The ceasefire arrangement that President Donald Trump imposed on Israel and Hamas produced a genuine, significant accomplishment – the immediate release of all our hostages and recovery of our fallen, which should hopefully conclude within days. This constitutes the initial and simplest phase of an agreement that Hamas attempted to breach even at this stage, and only substantial American pressure – particularly on Israel – prevented us from abandoning the arrangement.
The difficulty, naturally, resides in the following phases of the agreement – a flawed accord whose execution timeline and methodology remain completely ambiguous. Pressure can undoubtedly persist on Israel in subsequent stages – to retreat from further sections of the Strip and allow entry of Turkish or Qatari military forces, but anyone expecting Hamas will willingly disarm or that an Arab force will be prepared to force its disarmament dwells in fantasy.
Nevertheless Trump seeks to convert through empty rhetoric a temporary and fragile ceasefire arrangement into a peace-on-earth agreement between Israel and the complete Arab and Muslim world. If only he proves right.
Yet it appears the troublesome element of the agreement from Israel's standpoint is not the engagement with Hamas in the Strip, but rather the concealed American obligation to establish a Palestinian state, which Washington may impose upon Israel.
Did President Trump found the Palestinian state in Washington? On its surface, that represents the agreement's goal, but it's questionable whether the American president genuinely intends this, and what's definite is that irrespective of what the Americans desire, and especially the Europeans – a Palestinian state will not emerge, and any initiative attempting to impose it will merely stimulate violence and bloodshed, not exclusively between Palestinians and Israelis but also among the Palestinians themselves.
Trump's relationship toward Israel, and essentially that of all preceding American administrations, demonstrates profound commitment and emotional alignment with the Zionist enterprise. Conversely, concerning the Palestinians, no alignment or commitment is evident, neither in the agreement's wording nor in Trump's own statements, and he articulated this effectively when stressing that all he pursues is an arrangement everyone will accept, and from his standpoint it makes no distinction whether there will be two states – Israeli and Palestinian – or one state, Israel. His comments about corruption, violence and terror as the defining characteristic of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas disclose his assessment of the Palestinians' lacking capacity to establish and sustain a state.
One should recall that the fixation with establishing a Palestinian state among numerous world nations originates – beside the impulse to strike at Israel (in the manner of "beat the Jews") – also from the fantasy that a Palestinian state would resolve not merely the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but all the Middle East's difficulties, and alongside this, from the fantasy that exclusively Israel prevents the establishment of such a state.
All this is untrue. For 19 years from the War of Independence until the Six-Day War, Egypt and Jordan governed Gaza and the West Bank and never considered establishing a Palestinian state. Furthermore, the Oslo Accords opened the opportunity for Palestinians to establish a state entity that would administer and manage their existence. But this entity swiftly became a corrupt dictatorship dedicated to dreams and delusions, for instance about "return to Palestine." Meanwhile, the alternative that emerged to this entity is Hamas, a radical Islamic movement dedicated to religious fanaticism, violence and terror.
A trial-and-error approach of state establishment can be pursued in Libya or Somalia, where nobody genuinely cares what occurs there. But here we're addressing Israel's future and security – and these cannot be compromised.
Moreover, contrary to our pattern, Israel must not depend on the Palestinians to destroy Trump's show and undermine any effort to advance peace, as they have done previously. It must depend exclusively on itself and proactively advance policy alternatives that eliminate the threatening shadow of a corrupt dictatorship functioning as an incubator for religious fanaticism, violence and terror, which some attempt to establish in our vicinity and at our expense.
