For Israel, winning peace will be far more complicated than triumphing in war

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The setting, an elegant dinner table inside the White House on Monday evening, could hardly have been more different from the sun-drenched aircraft carrier George W. Bush stood on 22 years ago.

But the message delivered as Benjamin Netanyahu handed Donald Trump a copy of his letter nominating the U.S. President for the Nobel Peace Prize was the same as Mr. Bush’s claim of victory on board the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003, three weeks after U.S. troops toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq: Mission Accomplished.

Mr. Bush’s proclamation proved so early and inaccurate that it has since become an internet meme.

Mr. Bush’s dreams of a “new Middle East,” with the U.S.-installed democracy in Iraq spreading to its neighbours with affection for the United States and acceptance of Israel, devolved instead into a series of sectarian civil wars that killed hundreds of thousands of people.

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The White House dinner convened two weeks after the end of a 12-day war between Israel and Iran was far more sedate than Mr. Bush’s televised speech on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln. But Mr. Netanyahu has been no less bombastic in declaring Israel’s foes vanquished. Just like Mr. Bush back in 2003, Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Trump believe a “new Middle East” is on the cusp of being born.

Analysts agree Israel’s triumphs – backed by indirect U.S. military support in Gaza and Lebanon, and direct U.S. intervention against Iran – have dramatically changed the geopolitical map of the region. But just as in 2003, winning the peace will be far more complicated than triumphing in war.

Here’s a look at what might come next for key areas of the Middle East:

IsraelOpen this photo in gallery:

The Jewish state has been here before, in 1967, when it defeated the combined Arab armies and emerged from the Six-Day War with control of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Golan Heights. Israel’s decision to retain those territories has helped fuel a string of conflicts since then.

While Mr. Trump may hope to build on the Abraham Accords he oversaw during his first term in office – with that Nobel Peace Prize remaining the presidential dream – it’s less clear that Mr. Netanyahu is ready to end the fighting that began with the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel. Twenty-one months later, Mr. Netanyahu knows his coalition government could collapse if he agrees to a ceasefire in Gaza. His prospects are murky if he’s forced to fight another election.

Shalom Lipner, a nonresident senior fellow of Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council, said that while Mr. Netanyahu’s personal popularity had risen after the war against Iran, polling showed that the multiparty right-wing coalition he now heads would likely end up in opposition after an election.

“He’s gaming this as well,” Mr. Lipner said of Mr. Netanyahu, whom he once worked for as a strategic adviser. “If there was a deal with Trump, and somehow they worked out a hostage deal and people came home… it’s always possible he could recalibrate and say: ‘Now’s the time to bolt and go straight to elections.’ But I don’t think he sees elections as a sure thing.”

And Mr. Netanyahu, if he’s forced from office, would be back to where he was before Oct. 7: facing charges of criminal corruption that could see him jailed for up to a decade with the added threat of an International Criminal Court warrant for his arrest over alleged war crimes committed in Gaza.

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Talk of a new Middle East remains hollow so long as Israel keeps up its assault on Gaza and floats the prospect of permanently displacing its population to a corner of the Strip.

Hundreds of Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire in the past week alone, pushing the reported death toll from the war past 57,000. Though the Israeli government disputes the figures published by Gaza’s Ministry of Health, they are also used by the United Nations.

Mr. Netanyahu’s visit to Washington this week raised hopes that a deal – expected to see Hamas release some or all of its remaining 50 hostages in exchange for a 60-day ceasefire – was imminent, but the trip ended without any major announcements. The sticking point remains the same as it has been for months: Hamas wants the ceasefire to signal the end of the war, and the start of an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. Israel, meanwhile, isn’t willing to commit to a peace that leaves the Islamist militia in control of the coastal territory, able to rebuild its arsenal and strike again.

Instead, Defense Minister Israel Katz said he had instructed his country’s military to draw up a plan that would create a “humanitarian city” on the ruins of Rafah, in the far south of the strip. Eventually, all 2.1 million Gazans would be moved there, Mr. Katz said. International legal experts have warned that carrying out the plan would amount to a crime against humanity.

Israel has not allowed foreign journalists to report independently from Gaza since the start of the war.

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The test of whether Mr. Trump and Mr. Netanyahu are serious about ending the decades-long cycle of violence in the Middle East remains the same as it has been every other time the U.S. has tried to broker a regional peace. Does Israel, having demonstrated its unquestionable military superiority, finally feel safe enough to withdraw from the occupied West Bank, as well as Gaza, and allow for the creation of an independent Palestinian state?

It seems unlikely in the current atmosphere. A March poll of 611 people conducted by Tel Aviv University found that only 26 per cent of Jewish Israelis support the idea of holding peace talks with the Palestinian Authority headed by Mahmoud Abbas, down from 48 per cent before the Oct. 7 attacks. Meanwhile, 71 per cent supported providing incentives for the Palestinian population to leave Gaza, and 62 per cent supported the use of force to “evacuate” Palestinians from the Gaza Strip.

The wild card is how much those attitudes might change if the creation of a Palestinian state were connected to recognition of Israel by, and a peace treaty with, Saudi Arabia.

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Many Lebanese have long complained that the Iranian-backed Hezbollah was keeping their country mired in conflicts – against Israel, and as a party to Syria’s multisided civil war – that they wanted no part of.

The two-month war between Hezbollah and Israel last fall – which began in earnest with Israel’s Sept. 27 assassination of long-time Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, and ended with the Shia militia accepting peace terms that looked a lot like surrender – dramatically loosened Hezbollah’s hold on Lebanese politics. Now the question is whether its grip can be broken for good.

The signs are mixed. President Joseph Aoun recently delivered a seven-page proposal for disarming Hezbollah that was hailed by Thomas Barrack, Mr. Trump’s envoy to Lebanon, as “something spectacular.”

The details of the plan – which is supposed to be carried out by the end of the year – aren’t publicly known, however, and Hezbollah’s new leader, Naim Qassem, has vowed that his group won’t end its armed “resistance” to Israel.

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President Ahmed al-Sharaa’s government has made it clear that it has neither the interest nor the capacity to confront Israel and meddle in Lebanon the way the toppled Assad family regime did for decades.

Mr. Trump’s decisions to end decades of sanctions against the Syrian economy and to remove Mr. al-Sharaa’s Hayat Tahrir al-Sham movement from the list of international “terrorist” movements have made the U.S. President an unlikely hero in Damascus. One billboard that recently appeared on the streets of the Syrian capital featured photographs of Mr. al-Sharaa and Mr. Trump, alongside the words “Strong Leaders Make Peace. Syrian People Thank You.”

 Mr. al-Sharaa has indeed indicated a willingness to make peace with Israel. But reports out of Damascus suggest that peace would come with a price: the return of one-third of the Golan Heights, which have been under Israeli occupation since the 1967 war.

The biggest hitch in that plan is one that Mr. Trump created himself in 2019, during his first term. While Israel’s occupation of the Golan is illegal under international law, Mr. Trump officially recognized Israel’s 1981 annexation of the strategically important plateau.

Since the collapse of the Assad regime in December, Israel has set up new military bases on the Syrian side of Golan, and has demanded that no Syrian military be deployed south of Damascus – a policy it has enforced with regular air strikes.

Mr. Lipner said that while the situation in Syria was seen as “encouraging,” there’s no appetite for making security concessions to a Syrian government that most Israelis view with extreme suspicion because of Mr. al-Sharaa’s former affiliation with al-Qaeda.

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Before the Oct. 7 attacks, Iran thought it had Israel surrounded. There was Hezbollah on Israel’s northern border, and Hamas to the south. Iran itself had thousands of long-range missiles and drones, and Tehran held sway over militias that controlled large swaths of Yemen and Iraq.

Bashar al-Assad and his regime remained a reliable ally, even if badly weakened by Syria’s civil war. This strategy of “forward defence” is now in shambles. Hamas and Hezbollah are battered, seemingly incapable of putting up anything more than token resistance to Israel. Iran itself is licking its wounds after 12 days of Israeli and U.S. air strikes targeting its nuclear program.

So far, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his coterie remain defiant. Last week’s expulsion of inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency means the outside world may never know the true extent of the damage inflicted by the U.S.-Israeli attacks. There will be no more updates on how quickly Iran is or isn’t progressing with its nuclear ambitions.

That will be the worry in Washington and Jerusalem. In Tehran, the more immediate concern will be whether the regime’s internal opponents – who have risen up repeatedly in the past, only to be met with harsh repression – will try again to challenge the Ayatollah’s grip on power.

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For years, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been one of the loudest critics of Mr. Netanyahu, decrying Israel’s actions in Gaza as “open genocide” and describing the attack on Iran as “state terrorism.”

Mr. Erdogan is well-positioned to play the spoiler if he doesn’t like the looks of Mr. Trump and Mr. Netanyahu’s plans. NATO member Turkey has the largest military in the region, and holds considerable sway over Mr. al-Sharaa’s government after protecting and arming Hayat Tahrir al-Sham throughout Syria’s civil war. Mr. Erdogan’s own Justice and Development Party is also linked to Hamas through the international Muslim Brotherhood, a loose network of Islamist groups.

In the middle of the Israel-Iran conflict, Mr. Erdogan announced that Turkey would boost its own defence spending. “No one should try to test us, challenge us, or push our patience,” he said.

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When Mr. Trump made his first prolonged trip outside the United States after taking office, he went straight to Riyadh, just as he did in 2017, at the start of his first term. The message then and now was that Mr. Trump sees oil-rich Saudi Arabia as the most important U.S. partner in the region.

Any moves toward a “new Middle East,” therefore, will require the approval of Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman. It was in Riyadh that Mr. Trump first met with Mr. al-Sharaa, and announced his intention to lift U.S. sanctions against Syria.

MBS, as he’s known, has made it clear that he’s willing to recognize Israel – but only as part of a wider agreement that establishes an independent Palestinian state. In February, the Saudi Foreign Ministry released a statement calling its commitment to an independent Palestine “non-negotiable and not subject to compromises” – contradicting Mr. Trump’s claim that Saudi Arabia had expressed a willingness to help relocate Palestinians from the strip so that it could be redeveloped as a U.S. territory.

“There are only two alternative paths at this point: creative diplomacy to save whatever peace options are left in the region, or endless war,” Nabeel Khoury, a non-resident senior fellow at the Arab Center in Washington, D.C., wrote in an analysis published this week. “But considering all sides’ stubborn adherence to declared positions, chances of a return to violence are far greater than those of achieving sustainable peace.”