George Mitchell, the great US advocate for the Northern Ireland peace agreement, described diplomacy as 700 days of failure and one of success. In Gaza, tragically, there have been 730 days of failure and none of success. Indeed, the destruction, the death toll and the spillover of the conflict into other countries is a monument to shame diplomacy and what remains of international law. Arguably, it is the profession’s lowest point since 1939.
Some will claim failure is inevitable since this conflict is now so embedded and impervious to compromise that it can only be settled at the barrel of the gun, in essence through the repression or erasure of one side.
Yet, however entrenched the mutual hatreds, a consensus is building across the west that this conflict was desperately mishandled, including by European leaders who initially ceded responsibility to a US Democratic administration that romanticised modern Israel, misread how its government might react to the horror of 7 October – and how that would polarise the west.
Indeed, the mea culpas and self-justifications have been streaming out of Joe Biden’s former team. In her book on her doomed bid to become president, Kamala Harris writes: “I had pleaded with Joe, when he spoke publicly on this issue, to extend the same empathy he showed to the suffering of Ukrainians to the suffering of innocent Gazan civilians. But he couldn’t do it: while he could passionately state ‘I am a Zionist’, his remarks about innocent Palestinians came off as inadequate and forced.”
She adds that Benjamin Netanyahu never repaid the loyalty that Biden had shown because he wanted Donald Trump in the seat opposite him.
At its most generous, the Democrats misread the power dynamics. “We did not act like a superpower,” Andrew Miller, a former deputy assistant secretary of state for Israeli-Palestinian affairs, said recently. “Instead of beginning from the proposition that these were problems we could solve, we persuaded ourselves that there was little we could do to move our regional ally Israel.”
Trump did not have that inferiority complex. He used his unpredictability as his greatest diplomatic weapon but, like Biden, his special envoy Steve Witkoff became bogged down in trying to find a formula that guaranteed the release of all the hostages without Israel resuming the fighting, as it did in March this year.
As successive variations of the Witkoff proposals emerged, France and Saudi Arabia took matters into their own hands, deciding to use a UN conference on a two-state solution as a vehicle for gripping the diplomacy in a different way. The US monopoly on the peace process was broken and the neglected issue of Palestinian self-rule was finally addressed.
The ‘day-after’ plan
Before the conference, initially due to be held in June but delayed by a month by Israel’s attack on Iran, Emmanuel Macron extracted a letter from the Palestinian Authority (PA) president, Mahmoud Abbas, that endorsed a plan for the day after a ceasefire under which Hamas would be disarmed and debarred from holding office and a transitional body of experts would be formed to govern Palestine “under the umbrella” of a reformed Palestinian Authority. The notion of reform of the PA, often an empty diplomatic vessel, was this time given specifics, including a commitment by Abbas to much-delayed elections and internal change. An international force would be introduced.
Many versions of the “day after” plan for Gaza had been circulating since 2024 – one by American and Israeli experts published by the Wilson Center, another drafted by the Rand Corporation, a set of principles issued by the United Arab Emirates and a plan from Egypt. The Saudi-French plan incorporated many of these ideas into what became the New York declaration, passed by the UN conference in July and endorsed by the UN general assembly in September, with Israel and the US voting against.
One European diplomat said: “Although there was a lot of media heat about the issue of recognising Palestinian statehood, that was not where the serious diplomatic breakthrough was. We managed to convince the Americans to link the commitments to the ceasefire to a plan for what happens afterwards – and to realise that focusing on a ceasefire on its own would not work.”
In reference to the US’s over-reliance on Israeli firepower to impose its will, the diplomat said: “We also convinced them they could not go on rolling the dice and thinking it will come up double six.”
Critical to the process was a meeting in the White House in late August where Jared Kushner, Tony Blair and Witkoff convinced Trump that mass expulsions of Palestinians from Gaza was neither necessary nor wise.
One of those present said: “Trump had no illusions about Netanyahu’s reliability and had invested in the Middle East states. He was persuaded that for states such as Jordan and Egypt the spectre of waves of Palestinian refugees spilling over their borders was a red line. Trump agreed to take mass enforced displacement off the agenda.”
The other big message out of the meeting was that for the first time it became feasible to try to merge White House and French thinking. Speaking at Harvard University last month, the French foreign minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, said: “President Trump asked some of his close advisers to go to the Arab countries, to go to France, to go to the UK, to gather all the ideas that all of us have been putting together for months and years for what a day after plan would look like.”
The aim of the two-state solution conference and the general assembly vote, Barrot said, was to remove the obstacles to the two-state solution, including by Arab states condemning the 7 October attacks and endorsing the declaration’s exclusion of Hamas from Gaza.
“Until that vote, there was no international condemnation of Hamas, no international call for its disarmament, no international goal for its exclusion from any future role in the governance of Gaza and Palestine,” Barrot said. “This is done. We have changed the mindset. Everyone now sees Hamas for what they are: a terrorist organisation.”
The second obstacle, he explained, was to overcome Arab governments’ reluctance to state publicly that they had a goal of establishing diplomatic relations with Israel.
Barrot said the new UN text went further than ever before. “We got them … to say that they aspire not only to have a normal relationship with Israel, but to enter into a common regional architecture in the model of Asean in Asia or OSCE in Europe,” he said. “We got them to say things they never said.”
So, contrary to appearance, the weeks and days leading up to the general assembly was about the Arab states reaching out to Israel. Far from being rewarded, Hamas, an opponent of a two-state solution, was being ostracised from political power in Palestine, a fate its battered leadership has reluctantly accepted.
The Trump plan
But for Israel the New York declaration, with its clear references to a Palestinian state and a role for a reformed Palestinian Authority, remained unacceptable. So when Trump revealed his plan to the Arab and Muslim states on the sidelines of the general assembly, the declaration had become the benchmark against which it was to be judged by the Arab and Muslim states.
The Trump plan, largely prepared by Blair and Kushner, was necessarily thin, ambiguous and stripped of a timetable. The Arab states had misgivings, but advocates such as Blair argued that if the plan was more specific it would lose the required broad support and critical momentum. The lack of immediate leaks delighted western diplomats since it suggested the Arab states thought they could work with the plan.
But while the Arab states left New York, Netanyahu stayed in New York, holding two lengthy weekend meetings with Witkoff. After Israel’s attack on Hamas negotiators in Qatar on 9 September – a personal betrayal of Witkoff and Qatar – Netanyahu was persona non grata in the White House. Yet the Israeli prime minister extracted further concessions.
The amnesty to Hamas members was only available to those who handed over weapons in front of international observers and committed to peaceful coexistence. More detail was added about the destruction of Hamas infrastructure. Moreover, the withdrawal of Israel Defense Forces was blurred, and by the end the IDF would have to withdraw only to a security buffer zone encompassing more than 17% of Gaza until the strip “is properly secure from any resurgent terror threat”.
The process for this withdrawal “will be carried out according to criteria, and with a timeframe, to be agreed upon between the IDF, the international stabilisation force, the guarantors and the United States”.
After the plan’s publication, Netanyahu in a video message assured his domestic audience that Israel’s red lines were protected: Gaza separated from the West Bank, no return by the PA to Gaza, no path toward a “two-state solution” and no removal of Israel security forces from the majority of the Gaza Strip.
In trying to assuage the extremists in his coalition, Netanyahu was also doing all he could to persuade Hamas to reject the plan, so he could pursue the military offensive into Gaza City.
An answer from Hamas
Even though the plan did not have a timeline for when the board of technocrats would hand power to an elected Palestinian government, Qatar, Turkey and Egypt urged Hamas to accept many of the unsatisfactory ambiguities that could be addressed later. The war would end.
Diplomats said this message was received best not by the Hamas political wing in Doha but by the Hamas fighters inside Gaza, a new younger cadre steeped in the sacrifices made. With wording crafted by Qatar, the Hamas answer was in effect a “yes, but” that was open to many interpretations. Trump, to Netanyahu’s utter dismay, chose to take the Hamas response as an unqualified “yes”. The key was that Hamas was willing to relinquish its greatest bargaining chip: the remaining hostages.
Tahani Mustafa, of the European Council on Foreign Relations, argues that since the 7 October attack Palestinian politics has shifted to a more transactional outlook. “Palestinians are looking to someone that can make life bearable, keep them on their land and improve their living conditions. The very bare minimum is what people are asking for. Most Palestinians on the ground have resigned themselves to their fate.”
On this basis, the technocratic body to be chaired by Trump, but likely to be dominated by Blair with some figures from the Palestinian diaspora, could derive its legitimacy through its effectiveness.
Blair will be working against the destabilising backdrop of imminent elections in both Israel and Palestine. One of the body’s first tasks will be to build a relationship with Palestinian politics. Blair has close relations with the elites of the Middle East but none with the street, and he may leave to others such as Egypt the task of mediating an intra-Palestinian dialogue on Palestinian unity, a dialogue led by China, that the ageing and authoritarian PA president has sought to sabotage.
If elections do occur as promised, it could produce a change. The last time elections were attempted, in 2021 in the West Bank, the democratic appetite was there with 36 lists formed outside the established factions. The key question is what will happen if the elections produce a result that Blair’s technocratic board do not like.
As the Gaza war has continued with ever worsening devastation, Israel’s reputation has been shattered. In the Arab world, Israel is now seen as a greater threat to security than Iran. In the global south it is likened to apartheid South Africa, and across Europe the demonstrations and accusations of genocide continue. Growing majorities of American Jews and Democrats disapprove of Israel’s actions.
Robert Malley, a US negotiator at the time of the Oslo accords, has just co-authored a book on the impossibility of rational diplomatic answers to the conflict. He said external would-be peacemakers had been “so focused on whether we can get them to agree on what it would mean if there was a Palestinian state, just words on a piece of paper, without coming to terms with the nature of this conflict, the nature of this beast – which was a historical clash of narratives.
“From the Israeli perspective, they won in 1948. They won in 1967. And the Palestinians believe that they were victims of a historic injustice in 1948, 700,000 Palestinians expelled, loss of their land.
“And so for us Americans to come in and say, ‘well, let’s just paper over these differences, forget about the right of return, forget about Israeli historic grievances and Palestinian historic grievances, put a bow around it and call this peace’ – that was never going to fly with the parties.”
