Peace may prove trickier than war for a fractured Middle East

To achieve calm in the region a fragile coalition of vested international interests must hold, while Israel and Palestine have to bridge a complete lack of trust, says John Jenkins. It is a tall order — but not an impossible one

So, we have a peace plan – or do we? Since President Donald Trump announced that both Hamas and Israel had accepted his proposed plan for both ending the conflict and reconstructing Gaza under new management, there have been conflicting views about its significance. Anything that stops the killing and returns the Israeli hostages – alive and dead – to their families is a great thing. But we have been here before. Those who have negotiated an end to every conflict in Gaza and indeed the West Bank over the last 25 years have sought to do so by promising a resolution of the underlying issues. But that has never happened.

The fundamental issue is, of course, Palestinian self-government – the phrase used in the Oslo Accords. Many people assume this means a Palestinian state with full sovereignty. But no Israeli prime minister – not even Yitzhak Rabin – ever promised that. Israel has always wanted to maintain security control over at least the Jordan Valley and the heights of the West Bank – and since their 2005 disengagement from the Gaza strip, also both the land and sea borders of Gaza. And given what happened on 7 October 2023, you can see why.

The Trump plan buys time: it has the support of both Egypt and Jordan and behind them Saudi Arabia and its Gulf neighbours (Reuters)

Conversely, Palestinians think that such an arrangement would deprive them of the single thing they want more than anything else: the right to rule themselves in dignity and freedom.

So what do we mean when we talk of a “Palestinian state”? Polls in both Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories over the last few decades show substantial latent support for the proposition if it brings an end to the conflict. But Israelis and Palestinians mean very different things by the term. The steady growth of Israeli settlements and the failures and unpopularity of the PLO-led Palestinian Authority have only increased support for other options: simple rejectionism, the armed struggle and violent Islamist groups like Hamas which reject the whole framework of Oslo.

This is fundamentally a political issue. It can therefore only be resolved politically, not by the technocratic fixes the Trump plan offers. Those fixes in any case bear a distinct family resemblance to the provisions of the Oslo Accord and the 2002 Road Map. Both initiatives failed because they collided with reality: the absence of any agreement on what "Palestinian self-government" actually means. Behind that lies an almost complete lack of trust between the two sides. The vast majority of Israelis believe – at least for the moment – that they cannot safely live side by side with a fully sovereign Palestinian state. And a growing number of Palestinians now think the only answer is a single state, with equal rights for everyone, something very few Israelis would ever accept.

This is not to say there is no hope. The Trump plan buys time. It has the support of both Egypt and Jordan and behind them Saudi Arabia and its Gulf neighbours. Hamas has also been massively degraded. It is highly unlikely to disarm: to do so would be to stop being Hamas. But it is unclear what it can do with the weapons it now possesses. It no longer poses the threat to Israel that it did two years ago. Nor does Hezbollah in Lebanon or the country that stands behind both groups, Iran. And that is Israel’s achievement. The task for its leaders now is to turn those military gains into an enduring political settlement. The alternative is a garrison state.

The Palestinians have never on their own had enough to offer Israel. The other Arab states, notably Saudi Arabia, do. Offering the Palestinians self-determination within a wider regional state order, whose triangulation points are Riyadh, Amman, Cairo, Tel Aviv and perhaps even Damascus might seem a fantasy. But my guess is that that is precisely what Trump and his advisers are beginning to think. In which case, his plan is perhaps not so fantastic after all.

Sir John Jenkins is a former ambassador to Syria, Iraq, Libya and Saudi Arabia