(Sept. 30, 2025 / JNS) If it works, President Donald Trump would deserve the Nobel Peace Prize he covets but almost certainly will never receive. His 20-point plan to end the war in Gaza, which was publicly accepted by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at a White House meeting on Sept. 29, is based on some breathtaking assumptions about the future.
But if it did work, then it would not only mean that Israel would have achieved its two main war goals: the release of all of the remaining hostages held by Palestinian terrorists and the elimination of the Hamas terrorist organization in the Gaza Strip. It would also provide yet another opportunity for the Palestinian Arabs to choose peace and to end their century-old war on Zionism that has brought them nothing but death and destruction.
Do they want peace?
Like the other peace initiatives the Palestinians have been offered over the past decades, the problem is that it’s by no means clear that they regard a chance to end their long war against the Jewish presence in the land of Israel or even the latest chapter of it that began two years ago as a desirable outcome. As long as their national identity is inextricably tied to the conflict against the Jews, then no plan—no matter how fair or potentially beneficial to their future—will wind up working. In the absence of an acceptance that their struggle to erase Israel is finished, nothing is going to change.
In addition to that, Trump’s scheme can only succeed if there really is a body of nonpolitical Palestinian technocrats available to run Gaza who are not tainted by a belief in Israel’s destruction. If that happens, it also means that we are about to witness a sea change in the political culture of the Palestinian Arabs that is hard to imagine, coupled with an equally unlikely reform of the corrupt Palestinian Authority that hopes eventually to take over control of the Strip.
It will also require the global community and the United Nations to adopt policies to advance the cause of peace, rather than enabling the perpetuation of the century-old Muslim and Arab war on Zionism.
On top of that, it is based on the idea that a “Board of Peace” chaired by Trump and composed of world leaders like Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, will have the will and ability to fairly supervise the creation of a “new Gaza” dedicated to co-existence rather than continuing to construct a terrorist fortress.
And, of course, it’s also dependent on the good behavior of Hamas terrorists—the combatants who were not present in Washington.
Its leaders will have to surrender not just their arms and the control of the coastal enclave that they’ve had since 2007. It will also compel the Islamist group and the vast number of Palestinians who agree with their genocidal goals to give up their faith-based ideology that compels them to keep fighting for the elimination of Israel, regardless of what happens to them or how many of their own people are killed as a direct result of their strategies and tactics.
If all that happens, then the 20-point plan provides a path for Israel to achieve its main goals in the war started by the Hamas-led invasion and attacks in southern Israeli communities on Oct. 7, 2023. That is why Netanyahu had no choice but to go along with Trump.
Bitter pills for Israel
Nevertheless, certain elements of the plan are bitter pills for Israel’s government to swallow.
The release of 250 terrorists currently serving life sentences in Israeli prisons in exchange for the immediate release of the remaining 48 Israeli hostages—both those alive and those whose bodies are still being held by the Palestinians—is yet another outrageous example of the way peace processors accept a false moral equivalency between murderers and the innocent people they target.
Then there is the way that the plan trusts in the desire of these mythical apolitical Palestinian technocrats to build a Gaza dedicated to providing its residents with decent lives, as opposed to serving as a launching pad for the next edition of the jihad against the Jews.
The notion that the International Stabilization Force envisioned by the plan can police Gaza or ensure that it won’t be a threat to its neighbors, including Egypt, requires another enormous leap of faith. After all, it could also be used as an opportunity for those who hate the Jewish state to set in motion a train of events that might lead to the outbreak of the next violent Palestinian attempt to destroy Israel.
That Netanyahu was forced by Trump to apologize to Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani for Israel’s airstrike on Hamas leaders residing in security and luxury in the Gulf state, and pledging never to violate its sovereignty again, was both humiliating and deeply wrong. Trump’s willingness to believe in the fairy tale that the Qataris are a force for peace, rather than the primary funders of Islamist hate around the world, is an astonishing blunder by the president. It calls into question his judgment and the motives of some of his advisers, like Mideast envoy Steve Witkoff, who are compromised by their financial ties to Doha.
Despite all of that, the plan’s demand for the immediate release of all of the hostages and the prospect, even if it is entirely theoretical, of a Hamas-free Gaza was more than enough reason for Netanyahu to suspend disbelief and do as the president bade him.
Trump’s judgment is far from perfect, as his stand on Qatar makes obvious. That nation’s involvement in this scheme is a red flag in and of itself. This is, after all, the government that owns and runs Al Jazeera—the most influential news outlet in the Arab and Muslim world, as well as a primary source of Hamas propaganda—and is the primary funder and host of the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas.
Still, Trump has also made clear that if Hamas doesn’t agree to and abide by all 20 points in the new plan, Israel will be free to “finish the job” of destroying the terrorists.
There would be no reason to trust virtually any other player on the international stage to ensure that an agreement with terrorists isn’t flouted by them. The United Nations and its agencies are fatally compromised by their ties to Hamas and sympathy for the cause of Israel’s elimination. European nations—the supposed friends and allies of Israel—now unilaterally recognizing Palestinian statehood in order to reward Hamas and undermine Israel also remain untrustworthy.
The peacemakers test
As the world learned in the years that followed the signing of the Oslo Accords in September 1993, President Bill Clinton and his foreign-policy team were prepared to turn a blind eye to Palestinian violations of its terms, as well as to the obvious indications that they viewed Israel’s concessions of territory as merely a gift that allowed them to prepare to continue their quest for its destruction on more advantageous terms. The same was largely true of the George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden administrations.
But as the most pro-Israel president in the history of the modern Jewish state, Trump has earned the trust of those who care about it. And so, there is good reason to believe that, his mistaken ideas about Qatar notwithstanding, he will keep his word to hold the Palestinians and Hamas accountable.
At this moment, it is once again possible—as it was at every other point in the history of the last century when the Palestinians could have chosen peace—to imagine success.
To do so, however, means forgetting everything we know about the Palestinians and a society informed by Islamic ideas about the impossibility of accepting the idea that non-Muslims can be allowed to rule lands once possessed by Muslims. The continuation of the conflict is not a failure on the part of the Israelis to compromise or to take “risks for peace.” Rather, it is a function of the Palestinian understanding that they are perennial victims and the necessity to go on sacrificing generations of their children on the altar of an eternal quest to rid the Middle East of a state whose existence contradicts jihadist principles.
That is why all previous efforts to build peace have failed. All the billions in investment and foreign aid that have poured into Gaza, as well as Judea and Samaria, have not created a constituency for peace. The pragmatic assumptions of the diplomats that created the Oslo process, and those of more transactional figures like Trump, have always foundered on the fact that this conflict is about Islamist faith and not a dispute over real estate.
But no matter how foolish those assumptions may be, Trump has given the Palestinians one more exit ramp from a war that continues to devastate them. To think that they will embrace that opportunity is unmoored from a realistic assessment of their political culture and recent history. And if they fail to do so, we know that most of the world will blame Israel and not the Palestinians, as has happened every previous time they have rejected peace.
Decent people should pray that the Palestinians will finally wake up from the nightmare ideology that has led them down the path of bloodshed for a century. That would mean an end to their suffering, as well as freedom for the hostages and a respite for Israel. Yet no one should be surprised if that doesn’t happen. If, or rather when, that happens, then Trump must keep his word and back Israeli efforts to destroy Hamas and also double down on his campaign to rid American education of the woke antisemitism that has surged since Oct. 7.
As the world should have learned long ago, the real path to peacemaking is about more than crafting theoretical plans to end conflicts. The will to enforce such schemes, instead of winking at more Palestinian violations and promises to continue the war, serves as the true test of statesmanship.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him: @jonthans_tobin.
