Trump’s Nobel Prize hopes depend on controlling Israel

Donald Trump claims to have brokered a 60-day “ceasefire” between the warring parties in Gaza.

- SAM KILEY WORLD AFFAIRS EDITOR

If it works, a two-month suspension of the bombing of the territory, and of killings at human feeding pens, would be welcome. But it will solve nothing, because both Israel’s rulers and Hamas are committed to their core belief in a saying that begins “From the river to the sea …”

How the phrase ends, though, is the point of contention: “Israel will be sovereign” - or “Palestine will be free”. The former version, in so many words, is part of the founding documents of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party; the latter is a chant often taken to mean that Israel, along with its population, should be extinguished.

The only solution to these mutually exclusive slogans is tolerance and hope. Trump’s ceasefire offers neither. Violence and impunity have created a landscape of horror - and Trump isn’t the guide out of it.

Hamas is blood-soaked, murderous. It has sacrificed tens of thousands of innocent civilians to the Israeli war machine in its long campaign to shatter any chance that Palestinians might ever hope for their own state and freedom, alongside Israel, between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean.

Hamas remains the dominant force in Gaza. It has mistaken - and will continue to mistake - worldwide public dismay at what Israel has done to the Strip for endorsement of its zero-sum agenda. It will take the 60 days as a breather and a rearming opportunity.

The struggle for Gaza’s population will be how to resist the temptation to take up emigration opportunities. Israel has smashed their world into rubble and dust, and thereby may deliver on the Netanyahu government's clear desire to flush the territory’s 2.2 million survivors into the Egyptian Sinai desert and beyond. A poll conducted in May this year by the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research showed that 43 per cent of Palestinians were now willing to emigrate — to anywhere.