Optimists cite what they see as key differences between the failed January ceasefire and today. While accurate, neither necessarily foreshadows rapid progress.

With the last Israeli hostages living and dead to be released from Hamas captivity imminently, there is every reason for them and their families to celebrate and for everyone to hope for a more peaceful future.

But in the modern Middle East, we have been in a similar position many times before. As recently as this year’s January-through-March cease fire, Israel and Hamas exchanged hostages but the path to a long-term solution collapsed.

Woe to those who echo Neville Chamberlain’s 1939 boast that he had achieved “peace for our time”. US President Donald Trump has already gone much further, promising “eternal peace” in the region. He will doubtless say more when he arrives in Israel even though he did not receive the Nobel Peace Prize last week.

Tellingly, however, Trump thanked Russian President Vladimir Putin for saying the Nobel Prize committee has rewarded people who have “done nothing for the world” while Trump “solves complex problems, crises that last for decades”.

Optimists cite what they see as key differences between the failed January ceasefire and today: notably that all Israel hostages will be returned and that Trump has applied pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. While accurate, neither necessarily foreshadows rapid progress.

Firstly, the hostage returns will eliminate a major factor in Israel’s anti-Netanyahu politics since Hamas’ 2023 attack.

There will still be opposition to his policies in Gaza and the wider regional war caused by Iran’s ring of fire strategy, but the most emotional concern for average Israelis is closed. After Israel announced the deal, early polls showed improvement in Netanyahu’s political standing. He may also hope to benefit from Trump’s visit and the actual return of the hostages.

Secondly, Trump’s pressure on Netanyahu, widely attributed to Israel’s unsuccessful attack on Hamas leadership in Qatar, reflected Trump’s personal ire more than a change in US strategic views. He believed he hadn’t received adequate notice of Israel’s strike which, combined with predictable outrage from Qatar and others, is hardly likely to recur. While controversy over the incident was significant, its effects could well be short term.

Media coverage has concentrated on the returning Israelis held by Hamas, but Jerusalem will release approximately 2000 Palestinian prisoners, some 250 of whom are serving life sentences for terrorist activity and include some of the worst offenders in Israeli prisons. Hamas is pressing for releasing additional Gazans.

The return of these Gazans will serve as a tangible signal to others that Hamas is reconstituting its terrorist and military capabilities despite being severely damaged after two years of fighting. Indeed, Hamas fighters reportedly moved quickly in Gaza City to reassert control after the agreed-upon pullback of the Israel Defence Forces.

Whether we are at “the end of the beginning” is unknowable. International leaders must be more resolute today than they have ever been.

And that is the easy part. Further down the road, Trump’s peace plan is filled with vague, aspirational statements including the first of its twenty points: “Gaza will be a deradicalised terror-free zone that does not pose a threat to its neighbours.”

There are more. “Gaza will be governed under the temporary transitional governance of a technocratic, apolitical Palestinian committee” handling day-to-day Gazan affairs “with oversight and supervision by a new international transitional body, the ‘Board of Peace’” chaired by Trump himself. Hamas and other terrorist groups have already stated they reject any “foreign guardianship” over Gaza.

As abstract as disputes over these points might be, they have palpable effects on what happens after the hostage/prisoner swaps are successfully concluded. The most critical question is whether Hamas will demilitarise.

That point is largely aspirational and expresses the objective that Hamas will have no role in Gaza’s governance but does not say how that will be achieved. Obviously, further negotiation with Hamas is required – about, ironically, the central role it will have in its own unlikely military demise.

One little-noticed point in the peace plan addresses the eventual transfer of Gaza’s governance to the Palestinian Authority “at such time as the Palestinian Authority has completed its reform programme … and can securely and effectively take back control of Gaza” as described in earlier proposals.

But making the Authority “modern and efficient” is as likely as King Canute turning back the tide – or Hamas’s willingness to hand back Gaza to its principal Palestinian opponent.

Even if implementing Trump’s plan came close to such a turnover, there is no provision to ask Gazans themselves by whom they want to be ruled – through a referendum or an election, for example. And the risk of renewed authoritarian rule in Gaza, especially if Palestinian statehood is reached, remains unacceptably high.

Whether we are at “the end of the beginning”, in Winston Churchill’s words, is unknowable. International leaders must be more resolute and clear-eyed today than they have ever been.

This article was originally published by Australian Financial Review, on October 12, 2025. Click here to read the original article.

Lebanon today faces the existential question of whether it can emerge from decades of war and destruction, or whether it will again be consumed by civil conflict and terrorist domination. Its chance to return to “normalcy” is because of Israel’s strikes against Iran and its Middle Eastern terrorist proxies, following Hamas’s barbaric October 7 attack.

Hezbollah had dominated Lebanon for decades. They have effectively ruled from the shadows by brute military force without visibly occupying the most important constitutional public offices.  While many Shia citizens support Hezbollah, its real power comes from support supplied by Tehran, without which the terror group might never have come into being.

Qasem Soleimani and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force amalgamated a number of local terrorist groups and guided the 1983 attacks on America’s Beirut embassy. This marked the opening shots of worldwide terrorist war by radical Islamists. Israel’s post-October 7 attacks, combined with US participation in destroying much of Iran’s nuclear-weapons program, has forever altered that landscape.

Unfortunately, however, unacceptable threats persist. Although Israel decimated Hezbollah’s leadership, inflicted substantial casualties on its fighters, and destroyed much of its ballistic-missile arsenal and other weapons, Hezbollah retains significant military capabilities. Israel has scotched the snake, not killed it. The same is true of Hamas in Gaza, and to a much lesser extent of Yemen’s Houthi rebels and various Shia militias in Iraq.

Now, Lebanon’s struggling government is attempting to finish what Israel started, in yet another of seemingly endless efforts to disarm Hezbollah and make it act like a political party instead of an army-cum-terrorist organisation.  In 2006, for example, following Israel’s retaliatory actions after being attacked from Gaza and Lebanon, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1701.

This resolution sought to resolve Lebanon’s internal agony by disarming Hezbollah, committing it to act only through the political process, forbidding the importation of new weapons except for the legitimate Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF), and providing enhanced authority for UN peacekeepers to help restore internal security.

This effort was doomed from the start. Iran and Hezbollah had no intention of admitting defeat and participating in normal politics. They counted on Western indifference once “peace” was restored and Israeli forces were withdrawn from southern Lebanon. And also on indifference in Israel itself, which had resiled from its initial objective of destroying Hezbollah. Iran and Hezbollah proved correct in their assessments, providing one of the sources of encouragement to Tehran and its terrorist allies that ultimately led to October 7.

This history explains why what should be a noncontroversial effort to restore whatever is left of Lebanese civil society is so fraught with danger and contentiousness.  In reality, Hezbollah shows no signs of giving up.  And, for well or ill, the UN’s longstanding Lebanon peacekeeping mission, UNIFIL, has such a tarnished reputation for ineffectiveness that its mandate will be ended at the end of 2026.

Lebanon’s government thus faces an arduous task to end Hezbollah’s military capabilities and prevent Iran’s continuing financial and other support. That task is likely impossible without outside help.

That means Western countries, having discarded the well-intentioned but ineffective UNIFIL, must now find bilateral ways to help strengthen the LAF and civil Lebanese authorities. Moreover, however painful it may be, Lebanon must continue close cooperation with Israel, both to secure Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon and to disarm Hezbollah.

So far, Washington’s efforts to support Lebanese government efforts to “civilianise” Hezbollah have been inept and likely ineffective. The truth, as in 2006, is that once again neither Tehran nor Hezbollah intend to surrender weapons.  The recent visit of Ali Larijani, a long-time senior Iranian official, proves the point. There is some good news in Syria, where the post-Assad regime not only rejected a visit by Larijani, but barred him from transiting its airspace to travel to Lebanon. Unfortunately, while a staunch enemy of Tehran, Damascus’s new government has not yet shed the reputation for itself being terrorist.

Seeing Lebanon reborn with a peaceful, democratic government, free from both Iran and Hezbollah, would be a substantial step towards a truly stable, sustained Middle Eastern peace. But if Beirut and its international supporters shrink from disarming Hezbollah, we will simply end up in due course exactly where we were on October 7. That cannot be permitted.

This article was originally published by the Daily Telegraph on September 1, 2025. Click here to read the original article.

As Israel’s Gaza campaign against Hamas intensifies, the levels of Middle Eastern political rhetoric have also risen.  Prominent Israeli political leaders proclaim their support for a ”Greater Israel,” a slogan perhaps as old as the modern Jewish state itself.  Arab leaders, and many others outside the region, continue to insist on a “two-state solution,” another mantra with a long history.

Repeating these buzzwords undoubtedly satisfies the political supporters of the leaders doing so, and in which they honestly believe.  But they are also backward- rather than forward-looking.  Whatever validity such rhetorical flourishes may have had before October 7, 2023, they are now anachronisms.  We face a very different world after Hamas’s barbaric attack.  Moreover, globally, the June Israeli-US attacks on Iran’s nuclear-weapons and ballistic-missile programs are even more consequential. 

Iran’s terrorist surrogates, led by Hamas, initiated Tehran’s “ring of fire” strategy against Israel, the consequences of which are still playing out.  In retrospect, it is hard to imagine a more disastrous outcome for the ayatollahs and their proxies, but the grim truth is that what can properly be called the Third Gulf War is still not over.  In the First Gulf War, the United States and its allies liberated Kuwait from Saddam Hussein’s aggression, restoring the status quo ante bellum. The Second Gulf War brought Saddam’s downfall, in effect completing the unfinished First Gulf War.  

With Iraq eliminated as a threat to Middle Eastern peace and security, the Iranian threat took center stage, causing tectonic shifts in the region’s underlying strategic calculus.  Because the Third Gulf War is still underway on several fronts, final judgments about its enduring effects are not yet possible.  But it is imperative that all interested parties, both in the region and outside it, recognize that the regional environment is now dramatically different than before.  We are long past the “old thinking” about the 1948-1973 period of military threats against Israel, which all failed, and also long past the 1973-1990 era of diplomacy, which produced mixed results in establishing lasting Middle East peace and security.

Most important strategically, the ayatollahs still govern in Tehran.  They are engaged in widespread domestic repression, desperately trying to shore up a regime increasingly distrusted by its citizens.  Nonetheless, events over the last two years, particularly the US-Israeli strikes, demonstrate clearly to its people how vulnerable the regime is, and fortify the widespread view that it is now a question of when it falls, not whether.

The fall of Assad’s dictatorship in Syria, Iran’s major ally, not only eliminated Tehran’s influence, but now permits Jerusalem and Damascus to reach a and ultimately lasting peace and an Abraham Accord.  On that front, the jury is still out.  In Lebanon, efforts to destroy Hezbollah militarily are underway, with reports of greater Israeli-Lebanese cooperation than have been seen in many decades.  Considerable antagonism between Beirut and Jerusalem still exists, but they undeniably share strong mutual interests in defanging Hezbollah as a military and terrorist threat.  Here again, the jury is still out.  

Yemen’s Houthi terrorists remain a regional threat, both to Israel and nearby Arab states, and to international commerce in the Red Sea as well.  This is clearly unfinished business for the world as a whole.

In Gaza and West Bank, conflict also continues against Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups.  Focusing on issues of armed conflict in no way minimizes the current humanitarian plight of Gazans themselves, nor the imperative of securing them a decent future.  Indeed, the only long-term solution from both a humanitarian and a politico-military perspective rests on eliminating Hamas as a viable political as well as military entity.  If the cancer is not eliminated, it will likely re-emerge in its October 7 form and again threaten Israel and neighboring Arab states alike.  

The two-state solution died on October 7.  I have long advocated a “three-state solution,” which would transfer Gaza back to Egyptian control and require Israel and Jordan to resolve borders and security issues on the West Bank.  Whether Egypt or Israel controls Gaza, or whether it is split between them, is less important than ensuring that Hamas (or other terrorist groups) does not emerge as a threat to either Cairo and Jersualem.  That may require a significant reduction in Gaza’s population through refugee resettlement under the supervision of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, consistent with its long-established humanitarian doctrines.  That will, in turn, take time and resources.  No serious observer, however, can argue that there is a quick-and-easy solution that has somehow eluded everyone’s imagination since Israel’s creation in 1948.

Cooling the rhetoric all around would help enormously.  Egypt and Israel reached the landmark Camp David agreement, leading to the first exchange of full diplomatic relations between Israel and one of its neighbors.  Together with their mutual friends, they can also make breakthroughs on Gaza.

This article was originally posted on September 9, 2025. Read the original article here.