Gaza ceasefire deal is a win for Trump

"WE HAVE A DEAL," US President-elect Donald Trump said on his social media channel Truth Social, as Israel and the Hamas terrorist organisation agreed to a ceasefire on Wednesday. He will get much of the credit if this marks the end of what has been a brutal war—and he'll deserve it. 

It isn't that he or his foreign policy team came up with a new solution. As US Secretary of State Antony Blinken sought to highlight in a valedictory speech at Washington's Atlantic Council on Tuesday, the deal on offer appears to have changed very little since its last-minute rejection by Israel months ago.

Nor was it Trump's threat to let all hell break loose that will have done the trick. Hell has been breaking loose ever since Hamas launched its mass terror attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. There is little more that any US president could do to dial up Israel's scorched earth retaliation.

No, the fact that an agreement could at last be reached was down to the simple clarity of Trump's demand that it must happen, and now. That has forced not only Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu but also his ultra-right cabinet members to confront a binary choice: play ball or alienate the most amenable leader to themselves and their goals ever elected to the US presidency.

You can feel for Blinken, President Joe Biden, and the rest of the outgoing US foreign policy team as Trump reaps the win from their tireless work in bringing two fundamentally hostile parties together. It's been a thankless job, as Blinken's interruption by three different hecklers during his speech attested. But they don't deserve all that much sympathy.

True, Biden's leverage over Israel was weakened by the fact that Netanyahu knew he could wait for the possibility of a friendlier face in the White House. Yet the 46th US President also lacked the courage to use the tools he did have at his disposal in the form of granting or withholding arms supplies to Israel.

We will never know if Netanyahu would have continued the war in Gaza the way he has—long after his generals decided they had achieved all they could militarily—had he known this would cost him the weapons he also needed to succeed against Hezbollah in Lebanon and Iran. That choice was never forced upon him.

Make no mistake, using the threat of an arms embargo would have taken immense political bravery on Biden's part. Not only would Trump have made electoral hay with the decision at home, but most Israelis would have been appalled. They want the Gaza war over, too, but Biden would have been telling them something much more concerning, which is that from now on, US support for Israel's security would be conditional.

Timing was at least as important. Trump's pressure could work in Gaza now because—unlike in Ukraine—both parties to the conflict have more to gain from ending the war. Since Netanyahu effectively scuppered much the same offer in August, the Israel Defence Force has achieved relatively little beyond killing Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, who was swiftly replaced. The war continued even then, at a disproportionate cost to Palestinians, as well as the hostages, Israel's troops, and its economy.

 Netanyahu has tested to destruction his claim that the best way to get the remaining hostages released was to keep fighting until Hamas was destroyed. This was never remotely plausible, but by now the tradeoff between continuing the war and losing hostage lives has been proved beyond reasonable doubt. Of the original 251 people seized in 2023, some 98 remain in Gaza, with about half that number thought to be alive. Only a full Israeli withdrawal is likely to get all of them out.

The bankruptcy of Israel's military-only strategy for Gaza also has become indisputable with time. The prediction of critics that Hamas would be able to turn the war into an attritional game of whack-a-mole, even while hugely degraded as a fighting force, has proved correct. The Israel Defence Force was driven back into the northern part of the strip it cleared at the start of the war, as Hamas shifted from direct confrontation to setting boobytraps and ambushes.

In the five months since Netanyahu's August rejection of a ceasefire over control of the 100-meter-wide strip of land inside Gaza's border with Egypt, known as the Philadelphi Corridor, the IDF says 151 of its soldiers have lost their lives. The Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry estimates that 6,700 Palestinians, including an unknown number of Hamas fighters, lost theirs in the same period.

But perhaps more important to Netanyahu's calculations is that he has in the interim acquired new narratives of military success—in Lebanon, Syria, and against Iran—to help counter any recriminations over Gaza and the policy and intelligence failures of Oct. 7.

Wednesday's agreement begins a phased process and is just the first step toward peace. The deal reportedly leaves negotiating a full end of the war to a second stage that could well break down. Only then will Israel's government have to confront the hard choice between indefinite occupation and making political concessions the Gulf States have made clear they will need if they're to help stabilise Gaza or resume normalisation with Israel.

As Blinken said in his speech, such a grand bargain can work only if Netanyahu ignores the demands of his ultra-right cabinet partners, because the requirements set by Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States are for an end to the war, involvement of the Palestinian Authority in running Gaza, and a credible Israeli commitment to the creation of a future Palestinian state.

Getting agreement to all that from the current Israeli government remains a tall order. As I've written before, in his second term Trump faces a very different Middle East, in which the priorities of Israel and its Arab neighbours are much less closely aligned. If he can succeed in turning a ceasefire into a permanent settlement while completing the process of integrating Israel into regional security, energy, and trade structures that he began in his first presidency, he'll deserve the peace prize he so clearly wants.

Marc Champion is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Europe, Russia and the Middle East. He was previously Istanbul bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal.

Disclaimer: This article first appeared on Bloomberg, and is published by special syndication arrangement.