President Donald Trump has put America First in Middle East policy like none of his peers. He has helped neutralize our enemies while avoiding needless conflicts and naïve regime-change operations. He has also strengthened our allies and fostered peaceful relations between them so they can serve as a bulwark against shared threats and we can focus elsewhere.
The Biden years put Iran First and imperiled the first Trump administration’s achievements — rejuvenating the mullocracy, enabling the Oct. 7 massacre, and seeking to exploit the ensuing war to reward Hamas with a Palestinian state.
But under the second Trump administration, the world’s leading state sponsor of jihad and its myriad proxies find themselves severely hobbled if not in ruins, while our strongest regional ally, Israel, has emerged ascendant following its efforts to hammer common foes. Consequently, prospects for Abraham Accords expansion and American extrication from the region have only grown more propitious.
Peace through strength, hard-headed realism, and the president’s philo-Semitism have worked to America’s great benefit — contra our foreign policy establishment and the president’s detractors.
Hamas’ Rule
The Trump administration’s “Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict” aims to consolidate these gains — securing and stabilizing the region through Israeli and Arab burden-sharing — consistent with Trump’s broader Middle East approach. But the president’s ultimate ambitions could be threatened by the many challenges inherent to the conflict.
The first and perhaps seminal point of the plan is that “Gaza will be a deradicalized terror-free zone that does not pose a threat to its neighbors.” Subsequently, the plan speaks to an end to the war, the surging of aid, demilitarization, governance plans, economic development, and security considerations — suggesting that all of these factors will prevent Gaza from once again becoming a terror enclave.
But the blueprint is largely silent on the animating ideology that made Gaza a jihadi haven in the first place. As President Trump noted in his press conference alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu revealing the pact, the current war’s origins can be found in the Palestinian Arabs’ election of Hamas to rule Gaza after the Jewish state had turned the strip over to them. Hamas’ aims and means were of course well-known to the Gazans, who chose to be represented by the Muslim Brotherhood arm, promising genocidal Jew-hatred and jihadism rooted in Islamic supremacist ideology.
Despite the fact Hamas’ rule led to two decades of violence, repression, corruption, and ultimately Gaza’s destruction during the war that Hamas provoked, there is little to suggest the population that put the jihadis into power and that in large part collaborated with them on and after Oct. 7 has suddenly recanted its views. Opinion polls conducted among Palestinian Arabs since have shown overwhelming support for the barbaric attack and violence to achieve geopolitical goals generally, a preference for Hamas’ leaders over alternatives, and opposition to disarming Hamas and expelling its leaders to stop the war.
The Gaza plan is silent on how it would address this problem, suggesting a belief that changes in material conditions, new political leadership, and the disarming of jihadists will suffice. President Trump may simply be presenting a choice to the Palestinian Arab population and those who will be governing it: Between peace and prosperity rooted in rational self-interest, or perpetual war rooted in religious fanaticism and the imperative to conquer, dominate, and make all infidels submit. The latter position’s historical prevalence could threaten the president’s best-laid plans.
Hostage Release at Great Cost
There are related perils baked into what has been termed “phase one” of the deal. While we celebrate the coming release of hostages to their loved ones, and with it the end of much of Hamas’ leverage, they come at great cost.
As with prior exchanges, Israel will free 250 life sentence prisoners — murderers and similarly dangerous convicts — and 1,700 Gazans detained after the Oct. 7 massacre. We are talking about 2,000 potential jihadists who, if past is prologue, will wreak havoc and chaos again. Israeli authorities, for example, have reported that more than four in five detainees released in the 2011 Gilad Shalit exchange returned to terrorism — including among them the mastermind of the Simchat Torah slaughter, Yayha Sinwar.
How many future Yahya Sinwars will now be set free? How many future rapes, murders, and kidnappings will follow?
And if Hamas, a group whose raison d’etre is murdering Jews and perpetrating a second Holocaust in Israel, were to be committed to a plan that calls for Gaza’s deradicalization and demilitarization — not just a hostage-for-jihadist trade that stops the war and rolls Israeli forces back — why would it demand that future jihadist foot-soldiers be set free?
Meanwhile, sources report that Israeli troops’ withdrawal in connection with the hostage-for-terrorists trade will likely result in a vacuum to be filled by Hamas’ remnants — a Hamas that is perhaps banking on successfully executing phase one of the deal to ensure its survival. It may believe that with Israel having de-mobilized and begun to withdraw, Israel will not re-mobilize and strike, however great the threats it might face, lest it risk being accused of violating the ceasefire.
The Gaza plan in fact seems to contemplate that Hamas will persist — in seeming contradiction of the plan’s opening point about a deradicalized non-threatening Gaza. Its members who, against all odds, “commit to peaceful co-existence and to decommission their weapons will be given amnesty.” Still others are free to leave and guaranteed safe passage to other countries — without disarming, renouncing their views, or facing any justice. But what of those who neither lay down their arms, abandon and repudiate the movement they have devoted their lives to, nor leave?
Demilitarization of Gaza
The plan contemplates a “process of demilitarization of Gaza” replete with the destruction of its terror infrastructure, yielding an enclave “fully committed to … peaceful coexistence with their neighbors,” and prohibiting Hamas and unnamed “other factions” from having “any role in Gaza, directly, indirectly, or in any form.” Implicit is a recognition that Hamas leaders will neither surrender nor be punished but rather persist. But how can Hamas still exist, and Gaza not pose a “threat to its neighbors or its people?”
The guarantors tasked with keeping Hamas and undefined but seemingly related factions in line consist of “regional partners” — presumably including Hamas’ patrons Qatar and Turkey, likely Egypt, which helped mediate the first phase of the deal, and perhaps other Arab nations.
But do these nations’ leaders have the capability or will to do what is necessary to suppress jihadist forces in Gaza — likely requiring ruling with an iron first — all to effectively provide security for Israel? Whatever the guarantors may believe in their heart of hearts about Islam, jihadism, and the Jewish state, they rule under the threat of revolt from an Arab street that is overwhelmingly comprised of genocidal Jew-haters much like the Palestinian Arab population the royals and potentates would be tasked with policing. Whatever inducements the U.S. government has provided them, is it worth it to them to do the dirty work necessary to secure Gaza?
While the plan notes that it is “critical to prevent munitions from entering Gaza,” with aid set to flow in — and once again perhaps be seized by militants — how will authorities on the ground ensure that weapons are not smuggled in? And if the working assumption is that there will likely be attempts to funnel arms into Gaza, isn’t that an inadvertent acknowledgment that the population is likely to remain at least in part radicalized?
Apolitical Committee, Vetted Police, Pay-to-Slay
Meanwhile, it is contemplated that a “technocratic, apolitical Palestinian committee” will govern the strip — yet no such leadership has ever emerged among the Palestinian Arabs, nor again is there any indicator that the public desires apolitical technocrats over theocrats.
Similarly, it is contemplated that “vetted Palestinian police forces” will be trained and police Gaza. Yet analogous forces operating in Judea and Samaria have themselves been found to often participate in terrorist attacks.
Likewise, the plan envisions control of Gaza ultimately transitioning to a “reform[ed]” Palestinian Authority that ends its “pay-to-slay” program and quits promoting incitement to jihad in media and its schools. It does so without explaining how the Hamas-lite Fatah-led Palestinian Authority will reform itself.
That President Trump pressured the Arab world to get Hamas to give up its key bargaining chip — innocent Israelis — and commit to deradicalizing and securing Gaza is commendable. That he did so while ensuring that Israeli forces remain on the ground until benchmarks are met is prudent. His effort to make the Middle East responsible for its own governance and security — consistent with America’s interests — is laudable.
Deradicalization in Doubt
The fundamental challenge to the plan is that should there be no deradicalization, it will threaten future war and imperil an Israel whose strength is critical to the president’s vision for a secure and stable the region from which America can recede — both due to Israel’s prowess and how its position as regional strong horse has garnered the respect of its historical Sunni Arab rivals.
The Trump administration may believe that through the carrots and sticks it has provided, it will have pressured the guarantors to keep a lid on Gaza. It may believe that the prospect of vastly improved economic conditions may prevail over the Islamic fanaticism that predominates among Gazans. Or the administration may have assembled the plan as more of an aspirational document, primarily to get to the point of a hostage exchange, after which relevant parties will fill in the details for what the “day after” in Gaza will really look like.
If that exchange comes to pass, we will cheer the freeing of the innocent who have been kept captive in hell on Earth for two years. What follows will determine whether what we are witnessing is a temporary cessation of hostilities in advance of a build-up to future jihadist pogroms and wars, or the commencement of a miraculous modus vivendi to benefit America, Israel, and the world.