Palestinians are responding to the agreement reached in Egypt this week with immense relief but also enormous trepidation.
Immense relief because it seems certain the Gaza genocide will be suspended for at least several days, and because the cessation of hostilities may, under the best of circumstances, extend for an indefinite period. The “ceasefire” could develop into what Trump has hailed as a definitive end to the “war”.
But enormous trepidation for multiple reasons. This is not an agreement Israel wanted or entered into willingly.
Rather than a deal forced onto Hamas by the leaders of Arab and Muslim states at US urging, it is one that was imposed on Israel by the United States at the urging of those same leaders.
The turning point, the straw that broke the camel’s back, was Israel’s bombing of the Qatari capital, Doha. Not because the failed assassination attempt against Hamas’s exile leadership led them to a sudden discovery that they were in Israel’s crosshairs, but because Washington’s closest allies in the region realised they, too, are fair game. Unless restrained by Washington, Israel would make increasingly short shrift of their sovereignty and national security.
Unlike his predecessor, Joe Biden, Donald Trump listened. The Gulf states and their promises of massive investments in the US are vital to Trump and his agenda. Money talks incessantly in US politics, and it is always listened to most carefully. In Trump’s Washington, it does so even louder.
Consumed by narcissistic vanity, the US strongman was also keen to get a deal done in time to influence the awarding of the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize. Consumed by jealousy for Barack Obama, he can hardly be blamed for wanting a prize Obama received for achieving absolutely nothing in the realm of peace.
A foreign policy coup would also serve as a welcome distraction from domestic crisis, now in the form of the US leader’s plummeting approval ratings and the government shutdown.
Washington called, and Netanyahu obeyed. The only “total victory” the wanted International Criminal Court fugitive repeatedly promised was achieved with a single missive from his chief sponsor in Washington, and it was Trump’s rather than Netanyahu’s.
In other words, this is an agreement that will be sustained only by US commitment. And only a fool would bet on that commitment being sustained. And it would take an even bigger fool to give anything agreed to by Trump and Netanyahu practical meaning.
Israel has a habit of bending ceasefires to its will, and of summarily abrogating them with Washington’s endorsement. Many Palestinians expect Israel will seek to impose an arrangement similar to the ceasefire purportedly in force in Lebanon. Hezbollah ceases, while Israel continues to fire.
A more concerning precedent was set in the Gaza Strip earlier this year, where the US permitted Israel to unilaterally change the terms of the January agreement after it had been agreed upon, and to then abrogate it and resume the genocide when the Palestinians rejected these changes.
Alternatively, Israel can exploit or engineer an event it defines as an infraction. In 1981, Israel and the PLO reached a ceasefire agreement ending hostilities across the Israeli-Lebanese border.
The agreement explicitly applied to that arena alone. Israel later proclaimed that its terms applied to the entire planet. Stretching bad faith even further, when a renegade Palestinian faction whose leader had been sentenced to death by the PLO conducted an assassination attempt against the Israeli ambassador to Britain the following year, Israel seized upon this as a pretext to invade Lebanon.
A key Israeli objective in 1982 was to eliminate the PLO. During the Siege of Beirut, various ceasefires were negotiated. On multiple occasions, Israeli forces would stop shooting and shelling, but continue advancing towards Palestinian positions. When the latter opened fire to defend themselves, Israel would declare the ceasefire in question over and resume its offensive.
More broadly, negotiations over an agreement – which Israel always tries to transform into negotiations between competing Israeli factions and then between Israel and Washington, rather than with its adversaries – are only the first step of an excruciating process. These are followed by an entirely new round of negotiations over the implementation of what has been agreed, which typically proceed from the premise that recently established framework is irrelevant.
Then there is the actual implementation, which Israel will seek to do in a manner suggesting that its commitments are merely preferences expressed by the other side rather than binding obligations.
The Oslo Accords, signed in 1993 and to be concluded in 1999, but now in their thirty-second year and counting, are the perfect template for this approach. They also reveal a different Israeli strategy, that of simply refusing to negotiate to ensure issues are neither addressed nor resolved.
From what we know of the details of the recently concluded Sharm al-Shaikh agreement, Israel will remain in physical occupation of approximately half of the Gaza Strip.
Its approach will most likely focus on either abrogating the agreement altogether or ensnaring the Palestinians into an endless, Oslo-like process over the terms and extent of further withdrawals from territory in which its very presence has already been ruled illegal by the International Court of Justice. Augmented by a Lebanese-style unilateral ceasefire.
For this reason, it is essential to keep Israel’s feet to the fire and heighten the flames. Palestinians are now in a position to leapfrog the meaningless process being prepared for them through an intensification of the global campaign to isolate Israel and hold it accountable for its crimes and violations. It is a potentially unique opportunity that cannot be squandered through demobilisation and subordination to another road to nowhere.
This, however, requires competent, credible, genuinely representative, and unified Palestinian leadership, capable of formulating and implementing a national strategy, and mobilising all the resources at its disposal to achieve it.
Next to attending to the immediate needs of the Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip, who have endured more than humanity can bear, it is this which forms the most urgent Palestinian priority. Failure will see the Palestinian cause once again reduced to at best a humanitarian question, which may well create a further opportunity for Israel to produce a new wave of Palestinian refugees.
Mouin Rabbani is Co-Editor of Jadaliyya and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies.
Follow Mouin on X: @MouinRabbani
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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.