Only a small few predicted that President Donald Trump’s efforts to end the Gaza war would succeed.
In the Middle East and especially in the realm of the Arab-Israeli conflict, it has always been safe to bet that peace efforts will fail. Something is bound to go wrong, and the gaps are too wide. The parties are often irrational and throw temper tantrums, and the spoilers will gladly insert a stick in one or more of the wagon’s wheels. Not surprisingly, only a small minority of “hopeless optimists” gave any probability that President Donald Trump’s efforts to end the Gaza war would succeed. Indeed, even after Israel and Hamas accepted the US-facilitated agreement on a cease-fire and hostage release on October 8, 2025, most experts and pundits opined that the agreement would not hold and that the protagonists would soon resume the fighting. While the first weeks have been bumpy, with some exchanges of fire occurring periodically, as of this writing, the ceasefire largely holds, and the protagonists are mostly complying with the agreement reached.
What did the pessimists get wrong? Why did so few expect that we would reach this point? The pessimists’ first error was their widely shared expectation that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu would reject any end to the fighting, that he would manipulate Trump to agree to something short of ending the war, and that even if Netanyahu would formally agree to stop, he would seize the first opportunity to resume the fighting.
This plausible expectation was based on the assumption that Netanyahu feared that an end to the war would result in a tsunami of demands for the creation of a national commission of inquiry into the sources and causes of the October 7, 2023, catastrophe. Clearly, his excuse for forestalling the launching of such an inquiry and for dismissing the demands for early elections as long as the fighting continues would then lose its ground, as would the justifications for skipping court sessions in the trial of the corruption charges that he faces. And yet, Netanyahu accepted the terms of the US-facilitated agreement, and so far, both Israel and Hamas are complying with the terms of the agreement they reached.
Likewise, Hamas was expected to reject any deal for the release of the Israeli hostages without Israel first committing to a complete withdrawal from Gaza. This expectation was based on the premise that Hamas leaders in Gaza view the hostages as their “human shield,” providing them an ultimate “life insurance.” And yet by this writing, Hamas had returned all live and almost all dead Israeli hostages while the Israel Defense Forces still controls more than 50 percent of the Gaza Strip.
What these assumptions missed was the cumulative fatigue suffered by both Israel and Hamas, with Palestinian casualties reaching almost 70,000 dead, among whom at least 20,000 were Hamas fighters, and hundreds of thousands of Israelis suffering physical, economic, and psychological attrition after many months of reserve service. Simply put, after two years of fighting with inconclusive results, both sides’ leaders lost their ability to resist pressures to end the war.
What experts also missed was the impact of the particular approach that Trump and his key advisors adopted when launching their efforts to end the war. One unique dimension of their approach was for the United States to refrain from attempting to bridge the gaps between the parties’ positions regarding the many issues and sub-issues dividing them. In contrast to previous US presidents Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama, Trump was never one to immerse himself in endless details. Implicitly rejecting the premise that “the devil is in the details,” Trump focused on the protagonists’ “incentive structures” and on compelling them to accept the most important compromises that an agreement would require.
Thus, instead of focusing on the parties’ positions regarding the many issues dividing them—an exercise that Jared Kushner regarded as a decades-long preoccupation of Middle East peace specialists—the United States focused almost entirely on mobilizing those who had leverage over Hamas and who could press Hamas to accept the concessions needed: Egypt, Qatar, and Turkey. This was in sharp contrast to previous Palestinian-Israeli peace negotiations, such as the Clinton-convened July 2000 Camp David summit, where the Arab states had no role.
In parallel, Trump committed himself and his chief advisors to act as Israel’s “responsible adult.” This translated to stopping Israel’s sliding into a regime change mission creep in the final days of its 12-day war with Iran in July. It was also manifested in Trump forcing Netanyahu to apologize to Qatar for Israel’s attack on Hamas’ leaders in Doha on September 9. Thus, in a humiliating session in the Oval Office, Trump made sure to be photographed as he made sure that Israel’s prime minister did not deviate from the dictated apology script. Then, during the final phase of closing the deal, Kushner and Steve Witkoff sat in at the Israeli cabinet meeting that deliberated the suggested compromises (a diplomatic innovation later called “Bibi sitting”). Photos of all these episodes were made public by the White House to make sure that Arab leaders are aware that the United States was keeping its part of the deal.
A closely related facet of the Trump team’s approach was reducing the relative significance of the details involved in such discussions by rejecting a principle upon which all previous Israeli-Palestinian negotiations were based, namely that “nothing is agreed upon until everything is agreed upon.” The driver of this principle was the wish to avoid one party pocketing the concession made by another party without adequate reciprocity. The downside of this principle was that all compromises reached were held hostage to the most difficult issue being negotiated. By contrast, the Trump team’s novel approach allowed the agreement on a ceasefire and hostages’ release to be reached and implemented, notwithstanding the lack of any agreement regarding the other 12 points in Trump’s 20-point peace plan.
Another aspect of the Trump team’s approach was the manner in which they introduced a human dimension to the process. During the many months that led to the deal, Trump and Witkoff involved themselves personally with the Israeli hostages’ families (indeed, to a far greater extent than did Netanyahu, who largely avoided such interactions). Trump had many meetings in the White House with members of the hostages’ families, and on a number of occasions, Witkoff attended gatherings in the so-called “hostages square” in Tel Aviv. Israelis who attended these rallies expressed their appreciation of Trump’s role in securing the hostages’ release, as was evident during the first mass gathering there, after the agreement on the hostage release was reached.
In the department of personal touch, not less astonishing was Witkoff’s meeting in Sharm el-Sheikh on October 8 with senior Hamas leader Khalil al-Hayya, whose son was killed in Israel’s strike against Hamas leaders in Doha. In opening the meeting, Witkoff, who lost his son to a drug overdose in 2011, approached Al-Haya as two parents who lost their sons. As Witkoff by then had established a deep emotional connection to the Israeli hostages’ families, there was no pushback to the sympathy that Witkoff expressed to a Hamas leader who played at least an indirect role in the horrific October 7 attack.
Another error driving the assessment that a deal to end the Gaza war and release the hostages was unlikely was an underestimation of the effects of the changes that the Middle East region has experienced since October 7. In 1990-91, America’s success in building the coalition that defeated Saddam Hussein in the First Gulf War opened the golden period of Middle East peacemaking that included the convening of the Madrid Peace Conference in 1991, holding the Middle East Multilateral Talks in 1992-95, and concluding the PLO-Israel Oslo Accords in 1993 and the Jordan-Israel Peace Treaty in 1994.
Paradoxically, Israel’s perseverance in the aftermath of October 7 has had a similar effect. The thwarting of Iran’s attacks on Israel in April and November 2024 by the United States Central Command-coordinated coalition; the serious damage suffered by Iran’s proxy, Hezbollah, due to Israel’s advanced technological capabilities as well as by Iran’s nuclear efforts and its air-defense systems during the 12-day Israel-Iran war; and finally, the replacement of Assad’s regime in Syria by President Ahmed al-Sharaa, who is negotiating a security agreement with Israel. The cumulative effect of these developments was to change the distribution of power in the Middle East significantly, to the “bad guys” detriment. In this new era, no significant player was left willing and able to undermine the agreement reached.
Yet pessimism is a state of mind that is hard to part with. No sooner than the agreement on ending the Gaza war was signed, that experts opined that the agreement was unlikely to hold as America’s impatient president would likely now turn his attention elsewhere. With other important issues, ranging from Ukraine to China, likely to demand Trump’s time and energy, it seemed unlikely that he would be able to deal with the many challenges that would need to be addressed if the ceasefire and hostage release deal is to be fully implemented. All the more so if the process is to move to the next, more ambitious parts of Trump’s 20-point plan.
The pessimists’ skepticism about the next steps may yet be confirmed and reaffirmed. However, Trump’s emissaries—both commercial real estate developers—have already made clear that in their area of expertise, the deal made is only the beginning. Thus, the United States has established a headquarters in the southern Israeli town of Kiryat Gat with officers representing key stakeholders monitoring the steps that the parties are taking to deconflict. While the road from deconflicting to peace is demanding and long, reaching this point has already surprised most observers. Moreover, it is far preferable to the horrors, death, and despair Israelis and Palestinians have experienced during the past two years. And who knows? The skeptics and pessimists may be wrong again.
About the Author: Shai Feldman
Shai Feldman is the Raymond Frankel Chair in Israeli Politics and Society at Brandeis University’s Crown Center for Middle East Studies.
Image: Shutterstock.com.
