Hamas exists, so there's no permanent ceasefire
It was Israel's call to agree to a ceasefire, out of exhaustion. It is no permanent solution.
The preamble of the Hamas Covenant reads: “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.” It continues: “There is no solution for the Palestinian problem except by Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are but a waste of time, an exercise in futility.” So, for Hamas, jihad it is, and jihad it will remain.
The ceasefire agreement announced by the Biden administration, with some collaboration with the incoming Trump team, is similar to agreements which failed to gain traction last year. Gaza health officials estimate the death toll at 46,645. Israel generally accepts the Gaza Ministry of Health numbers as accurate, but has said they tend to be inflated—or at least biased since no distinction is made between civilian deaths and combatants. An analysis published in The Lancet asserts that the count is low, by up to 25,000, but again does not touch on the number of actual terrorists killed while fighting.
One thing is certain: Hamas still fights on. In his farewell speech, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that Hamas has been able to recruit nearly as many fighters as it lost during the years-long war with Israel. Despite losing around 17,000 active militants, and a not inconsequential portion of its tunnel network and arms stores, Hamas still has the capability to fight and launch missiles into Israel. A ceasefire will only allow them to re-establish command and control, assess their actual damage, and begin to rebuild.
There is no future for Gaza with Hamas running it, other than as a military base from which to attack Israel. That’s because Hamas has as its purpose the destruction of Israel. If there were no Israel, there would be no Hamas (at least not in the form it currently exists). This means the ceasefire cannot be permanent. It means that after all the death and destruction in Gaza, Israel has not achieved its primary war goal to destroy Hamas and remove it from power. The fact that Hamas is signing off on the ceasefire, versus some other group to represent Gazans, is proof that Israel, and its Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, did not get what they wanted.
It could be that the Shabbat meeting between Netanyahu and Trump envoy Steve Witkoff was the persuasion that Netanyahu needed to sign on to the deal, which will release hundreds of imprisoned Hamas terrorists in exchange for 33 Israeli hostages, with a six week timeline to get to the next phase, where the rest of the hostages (or their bodies, if they are not living) would be released. I do expect Hamas to try to “play nice” to get to that next phase, though I am also sure there will be violations of the ceasefire because Hamas is incapable of executing command and control over its new recruits, who remain committed to killing Jews and Israelis.
Once the 33 hostages are released, and Hamas gains back those terrorists and murderers the Israelis have locked up in prison, the remaining hostages really have little value for them. There is far more value in getting to a more “permanent” ceasefire, which in Hamas interests is their chance to re-establish a flow of goods from Egypt, and access their significant funds to rebuild their ability to strike their enemy.
Meanwhile, all Israel has gotten is an amped-up version of “mow the lawn”—the strategy that allowed Hamas to lull the IDF and the Mossad into complacency and over-reliance on technical solutions to a very human problem.
On Israel’s side, there will be a reckoning. It’s likely this will be the end of Netanyahu’s political career, with a corruption trial still moving, and his extreme religious supporters in the Knesset upset over the hostage deal. I wonder exactly what Witkoff said to Netanyahu that persuaded him this is the time to sign on a deal that’s been presented for months in various forms? There has been much careful work by the Biden team over the last year, and to its credit, the Trump team, which was brought fully into the process, did not sabotage or attempt to rock that boat. Of course, their leader, President-elect Donald Trump, was quick to take credit.
Trump threatened that “all hell” would break loose if there was no deal before he took office. Perhaps Witkoff explained to Netanyahu exactly what that means. Either way, Netanyahu’s future is not in Trump’s hands, though what happens to him after he eventually leaves office may be part of the package offered by the Trump team.
The Biden team, led by Brett McGurk, has put in the time, working with Qatar, Egypt, and the main combatants, to create a structure to make the ceasefire possible. The devil is always in the details, and I give full credit to McGurk for focusing on the smallest of details. I give credit to Witkoff for staying out of McGurk’s way while committing to learn and execute the Biden team’s plan. If the ceasefire fails, it will not be the fault of the United States—on either side of the POTUS handover.
I don’t see the ceasefire failing in the first six weeks. Both sides are just too exhausted to resume a full war. Neither Israel nor Hamas has anything consequential to gain by resuming the killing in large numbers. IDF soldiers, who are largely reservists, want to go home. Businesses and families need them home. Israel’s economy is shattered and needs to begin to recover.
However, I don’t see the ceasefire holding, long-term. The “mow the lawn” strategy has failed, and is a recipe for failure. Hamas still exists. It still holds as its central tenet the destruction of Israel. Israel must engage that fact, not place it on the back burner. The solution is not to go in to Gaza every few years to degrade Hamas’ ability to fight. The IDF has been on the ground in Gaza since late 2023 and there are still many tunnels, and thousands of militants, ready to resume fighting when this war ends, for the next war, which is really one big war that never ends.
Israel’s reputation in the world is severely damaged, and in some ways, will not recover for this generation. The specter of the Holocaust which has given Israel the benefit of the doubt in moral terms, is fading. Israel has to grow up as a world power, and learn to use its moral compass in a world that has begun to move past the Holocaust. We must never forget the Holocaust, but also Israel has a responsibility not to commit genocide, even facing an enemy who would sacrifice an entire people to commit their own genocide.
Golda Meir famously said: “When peace comes we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons. Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.”
This ceasefire with Hamas is not the peace Meir was talking about. Perhaps one day Hamas will put down its murder stick. We have a ceasefire, but we are no closer to peace. We have only stopped more hell from breaking loose, for now.
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When did Netanyahu sign off on the deal? The last I heard and read said he had not.