Forget the Nobel Peace Prize. US President Donald Trump could achieve the ultimate accolade, courtesy of his 20-point peace plan, of going down in history as the leader who finally managed to agree an enduring peace between Israel and the Palestinians.
There is, of course, a long way to go before it will even be possible to judge whether Trump’s ambitious peace initiative can achieve its numerous goals, starting with the challenging process of returning the remaining Israeli hostages, alive or not.
While Hamas’s terrorist leadership indicated its willingness to release the 20 Israeli hostages who have survived the ordeal of being held captive in the most inhumane conditions for two years, doubts remain about its intentions regarding the other 28 hostages who have died in captivity.
There have already been suggestions from the Hamas leadership that finding the remains of the dead hostages will be more difficult because they are held by different factions, and Hamas does not know where they are all located.
This could be a genuine drawback to Hamas’s efforts to resolve the hostage issue. Or it could simply be another bargaining ploy by Hamas to draw out the hostage release process to buy it more time to regroup after the devastating losses it has suffered in recent months at the hands of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF).
Even so, Trump deserves enormous credit for negotiating a deal that both aims to resolve once and for all the emotive hostage issue while at the same time brokering a ceasefire deal that could ultimately bring the Gaza conflict to an end.
That will certainly be the expectation when Trump, together with other world leaders, gather in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh tomorrow to discuss the American president’s plan for ending the war.
The summit, hosted jointly by Trump and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, will inevitably draw comparisons with other seminal moments in the long-running saga of Middle East diplomacy, such as the signing of the Camp David Accords between Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin in 1978 under the auspices of US President Jimmy Carter.
The agreement laid the foundations of the peaceful coexistence between Israel and Egypt that continues to this day, to the extent that Egypt played a critical role in the negotiations that ultimately resulted in Trump’s peace plan. But tomorrow’s attendees will also be well aware that the Camp David agreement came at a terrible price.
Within three years, Sadat had been assassinated by Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a group supporting the same nihilist Islamist ideology as Hamas.
The next major diplomatic initiative to bring peace to the Middle East, the 1993 Oslo Accords, had similarly tragic consequences.
The Accords were signed on the White House lawn in 1994 by Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat, the head of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, under the beaming gaze of President Bill Clinton.
This was the last time Israeli and Palestinian leaders managed to sign a peace deal, and the aim was to lay the foundations of a future independent Palestinian state.
But the fierce resistance the initiative generated on both sides of the conflict set in motion a new cycle of violence, starting with Rabin’s assassination by a Jewish fanatic in November 1995. Soon afterwards Hamas launched a deadly series of terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians that ultimately resulted in the whole process being abandoned.
The shadow of previous Middle East initiatives will therefore hang heavily over tomorrow’s proceedings in Sharm el-Sheikh, where Trump and other world leaders will be hoping that his peace plan has the potential to succeed where others, including subsequent attempts to revive the Oslo process, have so lamentably failed. Certainly, if Trump’s plan does achieve its stated goals of ending the Gaza conflict and working towards the establishment of a Palestinian state, it will be an achievement of far greater significance than being awarded the Nobel Prize.
The scale of this daunting challenge, even with the hyperbole that inevitably surrounds any Trump initiative, should not be underestimated, as many significant obstacles need to be overcome before anything resembling progress in this latest Middle East peace initiative can be achieved.
Foremost among the obstacles that Trump and his allies must first overcome is the abiding lack of trust that permeates any dealings between Israel and Hamas, which meant that Hamas declined to be represented at tomorrow’s discussions in Egypt. Instead the group focused its energy on last-minute haggling over the names of the Palestinian prisoners to be released in return for the Israeli hostages.
And even if – and it is a big “if” – the hostage/prisoner exchange is completed in full, there are no guarantees that the two sides will move seamlessly to the next stage of the proceedings, whereby they agree a lasting end to hostilities in Gaza.
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has set himself the Churchillian goal of achieving “total victory” over Hamas, will be well aware that Hamas, while agreeing to end the hostage crisis, has conveniently failed to respond to many of the other key elements in Trump’s peace package, most importantly the requirement that it disarm and disband itself.
Hamas has already called up thousands of security personnel to operate in territory vacated by the Israeli military in Gaza, which hardly suggests that the terror group is minded to abandon its position.
Another key factor will be Trump’s ability to use his influence to persuade Netanyahu to end military operations.
The American leader’s ability to pressure Netanyahu to apologise for bombing Qatar – a key intermediary in the peace talks – appears to have been a seminal moment in achieving the breakthrough that resulted in the current stalemate, as it persuaded Hamas that Washington’s guarantee that Israel would not resume hostilities would be respected. By giving up the hostages Hamas is, after all, giving up its one big bargaining chip.
Making sure Netanyahu keeps his word, especially if Hamas refuses to disarm, will undoubtedly pose a major challenge for Trump if his peace initiative is to achieve more than securing the release of the remaining Israeli hostages.
Forget the Nobel Peace Prize. US President Donald Trump could achieve the ultimate accolade, courtesy of his 20-point peace plan, of going down in history as the leader who finally managed to agree an enduring peace between Israel and the Palestinians.
There is, of course, a long way to go before it will even be possible to judge whether Trump’s ambitious peace initiative can achieve its numerous goals, starting with the challenging process of returning the remaining Israeli hostages, alive or not.
While Hamas’s terrorist leadership indicated its willingness to release the 20 Israeli hostages who have survived the ordeal of being held captive in the most inhumane conditions for two years, doubts remain about its intentions regarding the other 28 hostages who have died in captivity.
There have already been suggestions from the Hamas leadership that finding the remains of the dead hostages will be more difficult because they are held by different factions, and Hamas does not know where they are all located.
This could be a genuine drawback to Hamas’s efforts to resolve the hostage issue. Or it could simply be another bargaining ploy by Hamas to draw out the hostage release process to buy it more time to regroup after the devastating losses it has suffered in recent months at the hands of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF).
Even so, Trump deserves enormous credit for negotiating a deal that both aims to resolve once and for all the emotive hostage issue while at the same time brokering a ceasefire deal that could ultimately bring the Gaza conflict to an end.
That will certainly be the expectation when Trump, together with other world leaders, gather in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh tomorrow to discuss the American president’s plan for ending the war.
The summit, hosted jointly by Trump and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, will inevitably draw comparisons with other seminal moments in the long-running saga of Middle East diplomacy, such as the signing of the Camp David Accords between Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin in 1978 under the auspices of US President Jimmy Carter.
The agreement laid the foundations of the peaceful coexistence between Israel and Egypt that continues to this day, to the extent that Egypt played a critical role in the negotiations that ultimately resulted in Trump’s peace plan. But tomorrow’s attendees will also be well aware that the Camp David agreement came at a terrible price.
Within three years, Sadat had been assassinated by Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a group supporting the same nihilist Islamist ideology as Hamas.
The next major diplomatic initiative to bring peace to the Middle East, the 1993 Oslo Accords, had similarly tragic consequences.
The Accords were signed on the White House lawn in 1994 by Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat, the head of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, under the beaming gaze of President Bill Clinton.
This was the last time Israeli and Palestinian leaders managed to sign a peace deal, and the aim was to lay the foundations of a future independent Palestinian state.
But the fierce resistance the initiative generated on both sides of the conflict set in motion a new cycle of violence, starting with Rabin’s assassination by a Jewish fanatic in November 1995. Soon afterwards Hamas launched a deadly series of terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians that ultimately resulted in the whole process being abandoned.
The shadow of previous Middle East initiatives will therefore hang heavily over tomorrow’s proceedings in Sharm el-Sheikh, where Trump and other world leaders will be hoping that his peace plan has the potential to succeed where others, including subsequent attempts to revive the Oslo process, have so lamentably failed. Certainly, if Trump’s plan does achieve its stated goals of ending the Gaza conflict and working towards the establishment of a Palestinian state, it will be an achievement of far greater significance than being awarded the Nobel Prize.
The scale of this daunting challenge, even with the hyperbole that inevitably surrounds any Trump initiative, should not be underestimated, as many significant obstacles need to be overcome before anything resembling progress in this latest Middle East peace initiative can be achieved.
Foremost among the obstacles that Trump and his allies must first overcome is the abiding lack of trust that permeates any dealings between Israel and Hamas, which meant that Hamas declined to be represented at tomorrow’s discussions in Egypt. Instead the group focused its energy on last-minute haggling over the names of the Palestinian prisoners to be released in return for the Israeli hostages.
And even if – and it is a big “if” – the hostage/prisoner exchange is completed in full, there are no guarantees that the two sides will move seamlessly to the next stage of the proceedings, whereby they agree a lasting end to hostilities in Gaza.
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has set himself the Churchillian goal of achieving “total victory” over Hamas, will be well aware that Hamas, while agreeing to end the hostage crisis, has conveniently failed to respond to many of the other key elements in Trump’s peace package, most importantly the requirement that it disarm and disband itself.
Hamas has already called up thousands of security personnel to operate in territory vacated by the Israeli military in Gaza, which hardly suggests that the terror group is minded to abandon its position.
Another key factor will be Trump’s ability to use his influence to persuade Netanyahu to end military operations.
The American leader’s ability to pressure Netanyahu to apologise for bombing Qatar – a key intermediary in the peace talks – appears to have been a seminal moment in achieving the breakthrough that resulted in the current stalemate, as it persuaded Hamas that Washington’s guarantee that Israel would not resume hostilities would be respected. By giving up the hostages Hamas is, after all, giving up its one big bargaining chip.
Making sure Netanyahu keeps his word, especially if Hamas refuses to disarm, will undoubtedly pose a major challenge for Trump if his peace initiative is to achieve more than securing the release of the remaining Israeli hostages.