Thank God There’s a Deal
Peace, even a cold peace, in Israel–Palestine is the stuff of presidential legacies.
I hadn’t been very optimistic. I’m still not, in the long run; I think misery and stupidity are the rule in human affairs. Even in the short term, I am nervous that it could blow up—the hostages won’t be returned, or Netanyahu will cave to the right of his coalition and continue the bombing. But relief, even hope: That’s the feeling of the day.
A bad peace is often better than even a “good” war, and fewer and fewer people have seen this as a good war—even those (like myself and this magazine’s founder) who thought Israel’s response after October 7 was natural and inevitable. There will be resentments on both sides, grumbling that the agreement gave up too much for too little. That’s the nature of deals.
Yet this deal doesn’t actually seem so very bad; it may in fact be something close to the best politically viable. One point that bears repeating is that most of the people of Gaza were children or unborn when Hamas took power in 2006, and most opinion-polling in Palestine is conducted by people with an axe to grind one way or another. The stipulated period of technocratic rule followed by fresh elections is a real and plausible chance to purge the past. Hamas has not just been corrupt and murderous; it has been a bad government for Palestine, and has provoked an immense amount of human suffering among the people it notionally represents. It doesn’t seem too rash to bet that the Palestinian people would like a change of pace.
Speaking of elections, the prospect of the collapse of the Israeli governing coalition is not unwelcome. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has governed by political expedience more than prudence even in the opinion of many Israel boosters. It is likely that even a more hardline leader like Naftali Bennett who does not have Netanyahu’s peculiar political vulnerabilities (particularly the threat of going to jail) would pursue more rational, less risky policies. For the second time, I have to say viva la democracia.
Peace will also allow the recovery of Israel’s relations with its immediate neighbors, which had been flying higher than ever at the outbreak of the war. The brutal fact of the Middle East is that Israel is small and its neighbors are large; Israeli technical prowess can go only so far in the face of raw human mass. Some sort of tolerable modus vivendi, which has been growing unstable under the weight of the rage of the Arab street, holds the most hopeful future for Israel.
Conversely, having peacekeeping forces in Gaza will incentivize those neighbors to maintain order in Palestine, rather than using the Palestinian cause as a sharp stick for poking Israel without taking any appreciable steps to relieve Palestinian suffering. (If you were the president of Egypt and responsible for keeping peace in the Strip, after the daring and even desperate measures Israel has taken in the past two years against its perceived enemies, would you really risk some bloodthirsty Islamic Jihad acolyte launching a rocket eastward on your watch?) Nobody expects an outbreak of warm, brotherly feeling in the Middle East; memories there are long. But a chilly alignment of incentives among better strangers will keep more people alive than the alternative.
Peace also makes it significantly more likely that the U.S. will finally begin to retrench from the Middle East; no matter how desirable in a vacuum it is just to leave the neighborhood, it is politically difficult to be seen cutting and running from chaos. (Ask Joe Biden how his withdrawal from Afghanistan went.) We may well be constrained in other respects—for example, by the festering Iranian situation, which seems unlikely to be resolved easily or soon—but Israel perceiving itself as being relatively more secure will make it easier to broker an exit without the Israelis blowing up whomever we’re negotiating with, which is becoming a challenging trend in our diplomacy.
I have been rough on the administration lately, and I do not intend to credit this peace against whatever fresh idiocy might be lined up for us. But it is nevertheless an impressive achievement. If they give Trump the Nobel for this one, I won’t even laugh. I will doubtless be punished for this outburst of optimism, but for now, well, it’s a good day.
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