Trump must learn patience for Gaza peace to endure

The hostages are free. That – not the bombastic and performative speech given to the Knesset by Donald Trump, or the self-congratulatory and ingratiating performance by the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu - was the most important event of a historic day.

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Stating that fact is not to take anything away from President Trump's personal diplomacy - which has been a critical factor in delivering the ceasefire, the release of the hostages, the exchange of Palestinian prisoners and other detainees, and the hopes for a wider peace - but it feels like a necessary corrective at a moment when, understandably, emotions are running high and the air is thick with hyperbole and sycophancy.

The US president was entitled to have what's been widely described as his “victory lap”, but some sense of perspective is also required on what is, at best, the first day of the beginning of the end of a decades-long conflict.

Arguably, indeed, this war could easily have ended more than a year ago had Mr Netanyahu really wanted it to, and had Joe Biden coerced him into ending it. That it was President Trump, rather than President Biden, who bullied the Israeli government adds some irony to the warm atmosphere earlier today in the Knesset chamber. President Biden always said he “had Israel’s back”, and he meant it; President Trump’s support is more conditional on Israel doing as America demands.

It was not, in truth, much of a celebration for Mr Netanyahu, to whom no one should be grateful. It cannot have been his desire, and must surely have been far from his calculations, that he should end up with his supposed ally Mr Trump launching a plan that has as its aim an implicit two-state solution and an eventual independent state of Palestine.