A Second Look at Trump's Speech to the Knesset

There’s no questioning the fact that Donald Trump’s victory speech following the release of the last surviving Israeli hostages won a standing ovation from the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. The euphoria was understandable. Trump played a major role in pressuring Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to accept a ceasefire.

That Trump managed to get Netanyahu to agree to a ceasefire is even more impressive because peace in Gaza may very well spell the end of Netanyahu’s political career. Given his record as a Machiavellian political infighter, getting him to go along with the cease-fire was no small feat.

Kind courtesy of political cartoonist and author Jeff Danziger

Wars can't go on forever

It was increasingly obvious to just about everyone that the ongoing war in Gaza was serving as a political lifeline for Netanyahu. You don’t remove a prime minister when the fighting is still going on.

But wars can’t last forever, and before the rampage against Gaza had even started, Netanyahu was already defending himself against a criminal indictment on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust.

More than a few Israelis blamed Netanyahu’s misguided priorities for creating the conditions that led to the October 7 massacre taking place. Others hold Netanyahu responsible for aiding Hamas’ rise to power by systematically sabotaging the Palestinian Authority’s presence in Gaza.

Understandably, no one wanted to bring any of that up in the jubilant atmosphere brought on by the hostage release, although Trump did manage to call attention to Netanyahu’s precarious state when he suggested to Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, that he might make the mess go away by issuing a blanket pardon.

Another historic dawn?

The major point in Trump’s speech was his declaration that the ceasefire marks a “historic dawn of a new era in the Middle East.” The hyperbole can be excused as rhetoric, but the contention that a momentary ceasefire marks the beginning of a stable peace is questionable.

Worse, it brings back memories of George W. Bush’s infamous announcement that the War in Iraq was over in 2003. Standing in front of a banner declaring “Mission Accomplished” on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, Bush engaged in one of the more embarrassingly premature victory laps in recent history.

Far from over, the Iraq War was just beginning. It dragged on through 2011 and the damage it caused was significant: 4,492 U.S. servicemen dead, another 32,000 wounded, and more than 200,000 Iraqi civilians killed.

In the wake of Trump’s self-congratulatory euphoria, most Arab leaders fretted over how long Trump was likely to remain focused on the region. If he lets the ball drop as he often does, the conflict is likely to resume with even greater brutality.

Medecins sans Frontieres seeking to provide humanitarian relief in Gaza.

MSF

Lessons learned: The wrong one?

An even more serious concern is that Trump’s enthusiasm over his momentary success may lead him to make wrong decisions in future conflicts. The U.S. Army maintains a program dubbed “Lessons Learned.” In the case of Gaza, Trump may have learned the wrong lessons.

To begin with, Trump made it clear to the Knesset that he is overly impressed by the success of his special envoy and good friend, real-estate tycoon Steve Witkoff. The obvious conclusion seems to be that a savvy deal-making businessman can prove more effective at complex negotiations than the professional diplomats at the U.S. State Department. In short, the U.S. diplomatic corps’ decades of experience may have been seriously overrated. That’s a dangerous conclusion.

Witkoff was not the key

There is no question that Witkoff did a competent job at communicating with the major players in securing a cease-fire, but it is also pretty obvious that the truce was very likely more a reaction to the total destruction of Gaza than anything that Witkoff had to say.

According to Reuters, Netanyahu’s campaign of revenge against Gaza has resulted in the death of more than 67,000 Palestinian civilians in just a little more than two years. A third of the civilians killed were under the age of 18. More than 20,000 were children. None of them had any demonstrable connection to the October 7 massacre. No one asked.

They were there, and someone had to pay for October 7, regardless of whether they actually had any responsibility. Taking in the rate of destruction Israel visited upon Gaza, each living Israeli hostage who was freed Monday was matched by 1,000 Palestinian children killed by Israeli bombs. It didn’t need Steve Witkoff to convince the world that a ceasefire was necessary. The mathematics of the situation did the trick.

How likely will Trump's 20-part proposal actually provide peace?

MSF

Diplomatic experience: knowing what to expect next

The advantage that experienced U.S. State Department diplomats have over canny businessmen like Witkoff and even Donald Trump is that they are more likely to know what to expect next. At least they are trained to think about future consequences.

Trump may see the future of Gaza as a peaceful Eden in which everyone, including the extended Trump family, can make money from newly available Mediterranean real estate. The experienced diplomat knows that reality is certain to be more complicated than that. Just the last 20 hostages were being released, Israel was forced to free nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners and detainees.

The deal, which Trump boasted about, required that this latter release be carried out without fanfare and so that it was barely noticed by the public. Fair enough, but it’s hard to ignore the fact that each ex-Israeli prisoner constitutes a potential time bomb that may go off sometime in the future.

Many of the detainees appeared to have been treated roughly by their Israeli captors. Some claimed to have been tortured. At least 250 were prisoners, whom Israel had already considered to be a serious enough threat to merit lengthy prison terms. They are not likely to forget Israel anytime soon.

Even more damaging, when it comes to Israel’s overall understanding of the situation, Netanyahu’s campaign has led Israel to seal itself off from the rest of the world in what amounts to an information bubble. Israeli bombers wreaked havoc on Gaza, but the Israeli public rarely got to see the full extent of the damage.

Foreign reporters and international news agencies have been forbidden entry into Gaza, and Israeli soldiers have even shot at reporters who tried to cover what was happening. (See Global Geneva series on the threats facing credible journalism)

All of that has had a corrosive effect on Israeli society, and that is exactly what Yahyah Sinwar intended to accomplish when he planned and launched the October 7 massacre. Because Israel’s public has been largely kept in the dark about what the IDF has actually been doing, most Israelis cannot understand why the rest of the world is upset.

AI generated vision of Trump's Gaza...

Future profits and building schemes

Trump’s speech to the Knesset made it clear that Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner, and the rest of Trump’s team were thinking primarily in terms of deal-making. If they thought about the future at all, it was in terms of future profits and million-dollar building schemes. Anything else was not their concern. It is of enormous concern, however, to the rest of the region.

The fact is that, regardless of the momentary euphoria, the future still looks pretty bleak. The fate of more than two million Palestinians is still undetermined. Ceasefire or no ceasefire, Israel cannot simply make them vanish. Refugee camps are incubators for terrorists of the future. Yahyah Sinwar was a product of a refugee camp, and the injustice of it filled his heart with hatred and turned him into a killing machine. Many more are waiting in the production line.

Even without the concentrated populations in refugee camps, Israel’s destruction of schools, hospitals, and basic infrastructure will create destructive forces that Israel will need to contend with in the future.

A child who grows up without education has few options for the future except to turn to crime or join a warlord putting together an armed gang. The Middle East is full of them. Pulling the trigger on a gun requires no education, at least not the kind that is learned in school. Israel has no answer to that looming storm, except to prepare itself for continuous warfare.

Deal-making is all you need...

Trump’s apparent conviction that deal-making is all you need is one thing. His ideas concerning the U.S. military are something else. In his speech, Trump boasted that he had asked U.S. generals in Washington how long it would take to rout out ISIS (The Islamic State of Iraq and the Lebanon). Trump said he asked the same question to Air Force General John Daniel “Raisin” Caine, who said he could do the job in four weeks.

Caine’s primary experience was as an F-16 pilot. He never had the command management training that is legally required for promotion to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. That didn’t bother Trump, who had met Raisin Caine at a conservative political rally and was smitten by his nickname. Trump simply issued a waver, overruling the rules that excluded Caine from the job.

...but what about the on-the-ground realities?

When Trump picked Caine to be Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Caine allegedly said, “I love, you sir. I think you are great. I’d kill for you.” That is what Trump wanted to hear. It cemented the relationship. In his speech to the Knesset, Trump compared Caine’s go-getter attitude to what he referred to as the “TV generals” at the Pentagon, who, Trump is convinced, obviously have trouble getting the job done.

All of that sounds fine, except that the kind of threats that the military faces today requires more than simply shooting at people or imposing a lightning victory. To be effective, military commanders need to understand the complex issues that made a shooting war inevitable to begin with.

The Pentagon has made considerable progress in that direction. Hamas may be finished as an organization, but the people who made it work are still there, and the forces that motivated them have not disappeared. Shakespeare said that a rose by any other name smells the same.

Gaza: Far from over

Unless its grievances are dealt with, Hamas will reconstitute itself. The name may change, but the threat is likely to be just as deadly. The ancient Greeks understood that. Their metaphor for the phenomenon was the many-headed Hydra. You cut off a head, and two more appeared in its place.

Trump doesn’t see that, and his temporary victory and the corresponding adulation that followed the ceasefire and hostage release in Gaza may further fuel his personal conviction that the experts don’t really know what they are talking about. It’s a dangerous world out there, and a president who fails to understand its complexity makes it even more dangerous. Gaza is not over yet.

Foreign correspondent and author William Dowell is Global Geneva's America’s editor based in Philadelphia. Over the past decades, he has covered much of the globe, including Iran, for TIME, ABC News and other news organizations.