09/10/2026
From an essay by NACHUM KAPLAN, OCT 07, 2025
Gaza peace will not mean peace between Israel and the Palestinians
Even if President Donald Trump's peace plan works in Gaza, it will not bring peace to the Middle East or end the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
Let us play make-believe and pretend that all parties accept U.S. President Donald Trump’s peace plan and that it works. It would not mean Middle East peace or even an end to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The region’s sickness runs deeper than Gaza.
It would remove Hamas from power, replace it with some kind of provisional Arab-administered entity, and build a technocratic scaffolding for reconstruction under international supervision. The US and Gulf monarchies would foot the bill. That is good. Yet the war in Gaza is a symptom of a wider Islamist disease that Trump’s plan does not address…
Even if this peace plan works for now in Gaza, jihadist sickness remains in Hebron’s mosques, Lebanon’s militias, Syria’s barracks, Tehran’s corridors of power, much of Judea and Samaria, and even in the “friendly” states of Egypt and Jordan. The Gaza deal is a ceasefire, not a transformation.
…The Arab–Israeli conflict — and its more specific Israel–Palestinian variant — has never been about borders, but about Israel’s existence. Israel wants security; its enemies want its annihilation. So long as that asymmetry remains, there can be no peace.
Hamas not ruling Gaza would certainly be a great thing, but the ideology that birthed it will remain entrenched in classrooms, sermons, and satellite channels across the Arab and wider Muslim world. Hamas is fond of saying that it is an idea, not merely a group — and that idea is that Jewish sovereignty is a crime against Islam. That belief extends far beyond Gaza. It is in Judea and Samaria, in refugee camps from Jordan to Lebanon, and in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard that supplies the rockets that terrorists fire at Israeli civilians. No peace plan can negotiate away an eschatology.
…The idea that solving the Israeli–Palestinian conflict would bring peace to the Middle East is untrue, and the idea that peace in Gaza will do so is nonsense. It is a superstition born of diplomatic and journalistic laziness.
Consider the map: civil war in Yemen, chaos in Sudan, Iranian subversion in Iraq, Turkish adventurism in northern Syria, and Islamist insurgencies from the Sahel to Sinai. None of these has anything to do with Israel, yet all are symptoms of the same pathology — Islamist fanaticism, authoritarianism, corruption, and tribal politics.
Middle East instability will continue as long as the battle within Islam between modernity and medievalism endures, and as long as the region remains a battlefield for great-power rivalry. Neither looks likely to end soon.
The Abraham Accords — and their resilience so far — show that Arab states and Israel can normalize ties and prosper without the Israeli–Palestinian conflict being fully resolved. That is true, but only up to a point. The Accords were born of converging interests, not shared values: Arab monarchies needed Israeli intelligence and American weapons to deter Iran. Those calculations remain valid, but they are not eternal.
An end to the Gaza war and reconstruction will ease pressure on Arab rulers to cool ties with Israel, but it is an open question whether economic normalization can outpace Islamist radicalization.
Peace agreements without genuine popular buy-in are brittle; they survive only until the next crisis. The Arab Street has not accepted Israel’s right to exist, only that it is a reality that must be tolerated for now. That is not peace; it is a truce.
Peace in the Middle East — which is unlikely because it would be a historical anomaly — cannot come from Western plans, maps, or conferences. Only a moral transformation within Arab and Muslim societies can deliver true acceptance of Israel’s permanent right to exist. Until that happens, every American or European initiative will remain a ritual of denial.
Trump’s plan, for all its virtues, does not address that moral core and thus can bring nothing more than an end to the current Israel–Hamas hostilities in Gaza. That is good, but it is nothing like Middle East peace.
Even if President Donald Trump's peace plan works in Gaza, it will not bring peace to the Middle East or end the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
