\n<\/p>\n
Mother Jones; Chip Somodevilla\/Getty; Abdelrahman Rashad \/ Middle East Images\/AFP\/Getty<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Last weekend,<\/span> President Donald Trump flew to the Middle East to celebrate a ceasefire his administration helped broker between Hamas and Israel, after over two years of war. Still, despite celebrations and the release of surviving hostages, much remains unknown about what will happen next.<\/p>\n To cut through the bluster and assess the significance of the agreement, I spoke on Tuesday with Daniel Levy<\/a>, the president of the US\/Middle East Project.<\/p>\n Levy, who is based in London, previously worked as an Israeli peace negotiator during the Oslo B talks and the Taba peace talks.\u00a0We first spoke in the immediate aftermath of Hamas\u2019 October 7 attack. \u201cOne war crime is not met by another,\u201d he said<\/a> at the time. \u201cThat\u2019s the path to hell, which is precisely the path we\u2019re on now.\u201d His warnings about the shortcomings of the current deal are similarly worth heeding.\u00a0<\/p>\n The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n President Trump said in a speech before the Israeli Knesset on Monday that we are witnessing the \u201chistoric dawn of a new Middle East.\u201d How would you describe what this deal actually is and its importance?<\/strong><\/p>\n The easiest way is perhaps to say there are two things going on here. <\/p>\n One is really consequential. The Palestinians in Gaza are not being starved, bombed, displaced, and killed today. The 20 remaining living Israelis being reunited with their families. The fact that Palestinian prisoners were released. The fact that\u2014although Israel is still now, it seems, trying to make it difficult\u2014aid is getting in through the UN agencies that know how to do this in a humanitarian fashion. All of that is really important.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cBut there\u2019s no actual plan for getting any further. Israel is still occupying about 50 percent of Gaza.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n It is also being claimed that we have a historic peace deal. That is absolutely fictitious. There has been a lot of bombast in the claims of President Trump related to the second thing.\u00a0There is no plan. There is no paper. There\u2019s no reference to the West Bank.<\/p>\n If you wanted to be generous to the ceremonial circus<\/a> in Egypt, and in the Israeli Knesset, you would acknowledge that many of the leaders who were there were on the treadmill of ingratiating themselves with Trump. If you want to be more generous, you could say: The more elaborate this was, the more difficult it makes it to break the ceasefire. <\/em>And I think that\u2019s true.\u00a0<\/p>\n I think one of the sticking points for Hamas in these negotiations was: What is the guarantee?<\/em> In the context of American realities, the guarantee was: Look what a big deal Trump is making of it; how committed he is to it. <\/em>Therefore, the bar for Netanyahu to go back to the kind of killing that has been credibly described and documented<\/a> by a UN Commission of Inquiry and others as a genocide, that bar becomes quite high. And that\u2019s where we are. But there\u2019s no actual plan for getting any further. Israel is still occupying about 50 percent of Gaza.<\/p>\n Why did<\/strong> this deal happen at this moment?<\/strong><\/p>\n I haven\u2019t totally unpacked that for myself.\u00a0<\/p>\n On the Hamas side, I think that the regional mediating parties were able to tell Hamas: It\u2019s not January to March\u2014when there was a ceasefire, it was violated, and we couldn\u2019t deliver. Now, you see the nature of our relationship with Trump. <\/em>That was a powerful card for Qatar and T\u00fcrkiye to play. Hamas, also, was in the room with the Americans. The plausibility of this ceasefire being permanent reached a higher level than it had in the past. That\u2019s the Hamas dynamic.<\/p>\n Then you have on the Israeli side. The answer to the timing is primarily an answer to the question: Why did Netanyahu agree now? Because Netanyahu has been the obstacle to a deal. What changes this time is the American pressure, although it\u2019s not just the American pressure. On the American pressure side, I do think that it was Netanyahu\u2019s hubristic overreach in bombing<\/a> in Qatar that played an important role because it put him on the back foot vis-a-vis Trump and the regional allies.\u00a0<\/p>\n The other factor that came into the equation was that there was this momentum towards pressure on Israel. And Netanyahu made a rare misstep when he talked<\/a> about isolation and autarky (an Israeli economy that would be self-reliant and not plugged into the world). That\u2019s not realistic. And so I think that international pressure got to him, and those were the vectors that forced him to do something that he had previously refused to do.<\/p>\n How much credit do you give Trump and his administration?<\/strong><\/p>\n I think there\u2019s credit that should be given. The difficulty in calibrating that level of credit is twofold.\u00a0<\/p>\n First of all, the credit is measured against how pathetic the approach of the previous administration was. If I\u2019m marginally better than something that was truly dreadful, how much credit does that merit? You see some of the Biden team trying to rewrite history and pretend that they were building to this all along. I\u2019d ideally like to see an actual physical court be the judge of that one day, but perhaps it will just be the court of history.\u00a0<\/p>\n The other thing you have to calibrate it against is that the Trump administration\u2019s approach, which kind of said we\u2019re just going to force this through, also leaves us with the situation we\u2019re in today\u2014which is that virtually everything that\u2019s been agreed to has already now been implemented. If vagueness going forward was the way to get here, then maybe it has a role. But then you have to come in and actually say: And now here\u2019s what\u2019s going to happen going forward.<\/em>\u00a0<\/p>\n There the fear is not so much that it\u2019s vague. It\u2019s: Are we better off with the Trump administration very engaged, or not engaged at all? <\/em>Because their engagement may well mean that what they try to impose next is criminal\u2014that it totally does not align with international law.\u00a0<\/p>\n This isn\u2019t our first rodeo in terms of how they approach Palestine. There was the Peace to Prosperity plan of the first Trump administration, the recognition of Israel\u2019s illegal annexation of Jerusalem, and the recognition of the Golan Heights.\u00a0<\/p>\n And what\u2019s in this 20 point plan<\/a>? The tiny bits of meat on this structure of bones are not in the least bit appetizing. A colonial governance structure for Gaza, for instance. No reference to the West Bank whatsoever.\u00a0<\/p>\n So credit to Trump, but it\u2019s a very flimsy premise to build something promising going forward.<\/p>\n How early do you think the Biden administration could have secured a deal similar to the one that exists now if it had been willing to exert leverage over Israel?<\/strong><\/p>\n Well, there was a ceasefire in November of 2023. In a way, it was America\u2019s deal to end the war because it was also America\u2019s war. Of course, it was Israel\u2019s war. But it was a war that could not have been conducted without America. It was Biden\u2019s war to stop. It was Trump\u2019s war to stop. Perhaps they couldn\u2019t have done that overnight. But, we\u2019ve seen it\u2014once the US was determined, it was a matter of days and weeks. And at any stage there were circumstances where the US could stop this.<\/p>\n The ceasefire reached in January fell apart after Israel violated it in March. How likely are we to get to some of the later points of this plan, like the so-called \u201cBoard of Peace\u201d to help oversee Gaza, and the international stabilization force that is supposed to eventually deploy there?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n There\u2019s a huge gap in all of this. The major point of credit that goes to what was achieved\u2014alongside the hostage release, prisoner exchange\u2014is that you have put an end to a genocidal war. That\u2019s huge. But the Trump administration doesn\u2019t see it that way. There\u2019s no humanization of Palestinians.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe credit [for Trump] is measured against how pathetic the approach of the previous administration [under Biden] was.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n And therefore, the biggest gap is\u2014having done something remarkable in putting an end to a genocidal war\u2014you don\u2019t do the thing that is most necessary after that: Which is to acknowledge what has happened, and to at least allow the language of accountability to permeate to whatever happens next.\u00a0<\/p>\n I get it if you don\u2019t want to put Netanyahu behind bars because you don\u2019t want to upset the apple cart. But you have to have some acknowledgment of what has gone on, and I think that\u2019s crucial to the shortcomings that we\u2019re likely to see going forward.\u00a0<\/p>\n Trump has gone in the opposite direction. In his Knesset speech on Monday, he talked about how Israel used American weapons \u201cvery well\u201d in Gaza and how it achieved peace through strength. What lessons are Israeli politicians taking away from this war after seeing it end with them still enjoying full US support?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n The major lesson is to reinforce the assumptions they went into this with. Those were reinforced by a Democratic administration under Biden, [Antony] Blinken<\/a>, [Jake] Sullivan<\/a>, [Brett] McGurk<\/a>. I think it\u2019s always important to remember the names of those who were complicit in war crimes. So, they were reinforced first by the Biden administration, and then by the Trump administration. And now by Trump\u2019s narrative. That is the permissive environment which led to the committing of such crimes in the first place.<\/p>\n I want to caveat that by saying Israeli politicians are cognizant that something\u2019s moved in America\u2014even in the MAGA space. They are also cognizant that Trump can turn on them. They don\u2019t expect it, but they are not sitting comfortably when they hear Trump lavishing the kind of praise he did on Recep Tayyip Erdo\u011fan, the president of Turkey, on Sheik Tamim, the Emir of Qatar, and others who were in that room in Egypt on Monday.<\/p>\n Thirdly, what they saw is that even with American support, things can get a bit uncomfortable when a cultural zeitgeist has shifted\u2014when your allies in the West are under pressure from their publics to act because of the extremity of what you are doing. And much as European leaders didn\u2019t want to impact their bilateral relationship with Israel, they were on a slippery slope because their publics were disgusted by their inaction.<\/p>\n What happens from here when, as many people expect, Trump\u2019s attention goes elsewhere and he doesn\u2019t focus on following through on the rest of this plan?<\/strong><\/p>\n I\u2019m not sure it looks very different whether there is sustained US attention or not. The determining factor is: What is the nature of that attention? The attention of a Trump-Rubio-Kushner administration on autopilot is a continued permissive environment in the West Bank, a continued permissive environment in the region, and Israel having quite a free hand.\u00a0<\/p>\n I would draw a distinction between a resumption of the level and intensity of killing and destruction in Gaza, and Israel staying in Gaza\u2014conducting operations as it has done in Lebanon during the so-called ceasefire, as it does in the West Bank, still nickel-and-diming everyone on aid, still being able to operationalize violent clans and militias to sow chaos. Unless this is an administration with a different approach, attention and inattention may not look too different.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n
\n