The October 13 peace summit in Sharm al-Sheikh—where Donald Trump assembled more than 30 world leaders, including Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and (for some reason) the international soccer vizier Gianni Infantino—achieved, for about two hours, general agreement on a 20-point plan for Gaza. It had immediately freed the remaining 20 living Israeli hostages, in exchange for almost 2,000 Palestinian prisoners, plus assurances of an Israeli military withdrawal and an end to the war. On that day, I made the case for optimism. Now it is time to make the case for the opposite.
In one, and probably only one, respect, the pageant in Sharm al-Sheikh resembled a certain type of Protestant wedding. The guests at those weddings affirm, out loud, that they will, in the Anglican phrasing, “do all in your power to uphold these two persons in their marriage.” That appeared to be the role of the potentates in Egypt: to say that they blessed the union Trump had just solemnized, and that they would take unspecified steps to support it. This union will be especially fragile, given that the two parties at the altar would like to kill each other (a condition that I am told usually takes decades of Anglican matrimony). And the remaining steps of the plan—the disarming of Hamas, the fielding of an international security force, and the establishment of a governing committee of Palestinian technocrats—will be a challenge, for the simple reason that no one knows how to do any of them.
“It’s not going to happen,” a former Israeli intelligence official, who requested anonymity to speak freely, told me a week ago. Disarming Hamas is a task that only the Israeli military can handle, he said, because Israel alone knows the human terrain of Gaza. It has mapped out neighborhoods, knows which clan hates which, and is prepared to use that knowledge to dismantle the remaining elements of Hamas. The plan’s 13th point calls for the permanent destruction of the 500 miles of tunnels built by Hamas under Gaza. Israel has destroyed 200 miles of tunnels. Who will destroy the rest? When? And how, if Hamas shoots at the engineers who are destroying them?
The countries currently being considered have no relevant experience. “They don’t know the DNA of Gaza,” the intelligence official told me. “And many of them—Indonesia, Pakistan—don’t know a word of Arabic.” What will happen the first time an Indonesian or Pakistani military contingent gets hit by a rocket, or sees Hamas preparing for an attack and fails to prevent it? These scenarios are both nightmarish and probable. Of the countries expected to have a security role, Turkey is among the more competent. But the former Israeli intelligence official said that Israel will prevent Turkey and Qatar from having a direct security role, because they are patrons of Hamas and have long since made themselves impossible partners in Gaza. “If they come,” he told me, “we will foil them.” Two years ago, serious people proposed that the Palestinian Authority take over Gaza, and the United States even tried to train and expand the PA’s security teams. These efforts amounted to so little that the PA is now “completely useless,” the former official told me; and it cannot manage its affairs in the West Bank, let alone in Gaza.
A security force can only materialize, he said, if the United States pays singular and sustained attention. When the deal came into force, I noted that Secretary of State and Acting National Security Adviser Marco Rubio had been designated as the U.S. official in charge of keeping Israel from responding to provocations by simply going back into the portions of Gaza it recently left behind. (Officials charged with keeping Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from returning to Gaza are now being called “Bibi-sitters.”) Vice President J. D. Vance visited Israel earlier this week, and Rubio is there now. This pattern of visits from Americans of steadily diminishing rank (watch for a visit from a deputy director of the Fish and Wildlife Service in mid-January) suggests the opposite of sustained attention. Rather than dragooning the wedding guests into making good on their promise, the United States is poised to let them scarf down canapés and leave, and let the quarreling couple kill each other before the honeymoon.
The general form of the Trump plan was optimistic. But it was not crazy. To start with a wedding, then wait ’til later to figure out the details of who washes the dishes and whether the toilet seat stays down, sounds backwards but is certainly better than hostage-taking and war without an achievable end. Right now the 20-point plan is in effect halted while Trump’s deputies make efforts to determine which of its deficiencies are remediable. It’s not clear when the plan will be implemented, who will implement it, or how.
This pause is costly. Everyone knows that some form of Hamas—skinned of the top echelon of its leadership—has survived and rules the parts of Gaza that Israel never fully occupied. During the pause, according to reports, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain have already told Trump that they will back out of the deal if Hamas remains armed. (All three countries are autocracies that suppress Islamists and revile Hamas.) In other words, they supported the plan in Sharm al-Sheikh not because they were eager to join the work party that would follow, but because they hoped that others would finish the job in Gaza and spare them the trouble. If the United States fails to produce more volunteers, it now appears that the work party will be an Israeli operation after all.
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