Trump declares ‘war is over’ in Gaza — but behind the spectacle, peace looks more like performance
US president Donald Trump poses for a photo during the Sharm El Sheikh peace summit in Egypt on Monday. Picture: Suzanne Plunkett/PA Wire
In Jerusalem, the American Emperor is holding court. Seated at the large desk, he brings out his signature black Sharpie to sign the book.
His manservant, the Israeli prime minister, stands uncomfortably behind him, staring as the proclamation is written.
The Emperor holds up the book. It is inscribed in the heavy black lines: “A great and beautiful day. A new beginning.”
The Emperor goes to the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament. He receives the acclaim of 22 standing ovations. He reads from the script: “This is not only the end of a war. This is the end of the age of terror and death and the beginning of the age of faith and hope and of God.”
He claims he has ended “eight wars in eight months”.
Later in the day, he travels to Egypt. He receives men from many nations, who each shake his hand and praise him. The president of Indonesia asks if he can meet the Emperor’s son Eric to discuss a business deal.
The Emperor gives his approval to some, such as Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan: “This gentleman from a place called Turkey has one of the most powerful armies actually in the world.”
He hails Egypt’s General El-Sisi, who took power in a coup in 2013: “They have very little crime. Because they don’t play games. That’s why. Like we do in the United States, with governors that have no idea what they’re doing.”
El-Sisi calls him “Your Excellency”.
He calls out for Hungary’s autocratic prime minister Viktor Orbán: “Where’s Viktor? Viktor, Viktor, we love Viktor. You are fantastic, alright?” The Emperor signs another document with his black Sharpie. It is a “Plan for Peace” in Gaza.
To bring reality out of the imperial spectacle, let’s begin elsewhere on Monday. Twenty Israelis, held by Hamas since October 7, 2023, were reunited with families and friends. The first four bodies of the 28 who did not survive were returned for relatives to seek closure.
On the Palestinian side, almost 2,000 — more than 1,700 swept up during the two-year Israeli assault on Gaza — were freed from Israel’s prisons.
And for now, the mass killing in Gaza has stopped, after almost 68,000 people — the large majority of them civilians, and many of them women and children — were slain. Among the 90% of Gaza’s 2.2 million inhabitants, some can return home, if those homes still exist. Aid can flow to alleviate the threat of starvation from Israel’s cutoff.
For the Emperor, however, the starring role is his. So some scrutiny of the spotlight is in order.
There was another phase 1 ceasefire, a six-week pause which began in mid-January 2025. The negotiations were driven by the Biden administration. They brought in Donald Trump’s envoy, real estate developer Steve Witkoff, because Trump wanted the acclaim on his inauguration day on January 20.
But at the start of March, when it was time to move to phase 2, with the swap of the remaining living Israeli hostages for Palestinian detainees, Netanyahu refused. His government not only renewed but expanded military operations and blocked all humanitarian assistance into Gaza.
Trump, the supposed peacemaker, did not object. Instead, he blamed Hamas and gave Netanyahu a blank cheque: “I am sending Israel everything it needs to finish the job, not a single Hamas member will be safe if you don’t do as I say.”
Talk of “ethnic cleansing” of Gaza, spurred by Trump’s comments a few weeks earlier about the removal of most of the population, was spurred by Israel’s hard-right ministers.
Finance minister Bezalel Smotrich and internal security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir were among those calling for the annexation of the West Bank, as Israel’s illegal settlements spread and threatened to divide the territory.
Days after the supposed concern over starvation, Witkoff and the US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee did a PR tour of Israel’s “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” operation, where more than 1,500 Gazans were slain trying to get a smattering of aid.
As Israel prepared to overrun Gaza City with its million residents, blowing up high-rises, Trump issued a “last warning” for Hamas to accept his “terms”.
So how did the Emperor take on the mantle of peacemaker? He was handed it by a Netanyahu miscalculation.
On September 9, Israel tried to bury any negotiations by murdering Hamas’s negotiators. An airstrike on a residential complex in Qatar’s capital Doha killed five Hamas staff and a member of Qatar’s security forces, but the negotiators escaped harm.
Israel had assassinated Hamas’s political leadership over the past two years with no repercussions from Washington. They ventured outside Gaza to kill Hamas’s political director Ismail Haniyeh in an explosion in Iran’s capital Tehran in July 2024.
But this time the attack violated the sovereignty of the mediator of the Gaza talks. More importantly, Qatar is an American ally, hosting the largest US military base in the Middle East.
Last year, it bankrolled Kushner’s Affinity investment fund with $1.5bn, alongside Saudi Arabia’s $2bn. The Trump organisation is pursuing a $5.5bn golf course and beachside resort on the Persian Gulf. And Trump accepted a $400m luxury plane, as a “gift” from Qatar’s royal family, to replace Air Force One.
The Gulf States used the leverage to get an urgent message to Trump and his inner circle. Unless pressure was put on Netanyahu, the mediation by Qatar and Egypt would collapse. Israel’s mass killing in Gaza would continue to spread instability across the region, threatening both the US government and Trump interests.
Two weeks later, Trump promised Arab and Muslim leaders, during a meeting on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, that he would not allow Netanyahu to annex the West Bank. His envoy Witkoff presented a 21-point “plan” — more of a sketch of general ambitions — for a “peace in the Mideast in Gaza”.
The negotiations had been revived. In talks with the Gulf States, Egypt, and Turkey, Hamas accepted the general tenets of the “plan”, including the release of all hostages. The Israeli Government said it would free thousands of detainees, including 250 serving life sentences.
However, up to last Wednesday, Netanyahu and his ministers were still baulking at the extent of Israeli withdrawal within Gaza. At a meeting in Egypt, Qatar’s prime minister slipped a note to Kushner and Witkoff. It urged them to push the Israelis to compromise.
Israel’s negotiators settled on a pullback from Gaza’s destroyed cities, while maintaining occupation of 53% of the Strip. Saying their “priority was to stop Israel’s bombings”, Hamas reluctantly agreed.
Why does this matter? Even if the catalyst was Netanyahu’s overreach and the opening seized by the Gulf States, even if Trump was motivated by ego and in part by profits for him and his family, why not allow him the unconditional tributes from the world’s media as well as those leaders engaging in flattery?
The challenge is that Trump’s proclamation, “War is Over”, skips over the difficult part.
To get the final hostages-for-detainees exchange and a ceasefire, negotiators pretended the Trump “plan” was definitive and pushed away key issues for later. They include:
• The extent of Israeli withdrawal: where will forces remain in Gaza? How many? What is the scope for their operations?
• The extent of disarmament of Hamas; its military branch, the Al-Qassam Brigades; and smaller Gazan factions: is it total or can the group retain “defensive” weapons?
• The arrangements for governance: what exactly is the “international board”, with Trump as chair, but with no Palestinians, overseeing Gaza? Which Palestinians will be permitted on the day-to-day administration, and does Israel have a veto over who serves?
• The arrangements for security: who will contribute to the “International Stabilisation Force”? Will Palestinians be among the personnel? Does Israel have a veto over the composition?
Far from least, will there be a pathway to a two-state resolution given two of the biggest obstacles to a state of Palestine are Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump?
Netanyahu’s hard-right ministers are always looking for a pretext to resume attacks and establish long-term occupation. With the struggle to recover and return the bodies of the deceased Israeli hostages, the government held up the resumption of aid through the Rafah crossing on Wednesday, opening itself up to accusations of weaponising starvation and collective punishment of the civilian population.
National security minister Ben-Gvir declared: “Enough with the disgrace. Moments after opening the crossings to hundreds of trucks, Hamas very quickly returned to its known methods — to lie, to cheat, and to abuse families and the bodies.
“This Nazi terror understands only force, and the only way to deal with it is to erase it from the face of the earth.”
Finance minister Bezalel Smotrich vowed: “There will be Jewish settlements in Gaza.”
With no security established in the strip, armed members of Hamas are patrolling the unoccupied portion of Gaza. Clashes with other factions have killed dozens of people. Others have been slain by ongoing Israeli operations.
Can the Gulf States and Turkey keep Trump engaged, not for the fantasy of a “Riviera of the Middle East” but for the basic recovery and reconstruction needed for all Gazans?
Can the Netanyahu government be checked from expanding its control, with consequent violence and killings of the West Bank?
The negotiations and arrangements for stability, let alone a State of Palestine, do not offer a quick ego fix for the Emperor — the fix on which he relies not just day by day, but moment by moment.
He told reporters on Tuesday: “[I am] the greatest president of them all. Does that include Washington and Lincoln? Yes, it does.”
Or as the Emperor’s son Eric put it, two days after the visit to the centre of the Muslim, Jewish, and Christian worlds to sign documents and accept tributes:
“We’re saving God.”
- Scott Lucas is a professor of international politics at the Clinton Institute, UCD
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