On a billboard in Tel Aviv, President Donald Trump is compared to Cyrus the Great. The allusion is not perfect, but it is apt: a powerful non-Jewish ruler has moved the world on behalf of the people of Israel.
Back in the days of Cyrus the Great, that meant freeing the Jews from Babylonian captivity, allowing them to return and rebuild the temple. In Trump’s day, it means moving the world to make Israel more secure, garnering the release of the final 20 living hostages.
Without Trump and his unique abilities as a negotiator, it’s hard to see how that would have happened. Trump absolutely deserves praise, and the nations represented at the Sharm el-Sheikh meeting after the hostage release, especially Qatar and Turkey, also played pivotal roles. But without Trump, that coordinated effort would never have amounted to much, as it hasn’t for years.
The Abraham Accords, negotiated in Trump’s first term, was arguably the foundation stone. The Accords allowed several Arab nations, including the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco, to establish full diplomatic relations with Israel even in the absence of resolution of the Palestinian issue. Informal ties between Israel and other nations that do not currently recognize Israel, such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar, have also blossomed since the signing of the Accords. There was a growing recognition that the more severe threat was Iran and its proxies in the region.
But with U.S. backing, Israel successfully struck devastating blows to those proxies, the most sensational one against Hezbollah, which led to the fall of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, all the while hitting hard against Hamas in Gaza and the Houthis in Yemen. Finally, in separate but coordinated strikes, both Israel and the U.S. struck at Iranian military and nuclear sites. Because of those actions, the game board is very different now in the Middle East than it was two years ago, and with that change comes the rise of fresh possibilities.
No matter who you voted for in the last election, you have to tip your hat to Donald J. Trump for what he has accomplished in the Middle East. He even forced Benjamin Netanyahu to read an apology to the Qataris over the telephone for their strike against Hamas in Qatar, with White House photographers on hand to record the moment of humiliation. Trump may be a son of a gun, but then so, apparently, was Cyrus the Great (who, ironically, was Persian). Sometimes you just need a son of a gun to not only think outside the box, but also to upend that box so people can actually get out of it.
And one of the best dimensions of this outcome is that, with the exception of a few heavily caveated recognitions of Palestine, it is exceedingly difficult to paint the current situation as any sort of victory for Hamas. Oct. 7 did not pay off; the horrifying, even nauseating, carefully planned terror of that day did not pay off. Taking the hostages did not deter Israel; rather, it catalyzed Israel to commit to the utter destruction of Hamas, which meant immense collateral damage in Gaza. While well-fed Hamas leaders hid underground or in Qatar, the people of Gaza starved and died. Hamas no longer has international patrons, but perhaps even more critically, it has lost support among its own people.
As Trump said to the Knesset this week, “It should now be clear to everyone throughout the region that decades of fomenting terrorism and extremism, Jihadism and anti-Semitism have not worked. They haven’t worked. They’ve been a disaster. ... They’ve backfired completely and totally. ... From Gaza to Iran, those bitter hatreds have delivered nothing but misery, suffering, failure and death. They’ve served not to weaken Israel, but to annihilate the very forces that did the most to foment this hatred. And it’s really, I mean, everybody that’s tried it has become irrelevant. Meanwhile, we’ve seen those nations that set aside their differences, reached across ancient divides and pursued engagement, are now among the most successful in the region.”
From Trump’s lips to God’s ear, as they say, but I fear the path ahead will be a rocky one. Hamas is already fighting for its veritable life on the streets of Gaza; its worst enemies are within the Strip, not across the border. There is zero chance Hamas will disarm as Trump’s 20-point plan mandates. Maybe it will divest itself of some rockets, but not anything else. To survive, Hamas must keep power in Gaza; to keep power in Gaza, it must be armed.
While there are many other roadblocks ahead, such as whether Israel will accept a two-state solution, the immediate roadblock is the disarmament of Hamas. If Hamas will not disarm, some force will have to disarm it. If Israel takes up the sword again, the world is back to square one. According to Trump’s plan, an International Stabilization Force with soldiers and police from surrounding Arab nations is to oversee disarmament and train the new security forces of the Gaza Strip.
But such a force does not even yet exist. Despite my admiration for what President Trump has accomplished, the ceasefire may not last until the end of the month as Hamas tries to immediately reassert its control over Gaza. If Trump really wants that Nobel Peace Prize, he, too, must act swiftly before the box he upended is reassembled once more. What he can possibly do is unclear to me. But then again, our son of a gun-in-chief has been underestimated before.
