serious about peace.

But Trump has a chance to break that pattern.

All he has to do to accomplish that is to simply stand by the terms that he set down in the plan that Netanyahu had no choice but to sign on to.

That was, after all, a take-it-or-leave-it scheme that starts with Hamas first releasing the remaining living hostages and bodies of slain kidnap victims they are holding. After that, Israel will start withdrawing from parts of the Gaza Strip, and if Hamas does actually disarm and give up control to the technocratic and international authority envisioned by the pact, withdraw to its perimeters.

Under those circumstances, with all remaining hostages freed and Hamas defeated, Israel would be right to claim that all of Netanyahu’s war goals would be achieved.

If Hamas tries to talk itself out of any part of the deal, Trump said he will give the Israelis the green light to “finish the job” in Gaza. That, too, would achieve at least the goal of ensuring Hamas’s destruction.

Two years of suffering

Still, it is staggering to think that exactly two years after the horrors of Oct. 7, 2023 that the outcome of the war triggered by the Hamas-led Palestinian attacks on southern Israeli communities comes down to whether the president of the United States is as good as his word.

After such enormous trauma and suffering—and such great sacrifices on the part of the soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces and the people of Israel—is it possible to speak of “victory” in this war? The anniversary, which falls this week during the holiday of Sukkot, is one in which mourning remains the primary theme.

For those who were lost or kidnapped on Oct. 7, as well as their families, and for all those whose loved ones died or were maimed in fighting this war, concepts like “victory” or “defeat” may well seem meaningless.

But as so many Israelis, including soldiers and their families, have told me during these past two years, the post-Oct. 7 war is not pointless. It is a just war—a conflict begun by fanatical terrorists and their supporters whose goal was the extinction of the Jewish state and the genocide of its people. Israeli soldiers have not been seeking the genocide of the Palestinian Arabs—an antisemitic rhetorical trick of inversion in which the perpetrators have sought to blame the victims. Rather, they are fighting for their homes and families, as well as the right of the Jewish people to live in peace and security in their ancient homeland.

Any outcome to the war, such as the one that the Biden administration sought to impose on Israel throughout the war’s first year, with Hamas still having much of its armed forces intact and in control of large parts of Gaza, that fell short of the destruction of the terrorists would have been a terrible defeat for the Jewish state. It would have not merely allowed Hamas to claim victory for having imposed such trauma on Israel and then surviving, but placed it in a position to make good on its threats of launching more Oct. 7-style attacks.

It’s clear that, as JNS has reported, Hamas will do everything it can during the implementation talks in Egypt to prevaricate and delay the deal to wear down the patience of the Americans. Even if we believe that the Islamist group is under pressure from its supporters Qatar and Turkey to make some kind of deal and end the war before its remnants are obliterated by the latest Israeli offensive in Gaza City, it’s hard to imagine them surrendering every last hostage. The hostages are, as they have been throughout the war, Hamas’s bargaining chips, and along with the suffering and casualties they’ve sought to impose on their own people, their main assets in this conflict.

It’s equally difficult to imagine Hamas merely surrendering to Trump and Israel, and allowing itself to be replaced by apolitical technocrats (assuming that such people actually exist) or foreigners intent on rebuilding the Strip as a place where people can live in peace, rather than exist as a terrorist fortress.

It’s also a stretch to think that the Palestinian Arab population, which has been indoctrinated in hatred for Israel and the Jews, and whose national identity is inextricably tied to a century-old war on Zionism, will finally renounce all that and embrace peace once the shooting stops in Gaza. Even if the deal is implemented, the idea that foreign investment and security involvement in Gaza will cause the Palestinians to give up their fantasies of Israel’s destruction and that the aid will not somehow be diverted toward a continuation of the war by a people addicted to terror and suicidal sacrifices remains slim.

Given the history of American and international enabling of Palestinian strategies that aimed at sabotaging any hope of ending the conflict, Hamas is not without reason to think that they can do it again.

Those are sound points to be skeptical that an end to the suffering is imminent.

Netanyahu stood firm

Regardless of what follows, if the hostages are freed and Hamas is disarmed, then, contrary to the arguments of his critics, Netanyahu will deserve a great deal of the credit. Without his steadfastness, the Jewish state would have settled for some humiliating deal that might not have brought freedom to all of the hostages and would have certainly placed it in danger of having to fight another such war in a few years. He was right to refuse to accept such a deal. That refusal was associated with false claims that he was only prolonging the war to stay in power. But it was still, notwithstanding the enormous pressure placed on him to surrender by some of the hostage families and his foreign and domestic opponents, the right decision.

The courage and willingness to sacrifice on the part of the Israeli people, even as they are demonized abroad, must also be fully acknowledged as we remember Oct. 7 and look forward to a post-war era.

Still, an outcome that leads to freedom for all of the hostages and the defeat of Hamas is something that could only be achieved by Trump. He will never get the Nobel Peace Prize that he covets. But by choosing to demand terms for an end to the war that attacks its cause—the existence of Hamas—he changed the equation in the Middle East in a way that no other American leader could have or would have insisted upon.

It’s true that the hatred for Israel and the Jews that was unleashed on Oct. 7 and the biased reporting of the conflict in Gaza isn’t simply going to go away. Even after the shooting stops, Israel will still be accused of “genocide” by those who have swallowed Hamas propaganda that was mainstreamed by the legacy press. Moreover, the legitimization of anti-Zionism in public discourse, which is indistinguishable from the antisemitism that has been normalized, will inevitably continue to build a constituency for new campaigns for Israel’s destruction.

However, after so much sorrow, it may well be that after enduring two years of war, it will end in an outcome that decent people should cheer for. All it took was American and Israeli heads of state who were prepared to ignore their critics and insist on the defeat of terror. If so, then no matter what you think of Trump or Netanyahu, history should vindicate them both.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of Jewish News Syndicate.