Bowen: Momentum is the strength of Trump’s Gaza plan, but lack of detail is its weakness

Donald Trump’s framework agreement for ending the Gaza war and reconstructing the devastated territory has momentum behind it.

Much of it comes from the president himself. Momentum comes too from leading Arab and Islamic countries who have supported the plan, including Jordan, Egypt, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Pakistan, Indonesia and Turkey. And Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, standing next to Donald Trump, accepted it too, despite the fact it contains talk of a pathway to a Palestinian state that he has repeatedly denounced.

To keep the pace up, Trump says that Hamas has “three to four days” to decide whether to say yes or no.

If the answer is no, the war goes on.

The proposed deal looks a lot like a plan put forward by Joe Biden well over a year ago. Since then there has been massive killing of Palestinian civilians, more destruction in Gaza, and now a famine, while Israeli hostages in Gaza have had to endure months more of agony and captivity.

There were many reports in the Israeli media that the Biden initiative failed because Netanyahu moved the goalposts with a new set of demands – under pressure from the hard right in his cabinet.

Even so, the framework plan is a significant moment. For the first time, Donald Trump is putting pressure on Israel to end the war. Donald Trump has made himself into a leader to whom it is hard to say no. Nobody wants to end up getting the roasting Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky received in the Oval Office back in February. But things can change when leaders leave the White House.

Before Benjamin Netanyahu left Washington DC to go back to Israel his staff filmed him putting over his version of events. One element was the idea of an independent Palestine next to Israel, the two-state solution which the UK and other Western countries have tried to revive by recognising Palestine.

The Trump document gives an indeterminate nod to the idea of Palestinian independence. It says that after the reform of the Palestinian Authority, which is based in Ramallah and led by President Mahmoud Abbas, conditions “may finally be in place for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood, which we recognise as the aspiration of the Palestinian people.”

Even the thought of a distant prospect of a Palestinian state was too much for Netanyahu, who had given whole-hearted support to Trump at the White House, telling him in English “I support your plan to end the war in Gaza, which achieves our war aims.”

On the video, getting his message out in Hebrew to the people back home before the long flight home, Netanyahu is asked if he agreed to a Palestinian state. He was emphatic.

“No, absolutely not. It’s not even written in the agreement. But we did say one thing. That we would forcibly resist a Palestinian state.” Trump, he said, agreed.