If the current ceasefire in Gaza holds, it will mark the much-needed end to an indefensibly cruel war. But the longer-term picture, and whether yet another deadly conflagration can be prevented, is another matter. One factor — not the only one, but a big one — is whether the Israelis can be convinced that they should give peace negotiations a serious chance.
Ilan Goldenberg has been thinking about how to do that for quite some time.
While serving as a high-ranking Biden administration official on the Israel-Palestine desk, Goldenberg pushed unsuccessfully for the White House to pressure the Israelis more aggressively in pursuit of a ceasefire. Now that the Trump administration has done so and secured an agreement for their efforts, he sees possibilities for change in Israel’s deeper approach to the conflict — either for the better or for the worse.
The optimistic scenario looks a lot like the aftermath of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, in which Israel fended off a surprise invasion from Egyptian and Syrian forces. The initial success of the Arab attack shocked an Israeli public that had grown overconfident in its own strength, laying the groundwork for Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s decision to sign a peace treaty with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1978.
The pessimistic scenario resembles the aftermath of the Second Intifada in the 2000s, the bloodiest round of Israeli-Palestinian fighting prior to the current war. That conflict, in which large numbers of Israeli civilians were killed by terrorist attacks inside its borders, led many Israelis to conclude that negotiated peace was impossible — producing a political shift to the right that has led to ever-deepening occupation in the West Bank and Israel’s shockingly brutal conduct during the Gaza war.
So, which one is more likely: an Israeli recognition of the need for peace, or a doubling down on the logic of perpetual war? Goldenberg isn’t sure. But he’s confident that there’s a struggle shaping up right now that could tilt the outcome in one direction or the other.
“The most important thing is going to be elections in Israel next year,” he tells me. “That’s the linchpin of all of this.”
The Trump ceasefire deal is, in part, an agreement to decide not to decide.
While it purports to be a comprehensive agreement, the parties only fully agreed to its short-term provisions — like this past weekend’s hostage-prisoner exchange, as well as an Israeli withdrawal from much of Gaza. There are no agreed-upon specific steps for implementing its longer-term provisions, such as Hamas’s disarmament or the installation of an international peacekeeping force in Gaza.
Turning such ideas from aspiration to reality will require difficult compromises, and there are real reasons to be skeptical of everyone involved. President Donald Trump’s foreign policy isn’t exactly known for its follow-through or attention to detail. Meanwhile, Hamas’s post-ceasefire killing spree, in which the group publicly executed some of its Palestinian rivals in Gaza, suggests that it isn’t interested in giving up either arms or power.
And on the Israeli side, the biggest problem can be summed up in four words: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
In power for 15 of the last 16 years, “Bibi” has demonstrated an increasingly open hostility to the very idea of serious peace negotiations. His political future depends on an alliance with extreme-right factions who think Israel’s biggest mistake in Gaza is that it wasn’t violent enough.
So long as Netanyahu is at the helm, he will almost assuredly work to sabotage any attempt at implementing the agreement’s 19th and most ambitious provision: its hope to ultimately create “a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood, which we recognise as the aspiration of the Palestinian people.” If Netanyahu’s past behavior is any guide, he will work doggedly to sabotage this element of the deal while attempting to blame Hamas for his own obstructionism.
“He’s a man who, for 20 years, has refused to ever take a risk and move the population to something better,” Goldenberg says. “Instead, he’s consistently played to their worst instincts and to their fears.”
In practice, this looks a lot like Israel’s Tuesday decision, which has since been reversed, to cut the amount of aid flowing into Gaza to half of the agreed-upon levels.
The stated reason for the suspension was that Hamas hadn’t followed through on its agreement to hand over the bodies of deceased Israeli hostages. Whether or not this was true — it’s possible, as Hamas claims, that they’re having trouble finding the remains — there was no need for Israel to retaliate in such a Draconian way.
The most coherent explanation for its decision is that Netanyahu and his allies want the agreement to fail but don’t want to get the blame for withdrawing from it without cause. So they’re willing to take aggressive steps to destabilize it. And at one point, those efforts are likely to succeed.
This doesn’t mean that they want to go back to fighting tomorrow. Resuming the war would be a brazen insult to Trump, who is increasingly staking his reputation on bringing “peace” to the Middle East. There is a very good chance that, as Goldenberg puts it, “the major fighting is over,” no matter what.
But the question is not just whether bombs will start dropping in the immediate future. It’s whether something is being done to prevent another conflagration several years down the line. That requires tackling the underlying condition of conflict between the two sides: the lack of a fully negotiated settlement that addresses the legitimate fears and aspirations of both peoples. Without that, another round of vicious fighting is inevitable.
Israel’s “most consequential” election
If this logic holds, then Netanyahu must leave office for this ceasefire to eventually set the stage for a true peace. For this reason, Israel’s upcoming elections — currently scheduled for October 2026, though they could be called sooner — are shaping up to be enormously consequential. Michael Koplow, an expert at the Israel Policy Forum think tank, has written that “the coming elections will be the most consequential in Israel’s history.”
The good news, at least for those who desire a lasting peace, is that Netanyahu is likely to lose.
“Hardly anything in the last year and a half has fundamentally changed Netanyahu’s polling strength.”
— Dahlia Scheindlin, Israeli pollster
Early post-ceasefire polls have Netanyahu and his radical right coalition partners winning 48 seats out of a total of 120 in the Knesset (Israel’s parliament). That’s actually a slight improvement over their prior numbers, but it’s still well short of the 61 seats necessary to form a governing coalition — a shortfall that’s been remarkably consistent over time.
“Hardly anything in the last year and a half has fundamentally changed Netanyahu’s polling strength,” says Dahlia Scheindlin, a leading Israeli pollster.
Of course, Scheindlin cautions, those numbers could change. It’s a cliché in Middle East journalism to call Netanyahu a consummate political survivor, but it’s a cliché for a reason: He’s been able to hold on to power long after many observers declared him doomed.
Maybe the widespread joy inside Israel at the return of the hostages changes things; we haven’t yet seen solid polling data since their release. But the long-run consistency in the numbers is so striking that it suggests there might be deeper, harder-to-fix problems for the prime minister.
Netanyahu’s continued refusal to take any accountability for the October 7 attack — or even convene a real commission to investigate responsibility — has infuriated Israelis who still live with the trauma of that day’s events. Additionally, most Israelis believe Netanyahu has been prolonging the war for political reasons, which would suggest the ceasefire was not an accomplishment but something forced on him. It’s also worth remembering that Netanyahu is an indicted criminal who launched an attack on the independence of Israel’s judiciary prior to the war, one that prompted the largest protest movement in the country’s history.
Despite Netanyahu’s vaunted survival skills, in other words, the odds this time around are very much against him.
But Netanyahu’s defeat does not guarantee that Israel gets on a path to peace. It is a necessary condition — so long as he is in office, a durable peace is likely impossible — but it is not a sufficient one. To solve the Israeli part of the peace equation, you need to address the public’s post-October 7 souring on the prospects for any kind of real agreement. And that requires leadership willing to make the case to them.
“During violent escalations, I have rarely seen the Israeli public go ahead of its leaders in getting more moderate,” Scheindlin says. The 1978 Camp David agreement, she notes, was initially met with skepticism from the Israeli public. But once you had “a legitimately elected leader making the case…then people changed their minds, and within a few months they supported the agreement with very high majorities.”
Nobody knows whether such leadership exists today.
The opposition to Netanyahu is made up of a group of parties that span the ideological gamut. Their leaders include far-right settlers like Naftali Bennett, center-right hawks like Benny Gantz, Zionist liberals like Yair Golan, and even Arab Islamists like Mansour Abbas.
These parties share little other than a deep distaste for Netanyahu, and that makes any coalition they form liable to collapse. Such a grand opposition took power in 2021, with Bennett as its first prime minister, only to fall under the weight of its own contradictions — and set the stage for Netanyahu’s return to power.
At present, we have no idea what subgroupings of these parties will do better and which will do worse. A lot will depend not just on Netanyahu’s defeat, but which of the various out-of-government parties do better and what sort of governing coalition the election yields. A government led by Bennett is, for example, less likely to engage in serious negotiations than one led by the centrist Yair Lapid.
It is, in short, eminently possible that this fragile ceasefire could collapse eventually, even if Netanyahu goes down to defeat. But if he remains in power, those odds approximate certainty. If Trump, or anyone else, wants this deal to truly lay the groundwork for peace, they need to begin with removing Netanyahu from the equation.
“There’s a lot of hinge points,” Goldenberg says. “But the first one has to be him.”
