Donald Trump’s framework agreement for ending the Gaza war and reconstructing the devastated territory has momentum behind it.
Much of it comes from the president himself. Momentum comes too from leading Arab and Islamic countries who have supported the plan, including Jordan, Egypt, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Pakistan, Indonesia and Turkey. And Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, standing next to Donald Trump, accepted it too, despite the fact it contains talk of a pathway to a Palestinian state that he has repeatedly denounced.
To keep the pace up, Trump says that Hamas has “three to four days” to decide whether to say yes or no.
If the answer is no, the war goes on.
The proposed deal looks a lot like a plan put forward by Joe Biden well over a year ago. Since then there has been massive killing of Palestinian civilians, more destruction in Gaza, and now a famine, while Israeli hostages in Gaza have had to endure months more of agony and captivity.
There were many reports in the Israeli media that the Biden initiative failed because Netanyahu moved the goalposts with a new set of demands – under pressure from the hard right in his cabinet.
Even so, the framework plan is a significant moment. For the first time, Donald Trump is putting pressure on Israel to end the war. Donald Trump has made himself into a leader to whom it is hard to say no. Nobody wants to end up getting the roasting Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky received in the Oval Office back in February. But things can change when leaders leave the White House.
Before Benjamin Netanyahu left Washington DC to go back to Israel his staff filmed him putting over his version of events. One element was the idea of an independent Palestine next to Israel, the two-state solution which the UK and other Western countries have tried to revive by recognising Palestine.
The Trump document gives an indeterminate nod to the idea of Palestinian independence. It says that after the reform of the Palestinian Authority, which is based in Ramallah and led by President Mahmoud Abbas, conditions “may finally be in place for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood, which we recognise as the aspiration of the Palestinian people.”
Even the thought of a distant prospect of a Palestinian state was too much for Netanyahu, who had given whole-hearted support to Trump at the White House, telling him in English “I support your plan to end the war in Gaza, which achieves our war aims.”
On the video, getting his message out in Hebrew to the people back home before the long flight home, Netanyahu is asked if he agreed to a Palestinian state. He was emphatic.
“No, absolutely not. It’s not even written in the agreement. But we did say one thing. That we would forcibly resist a Palestinian state.” Trump, he said, agreed.
Momentum is the plan’s strength. Its weakness is the lack of detail, a characteristic of Trumpian diplomacy. The document that Trump and Netanyahu endorsed, which also has the support of the UK and other European countries, comes with a rough map of stages of an IDF pull-back, but none of the nuts and bolts that determine whether diplomatic agreements designed to end a war hold together or disintegrate.
If it is to work, hard negotiation will be necessary. In that process there will be many opportunities for it to break down.
Mainstream opposition parties in Israel have endorsed the plan. It has been condemned by the extremist ultra-nationalists in the Netanyahu coalition, who had loved the “Trump Riviera” plan mooted at the start of the year, launched with a bizarre video showing the leaders of Israel and the US in beach gear sipping cocktails to the backdrop of a new Gazan cityscape glittering glass towers. The Israeli hard right were delighted that the Riviera plan included the removal of all of Gaza’s more than two million Palestinians. Jewish extremists want the land annexed and Palestinians replaced with Jewish settlers.
The new plan says no Palestinian will be forced to leave. Bezalel Smotrich, the ultranationalist finance minister and settler leader, compared it to the Munich agreement, signed this week in 1938. At Munich the UK and France forced Czechoslovakia to surrender territory and not long after its independence to Nazi Germany.
If Hamas accepts the agreement, and if Benjamin Netanyahu wants to find ways to placate Smotrich and the other extremists who keep his coalition in power, he will have plenty of chances to sabotage the negotiations in ways that put the blame on Hamas. The structure of the Trump framework agreement allows Israel a range of opportunities to veto moves it does not like.
It may not be possible to end a deep-seated conflict that has lasted more than a century. Longer term, the UK and many countries outside Israel and the US believe that any attempted solution that does not lead to Palestinian independence will not bring peace.
When the foreign ministers of the Arab and Islamic countries issued their statement of support, they said that they believed it would lead to a full Israeli withdrawal and rebuilding of Gaza, and “a path for just peace on basis of two-state solution under which Gaza is fully integrated with the West Bank in Palestinian state in accordance with international law.” That could be taken as a coded reference to the decision of the International Court of Justice that the occupation of Palestinian land by Israel is illegal.
Netanyahu believes the deal takes him closer to Israel’s elusive victory over Hamas. He denies any Palestinian right to the land between the river Jordan and the sea.
One plan, two very different versions of what it means. The framework is ambiguous enough for both interpretations to be possible. That is not a promising start.
