Today at 9:30 a.m., Air Force One made a low pass over Tel Aviv on its way into Ben Gurion Airport. The flight had more in common with an astronomical portent—a medieval comet, say, and all the swings in mood that might entail among the public—than a mere act of aviation. Israelis had stayed up for days in hopes that hostages would be released. The sight of the 747 meant: This is really happening. Within a few hours, it had happened. Hamas surrendered the last 20 of its living hostages to Israel and began the process of returning the remains of dozens more. (One hundred and forty had previously been released, eight had been freed in Israeli raids, and the remaining 75 or so are presumed dead.) Israel, having withdrawn its forces from much of Gaza on Friday, released 1,968 Palestinian prisoners.
The Israelis who had let themselves get carried away with expectant joy during the past few days were for once not punished for their optimism. Gazans who for two years had become accustomed to dozens of their neighbors being killed every day, on average, by Israel suddenly enjoyed the possibility of a hiatus. A war that started with the murder of more than 1,000 Israelis by Hamas, and went on to kill more Gazans than can be precisely counted, appears to have ended. This afternoon, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke in the Knesset and declared victory. Donald Trump spoke next and said that today the sun had risen on “a Holy Land that is finally at peace,” after Israel had achieved “all that can be won by force of arms.” Any hope in the region is largely due to the fact that Trump will look like a chump if the deal collapses, and that he will do anything to avoid chump status and destroy those who would make him into one.
I spent some of these moments of glee in East Jerusalem, at the home of the Palestinian philosopher Sari Nusseibeh. Nusseibeh, 76, was president of Al-Quds University from 1995 to 2014 and the Palestinian Authority’s representative in Jerusalem from 2001 to 2002. During that time, he toiled for a two-state solution—a vision of peace that for the past two years has seemed not only elusive but positively quaint. He has been out of politics for decades now, and told me that for much of the past two years he had preserved his sanity by avoiding too much Gaza news and watching South Korean soap operas instead.
Israel demands that Hamas disarm and vanish. Hamas still refuses. I told Nusseibeh I feared that the hiatus would not last, that Hamas would pop up from the rubble and blow up an Israeli military vehicle, and that the war would resume. He chided me for my pessimism: Hamas had little to gain from spoiling the peace at this point, and the Israelis would not be foolish enough to expose themselves to attacks of this sort. (A U.S. official in Israel told me that keeping Israel from responding to such a provocation is a high-priority task assigned to Secretary of State and National Security Adviser Marco Rubio.) The Trump plan calls for a force, made up of “Arab and international” partners, to keep the peace under the guidance of the United States military, and a “technocratic, apolitical Palestinian committee” to run Gaza.
Nusseibeh told me he felt a “paradoxical optimism” after the catastrophe of Gaza, and thought the new temporary government had “a good chance” of not returning to war soon. “We have paid an enormous price,” he told me. “Israelis have too. But that means people will be willing to look at things differently.” Now it was time to lightly chide his former self. “Before, everyone—including me—believed we could have a two-state solution overnight,” he said. Now, he said, no one could fool himself into thinking that peace could be effortlessly maintained, or that statehood could come suddenly. The security framework now coming into focus, he said, might work. And if it does, it could create new possibilities, including in the West Bank. He acknowledged the weirdness of how this path became possible, by the efforts of “this strange guy in the White House” who came from nowhere, “like Superman,” somehow imagining what can be, unburdened by what has been. Previous presidents hadn’t done much.
I am not used to being told by Palestinians to cheer up. Nusseibeh expressed concerns, too, particularly that Gaza, although newly peaceful, might end up permanently split from the West Bank. But his contemplation of the possibilities of the current moment was not a daydream.
Trump himself has declared that he “will not allow Israel to annex the West Bank.” That commitment, delivered last month in the Oval Office, was until recently open to doubt, in particular after his appointment of former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, an evangelical supporter of Israel, as his ambassador in Jerusalem. “I think Israel has title deed to Judea and Samaria,” he told CNN in 2017, pointedly preferring the name for the West Bank used by Israeli expansionists. Since he arrived in Jerusalem in April, Huckabee seems to have either lost or found religion on this issue. In July, he visited the West Bank village of Taybeh, where a Palestinian church had been torched by Israeli settlers, and declared that the arson was “an act of terror.” Settler violence surged soon after the October 7 attacks, as I reported at the time. The olive harvest, which has in the past been an occasion for attacks by settlers, just began, and things are quieter now. There may be hope.
The images of devastation in Gaza, and perhaps also the company of a philosopher, reminded me of another philosopher, Jonathan Lear, who died last month. In his 2006 book Radical Hope, Lear considered what remains for survivors of a wrecked civilization. After the Crow people of America’s Great Plains were confined to reservations, their last great chief, Plenty Coups, declared enigmatically that “after this, nothing happened.” The line was an epitaph for a way of life. Lear proposed that pronouncing the Crow dead in one form was a condition for clearing room for the “rebirth” of the Crow in another. To hope radically is to recognize the passing of one way of life, without being able to know what way of life will be born into the space made possible by the passing of the previous one.
The people of Gaza have not suffered a civilizational wipe-out like the Crow. (According to Hamas’s Ministry of Health, about 3 percent of the population of Gaza have died in the war. The figure includes combatants. In a few short years, about a third of all Crow died of smallpox alone.) But there might be a similar moment coming, when one political era has ended and another, whose details are as yet unknown, is struggling to be born. A strange orange midwife is attending.
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