Donald Trump went where no one dared: he said, in effect: stop fighting and start talking, and if you haven’t got the words or the will to talk yet, well then start building, building, and rebuilding, and see where it goes — it may even get you to eternal peace, said he; in any case, it cannot be anywhere worse than where you are, standing amidst rubble in a kill-or-be-killed forever war.
And it must be stated here, since we are Americans, that as Israel goes, so goes what we call the West — liberal civilization.
But, alas, there are worse things than wars that seem forever but that in fact end with one side clearly the victor. It is admittedly discourteous to say so now, but the fact is that this is not the case in Gaza. Its enemies have troops with useable arsenals and there is no indication they do not intend to use them. Maybe the chance of peace was worth the uncertainty; but when people who know the situation far better than most of us have sharply different takes on political affairs — I am thinking of the Middle East Forum’s Greg Roman on one side and the editors of the Israeli daily Haaretz on the other — but agree the Trump peace plan is flawed, there is cause, if not for pessimism, then at least, shall we say, realistic expectations.
One’s first reaction to the president’s peace offensive in the Middle East must be one of hope and cheers, however solemn. The surviving Israeli noncombatants whom Hamas has held hostage and tortured for two years, will return home, Gaza’s tortured residents, also victims of the war criminals who placed them in the line of fire, never letting them take refuge in the tunnels they had built for their own security — they too will return to what remains of home. For now, the artillery and the bombs will cease firing and stop falling.
For now. So yes, cheers however painful, hope however hesitant: for this, Donald Trump must be thanked, praised, congratulated. One’s first reaction is the right one. Who, after all, offered anything better, with a better chance of success?
And if one has a second reaction, it must be stated as soberly as possible and with the caveat that it springs only from prudence born of experience. To anticipate disappointment is not to will it; to anticipate something can also be a way, indeed the best way, to avoid it.
For let us look at this thing coldly. The Trump Peace Plan contains fine principles and aims, but, paradox, it also contains self-defeating assumptions.
The basic idea is to accept Palestinian self-rule in exchange for permanent peace between Jews and Muslims in the Levant: I use the archaic formula because it merits remembering, indeed it is crucial to remember, that this plan has been proposed by the Jews since the beginning of the “Arab-Israel conflict,” which itself antedates the Jewish national movement’s fight for liberation. This is accomplishment of Zionism. Today the name is widely reviled, but in real historical fact it is the only successful national liberation movement in the contemporary world.
Whereas all other national liberation movements of this era produced tyrannies that drive their own people to emigrate toward the very countries that allegedly oppressed and colonized them, the Zionist movement, transforming itself into the State of Israel, produced a representative, liberal democratic nation-state that transformed a desolate land into one of the world’s most prosperous countries, materially and spiritually speaking, benefiting Jewish and non-Jewish Israelis.
This is so well known that it is amazing, truly, that one must again and again repeat it; but that this should be so is also a clue to the problem with this peace plan: if one must repeat again and again that Israel is a success story, it must be because there are wicked forces in the world that obstinately repeat the opposite: Israel and all its works are evil and must be eradicated. And if these wicked forces are not silenced permanently, they will in time try again to do just that, eradicate Israel.
And it must be stated here, since we are Americans, that as Israel goes, so goes what we call the West — liberal civilization. So let us keep in mind that a successful and righteous peace plan, is of fundamental strategic importance to us, to the West, if we are serious about our own long term, or even short term, survival and success. Does the peace plan enhance the chances for this outcome, or lessen them? That is the question.
It is a question I certainly cannot answer. Perhaps no one can, but one cannot avoid noticing that persons with at least some claim to be able to offer tentative answers, such person are skeptical. They are hopeful, certainly; but their very devotion to Israel’s — and the West’s — win in this long struggle obliges them to express their skepticism, their worries.
Why worry? Let us first get two inconvenient historical facts clear, because they help explain why it really should surprise no one that there are worriers out there.
First of all, the peace plan in its major aims and, I stress, methods, has been around, as I was saying earlier, since before Israel’s successful war of independence. If you want a comparison, consider that American freedom was in the air, not yet codified in the terse genius of the founding documents, but very much in public discussion, before the successful conclusion of America’s war of independence.
The Zionists from the beginning took for granted it would, indeed it should, cooperate in the development of the wretched dump they intended to reclaim and rebuild with the indigenous populations in the land of Israel, who included Jews, Muslims, Christians, Levantines of various tribal or ethnic affiliations, people whose ancestries could be traced to Spain, North Africa, the Balkan countries, and so forth.
Cooperation remained the order of the day even after the bloody war of independence, a war of aggression launched not by “Palestinians” but by political parties in the region whose own idea of success was to take the places that the former colonial powers — France, Britain, Ottoman Empire/Turkey — exhausted by two world wars, could no longer maintain. Again by way of comparison, most anti-colonial movements following World War II followed the plot of George Orwell’s. satirical novel Animal Farm, in which the oppressed animals rebel against their oppressors only to end up with new oppressors.
Tyrannous regimes start foreign wars, as is well known; the post-colonial Near East is no exception. The various cliques and gangs and clans and families that took over from the hapless English and French and Turks had an enemy as nearly perfect as they could hope for: Israel could be presented to their oppressed masses as an invader, an imperialist, a cat’s paw of the Great Satan (the U.S.A.), a land-thief, a racist occupying power, etc.
All this is known; the reason for mentioning it is to ask whether the Arab side of the peace deal is staffed and represented by people any different from the tyrannous gangs that took over the various post-colonial states. Because if it is not, as a thorough, and thoroughly sober, analysis of the deal’s details, by the Middle East Forum’s Greg Roman concludes, then the conflict will start again sooner or later.
Roman’s key point, which is shared by the keen and well-informed observer Richard Prasquier, a brilliant French medical doctor and former president of the CRIF (Conseil representatif des institutions juives de France, an organization like the American Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations), is that there is no practical plan — unless it is being kept under wraps for the moment — to effectively disarm Hamas and insure the governing authority in Gaza is composed of people truly committed to Muslim-Jewish cooperation and coexistence in the region, which of course begins with a clear, definitive, and permanent recognition of Israel as a sovereign nation-state.
This is what Israel’s successive democratically chosen goverrnments have been proposing in one form or another since 1948. Arabs who have responded positively have either been murdered, cowed into silence, or driven into exile (usually to ex-colonial countries where they have tended to do quite well, as freedom inclined people do in free societies.)
Will this time be different? President Trump’s plan aims to force the Arabs to face their responsibilities, to “man up” as the idiom has it. It seems to have taken a businessman like Trump to point out what the diplomats could not grasp for three quarters of a century, namely: if the Arabs are not invested in the peace process, they will let it rot and the warmongers and criminals — like Hamas or the gang in charge of Persia (not an Arab country) — will again set the agenda, which is always the same: war to eradicate Israel. using your own people (the animals in Animal Farm) as cannon fodder and victims in the eyes of world public opinion.
In this regard, there is no question the two years of war in Gaza have been the scene of atrocious and heartbreaking slaughters, war crimes, and it will need repeating for years and decades and even generations, just as the basic facts of Israel’s founding need be, that the war criminals here are the Hamas gang and its supporters, funders, and apologists, be they Arab, European, American or anything else.
Donald Trump evidently believes he can turn death-cult criminals into decent, or at least reliable partners. It is true that if you get people entangled into commercial as well as political relations with yourself, as Trump seeks to do as part of his way of doing foreign policy, you have some leverage. But how much? And how far can you go, relations-wise, without giving them leverage over you?
Qatar, for example, without which Hamas could not have launched the October 7th war, has invested millions, if not billions, that the president’s own family stands to benefit from as will sports organizations (big business, lots of money in sports), American universities, real estate companies, and surely much else. So has Saudi Arabia; there is so much money in the Arab world, much if not all of it due to investments originally made by the colonial powers and continuing to this day, that there is a web of commercial relations being spun; but what if we’re the ones getting entangled?
Then again, this is not particularly new. We sold the Japanese militarists scrap iron in the 1930s and ’40s that came back at us in shrapnel and bombs. Commercial relations, however corrupt morally and otherwise, are inevitable and the question is whether we are prepared to break them off at a moment’s notice and not let them have determinative influence on our foreign and security policies. That is the question. If we can persuade, softly or sternly or both, whoever runs Gaza to really, seriously, work with America and Israel to turn the page, a new leaf, whatever — sure, there could be peace breaking out all across the region, perhaps even glimmers of freedom, if the Arabs want it.
But they have to want it. In the meantime we can rejoice, yes, that the killing of innocents by their own ogres has stopped, we can rejoice, surely, that Israeli soldiers will return safely to their families and their jobs, their ploughshares. What we cannot do is relax and lower our vigilance. It must on the contrary be heightened. Within and without, the enemy lurks and threatens. If we do not let ourselves be played for fools, our side will prevail.
READ MORE from Roger Kaplan: