World leaders, diplomatic insiders, and much of the media are celebrating a ceasefire in Gaza calling it a “peace deal” and endorsing President Donald Trump’s now unsuccessful campaign for a Nobel Peace Prize.
After the release of all the living Israeli hostages by Hamas, Benjamin Netanyahu and the Knesset cheered the arrival of the US president in Israel, heaping platitude after platitude on him, claiming that his election meant that “overnight, everything changed”.
US secretary of state Marc Rubio insisted the turning point came when Trump convened meetings with Arab and Muslim leaders on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in September.
“The president had some extraordinary phone calls and meetings that required a high degree of intensity and commitment and made this happen,” Rubio said.
As the deal emerged, Trump let it be known that it was his conversations with Netanyahu when he told him, “you can’t fight the world, Bibi”, that also played a part.
Yet even Trump himself seemed to acknowledge that it wasn’t all just down to the art of the deal when he said: “So many different things happened that were so amazing. It’s a lot of talent involved, I’ll tell you. But there was a certain degree of luck, too. You know, you need luck also. There is such a thing as luck.”
The Knesset lifted up the prospect of the Nobel peace prize again. The most detailed argument for The Donald to get the Norwegian gong came from an Israeli hostage negotiator who said it was only the current US president who could have delivered on a deal that was on the desk of his predecessor a year ago.
On the face of it, Gershon Baskin’s revelations, which he published on social media, show that Trump succeeded where Joe Biden failed.
“This deal could have been done a long time ago,” he wrote. “Hamas agreed to all of the same terms in September 2024. But at that point the response of the Israeli negotiators was that ‘the prime minister did not agree to end the war’.”
That Netanyahu refused the deal a year ago and that Biden failed to make him take it is not new. But it does reinforce the idea that Biden was weak – and that only Trump could have held “Bibi’s” feet to the fire to get him to agree to end the slaughter in Gaza, and to get the remaining hostages, dead and alive, back home.
“I met with members of the American negotiating team in October 2024, and they were as frustrated as I was in their inability to convince Biden and Biden’s people to look seriously at the deal on the table,” said Baskin, who was running back-channel negotiations for the release of hostages with Hamas at the time.
The Independent’s sources have confirmed that Biden’s own staff were deeply frustrated at his refusal to put pressure on Netanyahu to limit his military campaign in Gaza to a few weeks after the October 7 atrocities.
Biden, they said, would not take their advice and sided with Netanyahu.
A year later, with much (but not all) of Gaza in ruins, Baskin’s proposals, thrashed out with the help of Qatar, were getting nowhere in the White House.
“Hamas was ready for a deal to release all of the hostages, not to govern Gaza any longer and to end the war. But Israel was not ready,” says Baskin.
Exactly.
A year ago, Netanyahu had not seen his military achieve what he wanted from them. The far-right elements of his government want Gaza depopulated so that they can absorb the strip into the Israeli state.
For him, Gaza was not yet flattened enough to meet his tactical aim – which was, and is, the annihilation of any militant’s ability to attack Israel again for the next couple of decades.
This is not a quest for peace – it is the absence of threat.
Baskin went on to argue that it was clear only the Trump administration could deliver Israeli support for a ceasefire that Hamas had agreed to.
“On December 26, 2024, it was clear to me that the only way that the war would come to an end is when President Trump makes the decision that it has to end… The Israeli side would accept whatever Trump forced them to accept.”
That last sentence is the argument that underpins the Trump for Nobel argument. It can be true and nonsense at the same time.
Hamas is an extremist organisation that fetishises martyrdom for itself and the population it rules in Gaza. But by October last year it had clearly had enough. It wanted to survive as a movement and had achieved its aim of provoking a clash of civilisations with Israel and forcing the Palestinian issue back onto the world agenda.
In September this year, with Trump eight months into office, Baskin says he was getting Hamas close to accepting a ceasefire deal and longer-term peace, but was thwarted when Israel bombed Doha, targeting the chief Hamas negotiator Khalil al-Hayya.
That bombing shows that Israel had contempt for Trump. It showed that the US was being played while Israel continued to smash Gaza and the Hamas leadership.
“For over a year I believed that if President Trump decides that the war has to end, Trump will force Netanyahu into the agreement. That is exactly what happened”.
Really?
A more straightforward view would be that Netanyahu achieved what he set out to do – which is to make the Gaza Strip, home to 2.2 million people, unliveable. At least 80 per cent of its buildings, including all of its hospitals, have been destroyed in what the United Nations has said is a genocide.
Israel’s prime minister even endorsed Trump’s loopy scheme to move Gazans out of Gaza and turn it into a holiday resort.
When the shooting and the bombing stop, Gazans will leave the smoking rubble of their homeland in huge numbers and for ever. That, for Netanyahu, will be a victory in itself and one that he could not guarantee a year ago, but he sure can now.
On top of that, he has headed off a growing global chorus calling for boycotts, disinvestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel.
Sure, for now, Gazans can stay in Gaza. There will be plans to rebuild it. Gulf autocracies will stump up billions for the effort while Israel blocks most reconstruction efforts in the name of its own security (not unreasonably, as Hamas used building funds to make its network of “terror tunnels”).
Talks about a future Palestinian state will be protracted, and continue while Israel continues to annex chunks of the West Bank, while the tired and broken masses of Gaza emigrate to anywhere they can live behind four walls, not tent canvas.
“President Trump deserves the Nobel Peace Prize… we can breathe again,” says Baskin.
Trump has delivered the conditions for what Netanyahu will consider a victory, but the hardest part comes next in determining peace for either Israelis or their nearest neighbours.
.jpeg?trim=335,0,1,0&width=1200&height=800&crop=1200:800 "Independent Arabia correspondent Maryam Abu Daqqa posthumously awarded Press Freedom Hero Award – UK Times")
