Credit where due...
Trump, yes. And Qatar. And Turkey. And Jonathan Powell. And European countries...
Credit where due: Trump got the hostages out. That’s a worthy achievement. The extraordinary bombast of Trump’s words at the Knesset ceremony to celebrate their release doesn’t invalidate the success. After being praised at length by Benjamin Netanyahu and being awarded Israel’s highest honour, he then spoke for about an hour, announcing “the age of faith and hope, and of God”. These are not subjects that Trump is typically regarded as knowing much about. Another thing that Trump might struggle with is humility: at a signing ceremony for the peace deal in Sharm Al-Sheikh he declared: “This took 3,000 years, can you believe it? And it’s going to hold up.”
Trump got them out because he is probably the only person on earth who can force Israel’s Prime Minister to take an action that he doesn’t want to take. Netanyahu, whose baleful, corrupted influence has dragged Israel’s politics towards the extremes and who has still yet to acknowledge his culpability for the lapses that allowed the October 7th massacre to occur (although he fired plenty of others for theirs), managed to push Trump over the edge. The final straw was Israel’s bombing of Qatar in a strike targeting Hamas’s leadership, including its negotiating team. In the aftermath of the strike, Netanyahu claimed success and announced that the war in Gaza could “end immediately.” In fact, the strike missed all of its intended targets (an important reminder that claims made for Israeli ‘precision’ strikes are often questionable) and the war continued.
Trump likes Qatar. He has good reason to do so: unlike the Israelis, the Qataris have a lot of money. And they like to be generous with it. We all know that the Qataris gifted Trump a $400 million plane with all the glitzy accoutrements someone of his standards of taste expects. But it doesn’t stop there: the Trump family business is making deals in Qatar to build a Trump golf resort and the Qataris have also invested in Jared Kushner’s investment fund. So Trump was particularly enraged by Netanyahu’s actions and he forced him to read out an apology on a phonecall to Qatar’s Prime Minister.
This pushed things forwards to the point where both Israel and Hamas were willing to agree to a ceasefire, albeit with numerous conditions and caveats. Here, Trump’s team showed his willingness to take a risk, to push forwards and not insist that the final status is decided but bank the progress in getting hostages out and a cease to the fighting. And Qatar and Turkey, Hamas’s key sponsors, put huge pressure on them to accept. A key figure who has been involved in this process behind the scenes is Jonathan Powell. He has become something of an expert in peacemaking since his role in the Good Friday Agreement. One of his principles is that you manage peace as a process, step-by-step, rather than trying to make a mega-deal that fixes everything at once. Powell’s role was publicly celebrated by Stephen Witkoff, Trump’s chief negotiator. The parochial British media seems to think that Witkoff was intervening in order to contribute to the stupid manufactured debate around Powell’s supposed role in the failure of an espionage trial here in the UK. This seems completely implausible (why would Witkoff care?) whereas the reporting of Powell being involved on the Gaza issue is documented way back to early this year and before. The point here is that even the Trump people have acknowledged that this was a team effort.
Another way in which this was more than the effort of one man, was in the considerations weighing on Israel. Most Israeli politicians, but particularly those in Netanyahu’s government, make a habit of accusing any European country that doesn’t back their every action as being in league with Hamas. This was the nonsense that greeted the coordinated recognition of Palestinian statehood by France, the UK, Canada, Australia and others (it should of course be remembered that it was recognised long ago by most countries in the world, including Russia and China). As President Isaac Herzog said on his visit to London, “It won’t help free a single hostage”. Anyone adhering to this line would have to conclude that the significant diplomatic isolation that Netanyahu has caused Israel to experience had no bearing whatsoever on his decision to go for a ceasefire or that recognition had no bearing whatsoever on Hamas’s decision to free all of the hostages, clearly an illogical idea.
So we see that Trump’s success, which is real, is also a success for a wider array of players. However, this doesn’t absolve Trump from his responsibility, as the catalyst of this deal, from doing it earlier. Whether one is primarily concerned with the release of the hostages or the sufferings of the Palestinian people (or even both!) why now? Why not months ago? Let us not forget that a ceasefire was in place, negotiated by the Biden team, at the point that Trump was inaugurated in January. And that Trump only a few weeks later announced a plan for the American colonisation of Gaza, the expulsion of its population and the development of a series of beach resorts. It is hardly surprising that hostilities resumed in response to such a crazy plan. Since that time up to the present day, around 25,000 Palestinians have died, including several hundred from starvation. In the same timeframe, at least six hostages died in Hamas captivity.
But it’s fair to ask whether President Biden could have done this deal before January this year. I think the answer is that the US media and political environment would not have made it possible, even if he had managed to pressure Netanyahu. Imagine the likely response of the US media to a Democrat president forcing an Israeli Prime Minister to read out an apology to Qatar, the long-term supporters of Hamas? When President Biden briefly paused the shipment of certain heavy weapons to Israel in mid-2024 it was branded as “obscene” and “absurd” by Fox News, which said that “Biden was harder on Netanyahu than on the terrorist leader of Hamas”. Attempts by the Biden administration to negotiate directly with Hamas for release of hostages were roundly criticised. When Trump’s team did exactly that they were praised for their successes. When a US Democrat is in the White House he has to grapple with his own party, the largely hostile news media and a determined campaign of disruption from the right. Biden’s ceasefire and hostage deal in January 2025 was criticised by Republican Senators as giving too much to Hamas. You will notice that Democrats are welcoming Trump’s achievement. In the ultra-cynical world of the American GOP, the lives of hostages and Palestinians comes second to the zero sum business of sticking it to the other side.