The Gaza deal is no ceasefire – it is Hamas’s near-total surrender

Four days later, the American verbal warnings were followed by an Israeli kinetic attack that failed to kill the Hamas leaders it targeted, but absolutely succeeded as a message to Qatar’s rulers. Denials from all sides aside, it was clear that the attack was closely coordinated with the US, whose largest Middle East base lies just miles from the site of the Israeli strike.

For decades, Qatar has played “good cop, bad cop” games – presenting itself as the “jihadi whisperer” and therefore ostensibly a key ally for the West – even as it funded Islamists across the world and sowed discord in the West by bankrolling radical voices. With a population of just 300,000 citizens, nearly half of them obese, in a hostile region where it has managed to aggravate everyone, and a huge pot of gas to protect, Qatar has no real means of defending itself.

Its soft-power strategy was all it had, and it threw hundreds of billions at it, over 700,000 dollars per capita on the World Cup alone. The mere hint from Trump, via Boehler, of a withdrawal of American protection – followed days later by an Israeli strike (the stick) – played out hand-in-hand with the American carrot: the promise that if Qatar forced Hamas to the capitulation table and perhaps turned off its propaganda fire hose, America would pledge to protect it, and Israel would “apologise” as a face-saving gesture.

Qatar had no choice – and Qatar was Hamas’s final ally. The tiny emirate has once had the Iranian nuclear programme as another “bad cop” it could play, which is why it tried so hard to protect the prospect of it, but that too was neutered. 

Rough-and-ready Witkoff is succeeding where the refined, multilingual, European-educated Blinkens and Kerrys failed – and that is no accident. Steve Witkoff is not a diplomat; he is barely even his own man in this situation – he is a Trump clone. He serves as an emissary in the style of the ancient Near East: a royal messenger who would arrive in a far-off land and speak the words of the emperor – a mobile royal synecdoche granted all the pomp and regalia as if his master were there in person. It is said that “Trump speaks Arabic,” not literally, of course, but in the sense that the cut and thrust of Middle Eastern treaty-making is much closer to the New York City real-estate world than to the empty world-play of the United Nations where Blinken felt most at home.

Many of Trump’s closest friends and associates over the years have been such Middle Easterners – Jews, Christians and Muslims – from Stanley Chera to Tom Barrack. He is more comfortable with Erdoğan than Macron; Erdoğan doesn’t speak Macron’s English, but he does speak Trump’s language. Perhaps peace in the Middle East required a man like Trump, not one like Obama.

Yet many unknowns remain. Reaching the latter stages of the deal will be the hard part. Hamas has already been disarmed as a strategic threat to Israel but remains a threat to Gazans. Arab soldiers are not realistically going to confront Hamas and take their weapons, so a limbo will likely persist – perhaps until Hamas is overthrown by the local clans and Israeli-allied militias built up by the IDF over the past year.

Two years ago, nobody could have believed that Israel’s darkest day would lead to this extraordinary strategic victory, despite all the pain suffered – with Israel sitting astride the Middle East, its enemies, once holding knives to its throat as Iran built nuclear weapons to destroy it, humbled all around, including Iran itself.

The prospect of regional peace is realistic – the entire Iranian axis destroyed, Iran isolated and on the verge of bankruptcy. Nobody will dare challenge Israel again in the way Sinwar did for a generation or three. Everyone knows he wrecked Gaza and all their allies for nothing, even if some will not admit it.

Refusing to admit defeat is Middle Eastern tradition. After all, despite the humiliation of the Yom Kippur War, Egypt still celebrates that defeat as a victory every October 6. Presenting defeats as victories is a regional tradition – though this time, people know the truth. They may celebrate October 7 in the future, as they did this year around the UK, but in Gaza, the celebrations – amid the rubble of their former lives – will always ring hollow.

Yet just as the “Free Palestine” movement, cooked up by the Soviets to poke the US in the eye, outlived the Cold War, the anti-Zionist extremism pumped out by Qatar as part of its soft-power strategy (which it now appears to be moderating) will echo across the West for a generation. On October 8, 2023, Israelis and Jews worldwide realised that for every Hamas fighter who had come to kill and pillage the previous day, there were tens of thousands who supported them around the world – some alarmingly close to home. More attacks like that seen in Manchester are, sadly, already baked in since the Jihadis have taken note: Killing Jews in Israel is hard since they are protected by the IDF, killing Jews in Western cities, where they are protected by mere local police forces, remains the easy target.

But as peace breaks out in the Middle East – something the Arabs now need more than the Jews, who after all, have built one of the most robust economies in the world without peace – the Western diehards who have defined their identity through attachment to someone else’s cause (just coincidentally, the only one out of hundreds where Jews are on the other side) will increasingly be left swinging in the wind. Like those Japanese soldiers marooned on Pacific atolls, they will keep fighting to the death for their emperor-king decades after surrender.

So how did this all come about? It’s because everyone misjudged. When Jordan, a careless driver in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, justifies her bad driving by saying, “They’ll keep out of my way – it takes two to make an accident,” her interlocutor retorts, “Suppose you met somebody just as careless as yourself.” In October 2023, Hamas met Israel in exactly that way.

Hamas wrongly thought Israel was weak – and this was partly Israel’s fault. Internal divisions over relatively trivial matters, amplified by the media, made it appear that Israel just needed a small nudge over the cliff to fall. But Israel was – much to Nassim Taleb’s chagrin, no doubt – the epitome of antifragile. Israel, in turn, made the parallel mistake of underestimating Hamas and their intentions. Its leadership seemed to lack a theory of mind, failing to grasp that no, radical jihadists aren’t “just like us” actually – they don’t simply want a better life for their people. They mean it when they say they want to die a martyr, go to paradise, and kill you in the process.

So many stars had to align to bring all this about – weak leaders making mistakes, information asymmetries at precisely the right (or wrong) moments. Elections. Court cases. The wrong people in the wrong positions at the wrong time. The strategic victory Israel now enjoys happened despite the best efforts of nearly everyone on all sides. Two thousand Israelis died, and Gaza was wrecked. Its people will be spending a third winter in tents. The sheer scale of rubble and destruction means it will be only the third of many such winters – and that’s even assuming the latter stages of the peace plan, which Israel can live without and Hamas has no interest in advancing since they involve its total capitulation, ever come to pass.

Yet there is a tantalising hope that real peace might break out – even with the Gazans, and perhaps especially with them. They, more than anyone, have seen the cost of war with Israel. Peace in the Middle East can come quickly: one week, you and your cousins might be riding into another tribe’s village, swords drawn, pillaging and killing; the next, the blood feud is settled around a fire, and there may even be a wedding.

Whether true peace emerges, or a long-term truce leaves Gazans amid Hamas-ruled ruins, the fact remains that a third wave of Arab rejectionism of Zionism has now ended in failure. The initial Arab attempts to snuff out the Zionist project in 1948, the pan-Arab bid to unite and drive the Jews into the sea that ended in 1973, and the jihadi-religious effort that has now hit a humiliating brick wall – all mean that Israel, from a strategic perspective, has earned its place in the region.

But remember who did bring peace – and who didn’t. It wasn’t the alphabet soup of international organisations; on the contrary, some, not least UNRWA, facilitated the destruction of Gaza by allowing the brainwashing of a generation of its youth for jihad. It wasn’t the centre-left European leaders – Starmer, Macron and the rest – they played no role in peace; in fact, they clearly delayed it. It wasn’t Biden – or really his staff, since it is now plain he wasn’t truly in control – who brought the war to an end; in fact, he clearly dragged it out. His administration, had it stood solidly alongside Israel as the Trump administration did, could also have brought Qatar to bear on Hamas, but it chose a different path.

All these people saw the path to peace as running through the weakening and isolation of Israel – accentuating its internal divisions – instead of weakening and dividing Hamas from its allies and itself. For this, Netanyahu, who cannot escape some blame for the war’s origins, must be given credit. He truly did stand alone against many entrenched interests at home and abroad, even within the military, and held to a consistent plan from day one – one that even his critics must now grudgingly admit was, more or less, the correct one. Peace came through strength – in fact, peace came through victory.

This is why, incidentally, the “Ceasefire Now” crowd are in mourning today, as the ceasefire is signed and the war ends. They wanted not a ceasefire, but an Israeli capitulation – the very kind the Biden administration and the Europeans were trying to cajole Israel into. They didn’t want a Trump- and Arab-brokered ceasefire, which, as they correctly note, is the opposite: it is a Hamas capitulation – and worse still, one that pulls the rug out from under all their lawfare and lies against Israel.

There is one additional blessing all Jews can be thankful for. What was for a millennium of exile the happiest day in the Jewish calendar – Simchat Torah – was turned into a day of mourning by that band of bestial marauders. Last year, few had the heart to celebrate. But if all goes to plan, the last of the hostages will be freed in time for this year’s Simchat Torah – and the day will, almost by accident, once again be a day of joy for all Jews.

Saul Sadka is a geopolitical analyst and author of “The Intertextual Tanakh.” On X: @Saul_Sadka