By sheer force of will and a style bordering on mafia-like, President Donald Trump appears to have dragged the Middle East to the brink of an unlikely peace. Basking in applause at the Knesset on Monday, he declared that Israel’s long war was over. It was perfectly in tune with Trumpian spectacle, but on the ground it’s far from clear that the war is truly done.
The deal Israel actually agreed to two weeks ago is a 20-point plan which includes Hamas disarming, going into exile, and making way for a civilian Palestinian government backed by a complex regional and international oversight committee. This agreement was backed not only by most Western and Arab countries but by Qatar, Hamas’ one-time patron.
The show this week—both in Israel and in the Egyptian resort of Sharm-el-Sheikh, to which Trump dragged several dozen world and regional leaders, was predicated on the idea that this plan is now in place. Trump and Arab leaders “signed” documents to prove it—but without the presence of the two actual combatants, Israel and Hamas.
No one has actually heard Hamas agree to disarm. What we have heard is Trump saying the group agreed to “PEACE.” If Hamas still possesses arms and actually refuses to lay them down, Israel may soon want to resume the war, and it would have a point.
Yet doing so will now will be excruciatingly difficult after everyone from British PM Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron to Azerbaijan’s Ilham Aliyev and Armenia’s Nikol Pashinyan feted Trump’s “peace conference.” Trump has invested so much of America’s prestige in the claim of victory that he cannot allow facts to contradict him.
It is possible that in Sharm-el-Sheikh Trump secured Arab backing to ensure that Hamas is brought to heel. But it's just as possible that Israel, the region, and the poor Gazans will continue to be saddled with the militant group going forward. Indeed, it has been appointing local chieftains and executing dozens of accused “collaborators”—not exactly signs of an impending surrender.
Trump’s approach to the region has always been an extension of his personality, which is very much based on bluster and bluff, with leverage applied where possible. In the Ukraine war, Trump lacks sufficient leverage over Russia—but in the Middle East he has leverage over all involved. Israel cannot continue the war without him, Qatar and other Gulf countries want security guarantees and business access, Turkey wants F-35 planes, and Egypt wants Yemen’s Houthis to stop impeding maritime trade headed to the Suez canal.
Trump’s flatter-and-pay-off methods are crude, but in this part of the world they can work. A culture that respects power, intimidation, and humiliation more than polite consensus sometimes responds better to a man who projects force than to one who preaches peace and deals with problems with politeness and propriety.
The effectiveness—and the danger—of Trump’s approach were evident in June, at the end of the 12-day war between Israel and Iran. The Iranian regime had been badly schooled—its nuclear and ballistic missile programs badly degraded, its air defenses laid waste as Israel controlled its skies, its top military (and nuclear scientist) cadres wiped out in mass assassinations. Tehran wanted the war to end, especially after the U.S. bombed its three main nuclear sites with bunker busters. Israel wanted to go on, and perhaps bring down the regime.
So on June 23 Trump announced the war was over, daring either of the sides to call him a liar. And the war was over. He then passed on the chance to force Iran to sign surrender terms—for example, agreeing to end sponsorship of militias in the region—because he wanted credit for having finished the job with the bombing. Now Iran is rebuilding, unchastened, its regime secure.
The Gaza War could prove to be precisely this kind of premature declaration of victory. If it turns out that Hamas has pocketed the peace and refuses to disarm, then Netanyahu will face a massive political problem: this kind of deal—the hostages for an end to the war—was attainable a year or more ago, before dozens of hostages and hundreds of soldiers (as well as many thousands of Palestinians) were killed. It will add to his woes in elections, which must be held in a year at most.
And the past two years of warfare have been devastating. In the coming weeks, as international media—and truly independent and impartial global NGOs and humanitarian groups—arrive in Gaza, the devastation they will find will not be pretty, and Israel may face hard questions about the destruction it wreaked on Gaza. Could it not have been reduced? Was everything strictly necessary? What did it achieve?
On the other hand, one could argue that the strategic equation—for Israel, for moderate Palestinians, for the region, and for the world—is immeasurably better than it was before the war.
Israel managed during the war to meaningfully degrade the Lebanese militia Hezbollah, which had been undermining its host country for decades, and which began bombarding Israel recklessly in the wake of October 7. That led to the fall of Syria’s murderous Assad regime, which Hezbollah propped up and which in exchange deprived Hezbollah of its weapons superhighway from Iran through Syria. Iran has been weakened as well, and Hamas has been pulverized too—all of which seems to have emboldened the Arab world to turn against jihadism.
The Arab League went a long way toward delegitimizing jihadism and the Iranian militias project in July, when it joined Western powers in calling for Hamas to disarm. What is needed now is for the Arab world to put muscle behind those words.
Trump may be too invested in the end-of-war narrative to let Israel resume the fight, but the Arab world—especially the Gulf financiers—can finish the job by conditioning any reconstruction monies for Gaza on Hamas honoring the Trump plan, down to the point that requires the terrorist group to lay down its arms. Everything now rests on this.
Dan Perry is the former Cairo-based Middle East editor and London-based Europe/Africa editor of the Associated Press, the former chairman of the Foreign Press Association in Jerusalem, and the author of two books. Follow him at danperry.substack.com.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
