Even for a man prone to hyperbole, President Donald Trump soared into the stratosphere this week by heralding the announcement of his new peace plan for the Middle East as “potentially one of the great days ever in civilization.” The twenty-point plan is ambitiously, if vaguely, designed to end the nearly two-year war in Gaza; bring home all the hostages, both dead and alive; create a committee to govern the territory; demilitarize Hamas; and eventually eliminate “any danger posed in the region.” It calls for Israeli troops to withdraw from Gaza, in phases, but allows them to keep an undefined security perimeter until there is no “resurgent terror threat.” “This is eternity,” Trump said, on Monday, while rambling for half an hour from a lectern in the East Room of the White House. “This is for forever.”
Oh, and, by the way, Trump revealed, he will chair a new international “board of peace” to monitor the plan’s implementation. “Not at my request, believe me,” he said. “I’m very busy, but we have to make sure this works.” No other leader in thousands of years of Middle East history had been able to secure permanent peace, Trump claimed. But he had.
Trump’s description of his new job as “chairman of the board” recalled his insistence, earlier this year, that Gaza would be developed into the “Riviera of the Middle East.” That announcement was followed by an A.I.-generated video depicting a new Trump resort, on the shores of the Mediterranean, after the rubble had been cleared away. The U.N. estimates that more than ninety per cent of all residential buildings in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed. In the first twenty-four hours after Trump unveiled his plan, dozens of Palestinians were killed and more than a hundred wounded, as the Israel Defense Forces advanced deeper into Gaza City, the capital. (More than sixty-six thousand Palestinians, about three per cent of Gaza’s population, have been killed in the war.) “If this wasn’t going to seal the fate of so many people, then Trump appointing himself to head this peace board [with the former British Prime Minister Tony] Blair as his underling would be the stuff of fine comedy,” Daniel Levy, a former Israeli negotiator who now leads the U.S./Middle East Project, told me.
The plan, if Hamas approves, is scheduled to begin unfolding within seventy-two hours, with the return of Israeli hostages and the release of nearly two thousand Palestinians jailed by Israel. (On Wednesday, reports indicated that Hamas was open to the deal but had reservations about several key points, including the hostage release and the requirement that it disarm.) Trump claimed that the plan has already been endorsed by other countries in the Middle East. “Our Arab and Muslim partners are fully prepared to step up and fulfill their commitments for the benefit of the people of Gaza and the entire region,” he said. As the chairman of the board, Trump continued, he will be involved “with some very smart people” to insure “that we haven’t just been wasting time with an agreement that doesn’t get done.”
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