The ceasefire deal that President Trump imposed on Israel and on Hamas delivered a concrete achievement — the immediate release of all our living hostages and the return of the deceased, which should (we hope) be completed in the coming days. This is the first and easiest phase of a deal that Hamas even tried to break, and only heavy US pressure, oddly directed at Israel, stopped us from breaking off the whole thing.
The problem, of course, is in the later stages of the deal, whose implementation timetable and mechanics are far from clear. It is possible, of course, that the US will continue to pressure Israel in those later stages, that Israel will be asked to withdraw from additional parts of the Strip and to allow the entry of foreign military forces from Turkey or Qatar, but anyone who believes Hamas will voluntarily disarm, or that an Arab force will successfully coerce it to disarm, is living in a fantasy.
Trump seeks to flip with a single word a fragile, temporary ceasefire into an everlasting peace between Israel and the entire Arab and Muslim world. May he be right.
But it seems the real problem in the deal, from Israel's perspective, is not how to handle Hamas in the Strip, but the implicit American commitment within it to establish a Palestinian state, which Washington might try to impose on Israel.
Has President Trump founded a Palestinian state in Washington? Ostensibly that is the deal's aim, but it is doubtful that this is really the US president's intention. What is certain is that regardless of what the Americans, and certainly the Europeans, want, a Palestinian state will not come into being, and any attempt to force it into existence will only encourage violence and bloodshed, not only between Palestinians and Israelis but also among Palestinians themselves.
Trump's attitude toward Israel, and in fact that of all previous US administrations, is one of deep commitment and emotional identification with the Zionist cause. By contrast, there is no evident empathy or commitment toward the Palestinians in the wording of the agreement or in Trump's own remarks. He made that clear when he said that all he wants is a deal everyone will approve, and that for him it makes no difference whether there are two states, Israeli and Palestinian, or one state, Israel. His comments that corruption, violence and terror are the hallmarks of the Palestinian Authority and of Hamas, the terrorist organization, reveal what he thinks about the Palestinians' capacity to found and sustain a state.
It should be remembered that much of the world's obsession with establishing a Palestinian state stems, alongside the desire to strike at Israel, from the illusion that a Palestinian state would solve not only the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but all the Middle East's problems, and from the accompanying illusion that Israel alone is the obstacle to creating such a state.
That is not true. For 19 years between Israel's War of Independence and the Six Day War, Egypt and Jordan governed Gaza and the West Bank and never once considered creating a Palestinian state. Moreover, the Oslo accords opened the door for the Palestinians to form a state-like entity to govern and manage their lives. That entity very quickly turned into a corrupt dictatorship devoted to dreams and fantasies, for example about a right of return to Palestine. The alternative that arose to that entity is Hamas, an Islamist radical movement committed to religious extremism, violence and terror.
Experimentation with creating a state can be tried in Libya or Somalia, places no one really cares about. But here we are talking about Israel's future and security, and those are nonnegotiable.
After all this, and contrary to our usual instincts, Israel cannot rely on the Palestinians not to disrupt Trump's show and to not sabotage any attempt to advance peace, as they have done in the past. Israel must rely only on itself and proactively promote policy alternatives that remove the threatening shadow of a corrupt dictatorship that serves as a breeding ground for religious extremism, violence and terror, and that some would like to see established next door at our expense.
