On Wednesday 8 October Israel and Hamas agreed to a deal that may lead to an end to the Gaza Genocide.
While it is likely to save numerous lives, at least for the time being, and should be welcomed for that reason alone, it is hardly a peace agreement nor one that lays the basis for attaining Palestinian rights.
A little over a week ago US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu unveiled their proposal for the Gaza Strip at the White House. Consisting of twenty points, it incorporated significant revisions to the twenty-one point plan agreed between the US and a number of Arab and Muslim leaders several days previously.
The revised Trump-Netanyahu proposal for example removed any reference to the West Bank, deleted the clause committing Israel to refrain from further acts of aggression against Qatar, called for the disarmament of Hamas, and appointed Tony Blair as the governor of the Gaza Strip.
The proposal dealt with three sets of issues. The first addressed the immediate situation in the Gaza Strip: a cessation of hostilities, an Israeli-Palestinian exchange of captives, the first phase of an Israeli withdrawal from the territory, and the humanitarian emergency, including famine conditions, that Israel has engineered in Gaza.
The second dealt with Gaza governance. Drafted without consulting Palestinians and without their consent, it excluded not only Hamas but also every other Palestinian from governing the territory and assigned Tony Blair the role of ruling it on behalf of Israel, the US, and a kleptocracy known as the Board of Peace.
This was to be paired with the proposal’s first article, which called for deradicalization. Not of the genocidal society that is Israel, but rather of the Palestinians the genocidal apartheid regime has dispossessed for almost eight decades and occupied for longer than half a century. Somehow the Palestinians are supposed to be deradicalized under conditions that not only ensure but demand militancy.
Trump demanded that Hamas to unconditionally accept the agreement, and gave it an ultimatum to do so within several days or face total obliteration.
As noted in a previous post, Trump’s was a proposal Hamas could neither accept nor reject. Opinion was divided as to whether it would angrily reject this invitation to political suicide and national capitulation, or accept it because it had no other choice.
Playing to Trump’s narcissistic vanity, and from a realization that Washington is primarily invested in obtaining the release of the remaining Israeli captives in the Gaza Strip, to an extent that it considers an Israeli corpse more consequential than the lives of thousands of Palestinian children, Hamas gave Washington a response that ignored the demand for unconditional surrender yet was accepted by the US.
In its response, Hamas accepted the key US demand for a comprehensive exchange of captives at the outset of any agreement, and announced its willingness to commence immediate negotiations on the conditions to achieve this.
By offering Trump what he most wanted, and something he also needed given his failure to end the war in Ukraine and his conviction he is top candidate for the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize, Hamas successfully manipulated Trump into ordering Netanyahu to conclude a deal prior to the announcement of the prize on 10 October. The bright shiny object of an Israeli-Palestinian agreement for Trump also forms a welcome diversion from the domestic crisis resulting from the US government shutdown. And it predictably allowed him to bombastically claim he had successfully ended a conflict that has been ongoing throughout the region for many thousands of years.
The negotiations in the resort of Sharm al-Shaikh in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula thus focused solely on a captive exchange, cessation of hostilities, the extent of Israel’s initial withdrawal in the Gaza Strip, and surge in urgently-needed humanitarian supplies.
Details remain sparse, and in some case appear to be still under discussion.
Given that Israel was able to effortlessly repudiate the January agreement brokered by de facto US Secretary of State Steve Witkoff and do so with Washington’s full support, Hamas insisted that Trump personally announce and guarantee the implementation of the new agreement. This it achieved, and Trump may travel to the region to bask in its glory, but as with every other commitment Trump has ever provided, to anyone about anything, it is essentially worthless.
The details of the captive exchange remain unclear. If Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti and Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) General Secretary Ahmad Sa’adat are among those released from Israel’s occupation prison system, it will be a big achievement for Hamas and for the Palestinian people more generally. If neither these leaders nor prominent Hamas captives are freed, it will spell a significant failure for the movement. It will try to explain this away with statements that the prisoners themselves renounced their demand for freedom as a sacrifice to end the genocide.
The extent of Israel’s withdrawal is also important, since it is likely to be the full extent of Israel’s withdrawal before it begins ignoring and violating its commitments under the agreement with US indulgence. A key issue to look for is whether or not Israeli forces remain in Rafah. A full Israeli withdrawal does not appear to have been agreed.
As for the Blair Witch Project, it appears to not even have been discussed, and contrary to the Trump-Netanyahu proposal is now also up for negotiation rather than US-Israeli diktat.
Project Blair is most likely dead in the water. Hamas is not going to accept it, even the Palestinian Authority can’t stand the sight of the man, and his digital dystopian experiment in twenty-first century foreign rule is not what the Arab and Muslim leaders agreed to. As importantly, Israel will be prepared to ditch its great British champion because failure to agree on Gaza governance can be weaponized to obstruct reconstruction and maintain the territory as a pulverized demolition site unfit for human habitation.
Disarmament and the transformation of the Gaza Strip’s population into ardent Zionists is also off the table. As for the political dimensions of the Trump-Netanyahu proposal there was basically nothing there to begin with, so that won’t go anywhere either.
From Hamas’s perspective the main achievement in this agreement is creating the conditions that allow the Gaza Genocide to end, and robbing Israel of its determination to continue with a campaign intended to result in the ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip. It has not surrendered as demanded by Israel and the US, nor has Israel defeated Hamas despite waging the longest war in its history. If it had it wouldn’t be negotiating with the movement, least of all with leaders who it recently failed to assassinate.
The view that by agreeing to release the remaining captives at the outset of the agreement Hamas has lost any remaining leverage is not quite correct. The captives were useful only to the extent they compelled Israel to consent to an exchange that would free Palestinians from its prison system.
Apart from that the captives served mainly as a pretext for genocide and an issue with which to drive a wedge in Israeli public opinion that never produced significant changes in government policy. The captives did not have the slightest impact on Israeli military operations.
The claim that Hamas leaders surrounded themselves with captives for their own safety has long since been debunked as fiction, with as much relation to reality as the hasbara talking point about command centers in hospitals, human shields, and the like.
From Israel’s perspective the agreement is unwelcome but hardly a disaster. It has stopped Israel’s latest final offensive dead in its tracks. Netanyahu may be a Churchill in the sense of producing a famine, but he has failed to achieve his moment of decisive victory. He and his flunkies will of course claim this anyway, and some already are.
This notwithstanding, Trump’s attention span is even shorter than this sentence. Just as his commitment to the January ceasefire was limited to a desire to showcase an achievement on the day of his inauguration, and in so doing contrast himself with Genocide Joe, here again he may have no interest in the matter beyond the return of the Israeli captives. In other words, Israel will be in a good position to resume the genocide before the end of the month.
If this proves difficult for any number of reasons, Plan B is to engage Hamas in an Oslo-like process of endless negotiations about nothing, with an even lower political ceiling than the agreement that brought the PLO to the brink of death. Resuming war with Lebanon and/or Iran also remain viable and probable options.
Whatever the coming weeks and months may hold, Palestine now once again stands at the very center of global attention, and is today what Edward W. Said termed the litmus test for humanity and morality. Two years ago, as may be recalled, it had all but disappeared, out of both sight and mind.
At the same time the divided, fragmented, and disintegrating Palestinian national movement is in a particularly vulnerable position, and will find it extraordinarily difficult to seize let alone create opportunities to promote a paradigm shift to one that prioritizes Palestinian rights over meaningless negotiations about nothing. The reconstruction of the Palestinian national movement on a genuinely pluralistic, representative basis with credible leadership and a real strategy is the most urgent task of the moment, exceeded only by the need to end the genocide and tend to the immediate needs of the survivors.
Yet this is precisely the Palestinian challenge: to ensure that the unprecedented global mobilization of the past twenty-four months is not only maintained but amplified, but will now also envelop the Arab world. Because particularly at this juncture and with this US president, Arab states have genuine leverage. They must be compelled to use it, not only on behalf of the Palestinian people but, just as importantly and as demonstrated by recent events, on behalf of their own national security.
The struggle to arrest and reverse Israeli impunity, and replace it with accountability and consequences for its growing list of crimes continues.