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Kuttner on TAP

Trump’s peace plan and real estate deal

Strong-arming Bibi into a hostage/cease-fire agreement is the easy part.

They make a desert and call it peace. —Tacitus

The first phase of Donald Trump’s proposed peace deal in Gaza demonstrated all of his strengths and weaknesses. Trump finally concluded that he was being played for a fool by Netanyahu and had enough. So he gave Bibi an overdue humiliation by ordering the Israeli prime minister to accept a hostage-for-cease-fire plan, and then rubbed it in by dictating a phone call for Bibi to make from the White House on September 29 to Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, apologizing for Israel’s strike on Doha.

The tragedy is that this option of giving Bibi an ultimatum was there for Joe Biden all along, tens of thousands of Palestinian lives ago. But Biden feared the wrath of the Israel lobby, no matter how grotesque the genocide in Gaza. So he kept letting Bibi have his way with American weapons, at the cost of the votes of millions of disaffected young Americans appalled by Biden’s acceptance of Israel’s carnage.

In strong-arming Bibi, Trump has ironically bulletproofed himself against the charge of antisemitism by posing as a friend of the Jews. Columbia and Harvard, as it were, pay for Bibi’s sins.

With the two-year anniversary of the Hamas October 7th attacks coming tomorrow, Israeli public opinion is definitely on the side of the hostage deal, and commentators are relishing Bibi’s long-delayed comeuppance. The ultra-right figures in Bibi’s coalition cabinet are outraged, but for once they can’t veto the deal, because the centrist parties have pledged to make up the votes in the Knesset if needed.

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Even so, Hamas is a reluctant partner, since the larger proposed deal basically puts Hamas out of business. And the relatively easy part—hostages for cease-fire—is still being negotiated. What will be the Israeli withdrawal lines? Which Palestinians will be released? What are the security guarantees pending a final settlement?

Then comes the truly hard part. Who will actually govern Gaza? Trump may think of it as the next Riviera to be governed by a Board of Peace chaired by Trump himself, but the nations of the region, which are also expected to pay for the reconstruction, have other ideas. The Qataris have long played off all sides against each other and have been a key source of the financing of Hamas. There is also the question of restraining Israel’s plundering of the West Bank. It has long been conventional wisdom that the most important players in any settlement, namely the Saudis and the Egyptians, don’t give a damn about the Palestinians, but that doesn’t mean that they accept turning Gaza into Mar-a-Lago East.

Even if a deal is struck, there are multiple ways for things to go off the rails before it becomes a durable settlement. In the meantime, however, the sense of progress is a welcome diversion from the mess of the government shutdown and the increasing evidence of Trump’s deepening dementia whenever he goes off-script in public.

Trump is also motivated by his quest for a Nobel Peace Prize. He may have to wait awhile. Even if by some miracle, the Gaza cease-fire opens the door to a lasting settlement, the Norwegian Nobel Committee tends to take into account the entire career of laureates before awarding a prize. (The one appalling exception to that rule was Henry Kissinger, who shared the prize in 1973 for negotiating a cease-fire in a war that he had cynically prolonged.)

In the meantime, if Trump’s bullying has the effect of finally toppling Netanyahu, that is worthy of some lesser prize. Now, back to the shutdown.

– ROBERT KUTTNER

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