Yesterday, President Donald Trump unveiled a 20-point proposal for ending the devastating conflict in Gaza. On paper, it’s a mostly sensible deal—and certainly better than the alternative, which is what it should be measured against. Among other elements, the plan would end the war, return the remaining hostages, surge aid into Gaza, disarm and potentially exile Hamas, and provide an eventual pathway toward Palestinian self-government. Crucially, the proposal also repudiates Trump’s prior push to “clean out” Gazans in order to build an American resort, reversing an egregious blunder that had fanned the Israeli settler right’s dream of ethnically cleansing Gaza.
In short, the Trump plan is a bunch of generally reasonable ideas that have been circulating for years but have not been implemented, because both parties to the conflict have strong reservations about some of them. The question is whether any of that has changed. Trump’s proposal has the backing of the European Union, the Palestinian Authority, key Arab states, Israeli hostage families, and the Hamas patrons Turkey and Qatar. At the White House, the plan also received qualified support from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who praised it as achieving Israel’s war aims.
All of that, however, was the easy part. The hard part is the follow-through. Trump, always the salesman, presented the agreement as a done deal. But the real work has only just begun. Can Trump and his Middle Eastern allies get Hamas to assent to concessions, such as demilitarization, that it has thus far refused? And can the president keep Netanyahu from flipping on the deal if and when it threatens his far-right coalition in Parliament? For this plan to work, Trump will need his friends in Qatar and Turkey, whose countries shelter Hamas leaders, to deliver the terrorist group, and he will need to babysit the Israeli prime minister to ensure he upholds the bargain.
In theory, the president is uniquely situated to accomplish these aims. Trump has enjoyed warm relations with the leaders of Qatar and Turkey, having hosted both recently in the White House. He also has leverage over Netanyahu that no recent American president has enjoyed. That’s because, although Netanyahu previously marketed himself in his own country as a bulwark against pressure from liberal American presidents such as Barack Obama, insulating him from their demands, he has presented himself as an ally of the populist Trump. The prime minister even featured the president on massive campaign posters, implying to voters that only he could manage Israel’s relationship with the mercurial American leader. With new elections looming in 2026, Netanyahu cannot afford to be at odds with the man whose support is central to his own electoral argument, which is why he had no choice but to back Trump’s plan in Washington.
That early buy-in matters, but it is no guarantee that the deal will succeed. Hamas has not yet agreed to the proposal, and may respond with a “yes, and” intended to drag out negotiations and shift blame for their eventual failure to Israel. Netanyahu, meanwhile, will face blowback from the hard-right members of his coalition—who seek to ethnically cleanse, annex, and resettle Gaza—and may try to extricate himself from the agreement if he fears it will collapse his government.
As the Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid put it today, Netanyahu “usually says ‘yes’ in Washington, when he stands in front of cameras in the White House and feels like a groundbreaking statesman, and the ‘but’ when he returns to Israel and the base reminds him who’s boss.” In fact, Netanyahu has a long history of reneging on painstakingly negotiated agreements because of domestic political considerations. But none of those agreements had an American president on the other side. Trump has the power to compel Netanyahu; the question is whether he is capable of paying the sustained attention necessary to do it.
The bleak truth about the Gaza war is that most Palestinians and Israelis have wanted it to end for many months, but their leaders have instead privileged their own ideological interests over the popular will. As Mohammed al-Beltaji, a 47-year-old from Gaza City, told AFP after Trump announced his plan, “As always, Israel agrees, then Hamas refuses—or the other way around. It’s all a game, and we, the people, are the ones paying the price.” This latest round of diplomacy can hardly be expected to turn out differently. But it would be wrong not to hope.
The post What’s Missing From Trump’s Gaza Peace Plan appeared first on The Atlantic.
