The ceasefire in Gaza was announced on Jan. 15 and implemented on Jan. 19, and the question at the forefront of my mind has been: why now? With over 46,600 Palestinians killed and 1.9 million Gazans displaced since the start of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza in October 2023, why did it take over a year? The simple answer would be that Donald Trump’s election affords Benjamin Netanyahu an invaluable ally. Not only will this increase foreign aid, but it will also increase arms and munitions sent to Israel, sending a clear and definite message to Palestinians attempting to continue resistance. But the geopolitical reality is more complex.
Even in July 2024, the Israeli Defense Forces claimed to have wiped out “half” of Hamas’s military leaders. On Oct. 16, 2024, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was assassinated by the IDF, though his brother Mohammad Sinwar remains a crucial player in the internal politics of Hamas. Deprived of leadership and resources due to Israel’s longstanding blockade of humanitarian aid, (at one point, Israel blocked 83% of food aid to Gaza), Hamas was left with no choice but to rely on its ally, Hezbollah, a controversial Lebanese Shi’a paramilitary group. Yet even here, Hamas was outmanned. Hezbollah and Israel negotiated a ceasefire along the Lebanese-Israeli border on Nov. 26, in which Israeli citizens were returned to their homes in Northern Israel. Bereft of any kind of leverage, and compelled by the basic needs of its citizens, Hamas was forced to acquiesce to a paltry fraction of its intended goals.
For instance, while Hamas had to return Israeli hostages, the ceasefire is conditional, and at the time of writing this, only in phase two. Israel maintains a buffer zone between the villages attacked on Oct. 7, 2023, and the Gaza Strip, indicating that Israel believes trust must be rebuilt before the negotiation of a ceasefire on equal footing. In addition, Trump and Netanyahu held a meeting and press conference at the White House on Feb. 5, in which Trump expressed plans to use American troops to take over Gaza and suggested the permanent relocation of Palestinians, describing their current living conditions as “hell” and asking why anyone would want to live there in its current state. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt later backtracked Trump’s statement, stating that Trump intended to displace Palestinians “temporarily”.
Yet when one reflects on world history, relocation is frequently not a benevolent or temporary act. Rather, it often serves as a prelude to ethnic cleansing.
You could start with the Trail of Tears, when thousands of Native Americans died en route to western reservations. Reinforce that with the Dawes Act, which erased traditional indigenous communal ownership in favor of nuclear family-based land allotments. Then, of course, you could dwell on the Lebensraum, the Nazi Party’s idea for expanding the Aryan population through colonization of Slavic lands (which of course, necessitated the extermination of the Slavs, who the Nazis deemed subhuman.) You could muse about Japanese concentration camps during World War II, when 80,000 native-born citizens were stripped of their constitutional rights and shipped off to facilities with inadequate healthcare, where they would remain until 1946.
When a world leader advocates relocating a group of people, sit up and listen, because it’s happened before. What Trump ultimately wants is expanded economic opportunities for the U.S. and the U.S. alone. What Netanyahu wants is to consolidate his grip on power, and to do this, he has to rally a complex mix of Israeli political parties. Netanyahu is the face of Likud, a right-wing party that proudly espouses Zionism, conservatism and populism as its core tenets. In order to succeed in the October 2026 election, he needs 61 of the Knesset’s 120 seats. But his polling among Israelis is bleak. In order to appeal to a diverse array of factions, from the ultra Orthodox and Sephardi Shas, to his most powerful opposition, the centrist Yesh Atid, led by former prime minister Yair Lapid, he needs a victory. What better way to achieve such a thing than through platitudes of peace and pretensions at negotiation?
Make no mistake, the ceasefire is not a product of altruism, it’s the product of a power struggle, both within Israel and the United States. While the Biden administration claimed support for Israel and waxed poetic about Doug Emhoff’s Yiddishkeit, they poured the standard $3.3 billion into military and economic aid, rather than the planned $1 billion in bombs and bulldozers alone Trump intends to spend on making the decimated, ashen, depopulated Gaza Strip into his vanity project.
In the 90s, the Oslo Accords failed because while the goal of Palestinians was clear: to establish national sovereignty, the goals of Israel were more nebulous. Ultimately, Israel stands nothing to gain from a permanent ceasefire except for internal cohesion, and even that is questionable. Eventually, Netanyahu will lose power—his coalition is hanging by a thread—but that doesn’t mean that the damage he’s inflicted on the peace process won’t last. Netanyahu’s rhetoric describing Palestinians as “terrorists” is the symptom of a more fundamental issue with Israeli society. Israel emphasizes religious pluralism and diversity only when it’s convenient for them. This is not the long-awaited fairytale ending we wanted. This is merely the beginning of a new strategy to establish an American hold on the Levant.
