Donald Trump claims to have brokered a 60-day “ceasefire” between the warring parties in Gaza. If it works, a two-month suspension of the bombing of the territory, and of killings at human feeding pens, would be welcome. But it will solve nothing, because both Israel’s rulers and Hamas are committed to their core belief in a saying that begins “From the river to the sea ...”
How the phrase ends, though, is the point of contention: “Israel will be sovereign” – or “Palestine will be free”. The former version, in so many words, is part of the founding documents of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party; the latter is a chant often taken to mean that Israel, along with its population, should be extinguished.
The only solution to these mutually exclusive slogans is tolerance and hope. Trump’s ceasefire offers neither. Violence and impunity have created a landscape of horror – and Trump isn’t the guide out of it.
Hamas is blood-soaked, murderous. It has sacrificed tens of thousands of innocent civilians to the Israeli war machine in its long campaign to shatter any chance that Palestinians might ever hope for their own state and freedom, alongside Israel, between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean.
Hamas remains the dominant force in Gaza. It has mistaken – and will continue to mistake – worldwide public dismay at what Israel has done to the Strip for endorsement of its zero-sum agenda. It will take the 60 days as a breather and a rearming opportunity.
The struggle for Gaza’s population will be how to resist the temptation to take up emigration opportunities. Israel has smashed their world into rubble and dust, and thereby may deliver on the Netanyahu government’s clear desire to flush the territory’s 2.2 million survivors into the Egyptian Sinai desert and beyond.
A poll conducted in May this year by the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research showed that 43 per cent of Palestinians were now willing to emigrate – to anywhere.
The Palestinians have nowhere to turn for leadership. Eight months ago, 36 per cent of Palestinians said they supported Hamas, and 21 per cent said they supported Fatah, which dominates the West Bank. Support for Hamas since then has decreased by four percentage points, according to the poll.
Marwan Bargouthi, the most popular Palestinian politician with 50 per cent support, is in an Israeli jail serving several life sentences.
Since the murder of nearly 1,200 people and the abduction of 240 from Israel by extremists led by Hamas on 7 October 2023, Israel has waged a war of staggering brutality against Palestinians. The indictment of Netanyahu along with Yoav Gallant, then Israel’s defence minister, for war crimes, and the issuing of arrest warrants, is not a measure undertaken lightly by the International Criminal Court.
Israel has changed. There is a battle raging internally for its soul, as Netanyahu continues to do everything he can to stay in office – he is facing corruption charges. He has suspended plans to destroy the independent judiciary, but only temporarily. Meanwhile, the population is showing signs of radicalisation.
Some 82 per cent of Israeli Jews support the mass expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza, according to a recent poll by Pennsylvania State University. And 54 per cent strongly support this. It asked 1,000 Jewish Israelis if they supported the idea that all of the people in towns conquered by Israel should be killed, in the same way that Jericho was flattened in the Bible; 47 per cent backed the idea of mass slaughter.
The results of this survey were published in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. The left-wing publication has also published allegations that, since May this year, the Israel Defense Forces have deliberately killed more than 400 Palestinians seeking food aid.
Trump has leverage over Israel. He has cut foreign aid almost entirely around the world, except there and in Egypt. Before the US president slashed the help provided to the world’s neediest, the Jewish state received up to 20 per cent of America’s total overseas aid.
According to the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, the US provided Israel with $22.8bn (£16.8bn) in military aid in the first year of its Gaza campaign.
“Israel has been the largest cumulative recipient of US foreign aid since its founding, receiving about $310bn (adjusted for inflation) in total economic and military assistance,” read a November 2024 report by the US Council on Foreign Relations.
Trump says he is putting pressure on Netanyahu, who is shortly to visit the White House. But the US president has previously endorsed the ethnic cleansing of Gaza with the fantasy of settling its population in neighbouring countries while turning the territory itself into a beach resort.
His calls for a ceasefire warn that life will get worse for Palestinians – they don’t focus on any kind of option that would undermine the standing of Hamas with hope.
The US has instead been silent as Gaza has been carpet-bombed and Jewish settlers run amok on the West Bank, where illegal Israeli settlements have marched across the landscape and physically obliterated the space where a Palestinian state could ever take form.
If Trump wants to earn the Nobel Peace Prize, which he thinks he already richly deserves, he needs to put a stop to Israel’s impunity by ending the subsidies that allow the country to make war.
Hamas and its fellow recidivist travellers to armageddon can only be put out of business if the Palestinians, who already despair of all their leaders, can be offered a path that doesn’t end in apartheid, occupation and indignity for generations to come.
Trump could help end a zero-sum Grand Guignol by forcing Israel to back away from its “river to the sea” policies, while Hamas’s demands for sovereignty over the same space can be swept aside by a genuine return, among Palestinians, to faith in liberty.
Not long ago, two-thirds of people on both sides thought it would be possible for the two nations to live side by side between the River Jordan and the Med. They need freeing from the subsidies that trap them in misery there.
