After any major international agreement or legislative achievement, it’s natural and proper to look back and explore how it happened and who made it happen. That is how we learn what steps should be taken, and avoided, to spur positive change. But far too much attention in the political and media spheres is being paid to the question of whether one person, President Donald Trump, deserves the credit for the Israel-Hamas ceasefire.
Sunday talk show anchors this week pressed Democrats on “How much credit does President Trump deserve for this deal,” if the cease fire was “a clear win” for Trump, and if “this peace deal came together now because President Trump was more effective at pressuring Prime Minister Netanyahu than former President Biden.”
We will learn nothing from a cramped debate designed to flatter one man’s ego and buoy his hollow, self-indulgent quest for a Nobel Peace Prize. And we will steer attention away from the far more tragic yet instructive strategic failures on all sides that produced so much needless death and suffering and likely have set back the cause of peace for decades.
That Trump gets some credit for the ceasefire agreement is not even something in dispute. All reporting indicates he successfully leaned on a reluctant Netanyahu to accept Hamas’s offer to release the 20 remaining living Israeli hostages in exchange for Israel releasing far more Palestinian prisoners, without any broader peace agreement in place or commitment by Hamas to disarm.
But the value of that credit is limited. Finalizing such a deal after two years of ruthless war that left Gaza in rubble and depleted negotiating leverage for Hamas is not exactly a diplomatic feat on the order of the Camp David Accords. No trust has been built between Israelis and Palestinians, no vision of permanent peaceful coexistence has been offered, let alone given lip-service to. The long-standing presumption that Israel still sought a two-state solution has been extinguished by the statements of those now in power. At the micro-level, freedom for individuals in captivity is worthy of celebration. At the macro-level, what is there to cheer?
According to Gaza Health Ministry statistics, Hamas’s decision to attack Israel two years ago led to nearly 70,000 deaths of its own people, about three percent of the Gazan population. Among the dead were six members of Hamas’s own leadership. Much of the territory has been reduced to rubble, and according to the United Nations, about 90 percent of the population has been displaced, often multiple times. The most optimistic estimate from the U.N. for how long reconstruction will take is 16 years, and the most pessimistic 80 years. From the Palestinian perspective, the October 7 attack was an unmitigated disaster.
But this is no zero-sum game that requires christening Israel as the winner by default. The October 7 attack that killed nearly 1200 Israelis was a massive military, intelligence, and security failure on the part of a complacent Israeli government, uninterested in the peace process yet unwilling to believe their own peace could be so easily shattered. Clear signs of a pending assault were known yet repeatedly downplayed and dismissed.
The brutally overwhelming military response from Israel decimated Hamas and rolled back its allies Iran and Hezbollah, but at enormous cost to civilian human life and Israel’s global reputation and support for its right to exist; and to unity within the Jewish diaspora. The notion that Hamas or other Palestinian groups will now be kept at bay by Israel’s military might flies in the face of the decades-long history of Middle East strife, in which military victories are eventually reciprocated by asymmetric terrorist attacks. The seeds for irrevocable mistrust and ongoing conflict have been deeply planted. Without even a trace of hope in the near future for a two-state solution, we should expect them to grow for more decades. There were no strategic choices by Israel or Hamas that anyone in the future should ever want to replicate.
And Trump? Yes he secured this ceasefire agreement … seven months after he failed to maintain the ceasefire agreement struck by Biden in January. But Trump is never interested in protecting the “wins” of others. He loves to do just enough to organize his own ribbon-cutting ceremonies. Now he can assert that his agreement portends the “historic dawn of a new Middle East” even though there is no reason to believe that’s true—unless you think that Israel can and should persevere indefinitely by militarily subjugating Palestinian territories, without much global support, and that somehow amounts to a new dawn.
There is nothing in Trump’s record to show he has any understanding of the complex, multifaceted policy approaches required to strike not just a temporary agreement with a handshake, but a lasting peace fortified by hard-earned mutual trust, political compromise, and economic codependence. There is nothing in Trump’s record to suggest he cares about what may happen to any temporary agreement beyond his time in office, or even beyond the initial photo-op. The question, “is Trump more effective at pressuring Netanyahu than Biden” is extraordinarily narrow. Even if the answer is yes, does that mean Trump has superpower diplomatic skills that will be deployed to do the necessary follow-through work? Of course not. We all know Trump wants to do just enough—or be perceived as doing just enough—to get his medal, and that’s it.
We who live on Earth are stuck with Trump for another three years and three months. I understand the incentive for other world leaders to genuflect in hopes of surviving. But the rest of us need not fall over ourselves to narrow our fields of vision and place Trump at the center of every story. The lesson to learn from the October 7 attacks and the subsequent Israel-Hamas hostilities is not how a vainglorious blowhard can channel his thirst for validation into tenuous ceasefire agreements. It’s how the dark thrill of self-righteous violence in the short run can easily lead to devastating consequences in the long run.
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