As the great Robert Spencer summed up the original announcement of a ‘ceasefire’ ,by quoting Jeremiah, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace.”
Three months later there’s still no peace, but in the typical fashion of the ‘peace process’ involving terrorists, the process is moving anyway with the announcement of various boards including a Board of Peace potentially set to include Turkey’s Islamist dictator Erdogan and Qatar, both state sponsors of Hamas, despite protests from the Israeli government.
There’s an ‘executive board’ featuring Steven Witkoff, Jared Kushner, former UK PM Tony Blair, and World Bank President Ajay Banga among others. There’s a ‘technocratic’ committee that’s just the PLO in a suit and a Gaza Executive Board that includes Turkey’s Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan who praised the leader of Hamas, a Qatari diplomat, and Sigrid Kaag, a former Dutch UN official married to a former PLO ambassador to Switzerland opposed to the Israeli government.
The entire thing is a farce because the areas that the new Gaza Board is supposed to control is currently controlled by Hamas,
And Hamas is not going to cede power to anyone except itself. So the only way that this plays out is that, in the most likely scenario, the new ‘administration’ is (much like UNRWA) going to be a new face worn by Hamas. Since the system includes Hamas state sponsors like Turkey and Qatar, that is going to be the state of play. China and Russia had been hosting Hamas-PLO negotiations and the PLO ‘technocrats’ are going to put a show of running things with Hamas actually running things.
Hamas has obviously not disarmed and it’s been pretty clear that it won’t disarm unless it’s to an army it controls. That means Qatar has to pull this bait and switch the way that it did in Afghanistan. And we’ve apparently learned nothing from it.
Meanwhile Witkoff and his useful idiots are throwing out more empty blather and acting like they accomplished something beyond acting as cutouts for Hamas and the allies of Hamas.
If you have any doubt about this being the same exact peace process farce that we got under Clinton, Bush, Obama, etc, you can hear it from Witkoff directly.
Speaking with journalists, Witkoff addressed Israel Hayom questions regarding Gaza’s future. Asked whether Gaza’s reconstruction was contingent on Hamas’ disarmament, he replied: “I think they will disarm. The president was not afraid to allow Jared and me to meet Hamas. We met them, and that was the key to the deal.”
According to Witkoff, a meeting held in Sharm el-Sheikh with Hamas marked a turning point. “That meeting was, in my view, the key to the deal because it showed that we adopted direct negotiations. It was the breakthrough in the 20-point peace plan, and we may need to meet them again. We are not threatened by meeting them. Communication is the most important thing.”
Asked by Israel Hayom about leverage over Hamas, Witkoff argued that the group could be persuaded that disarmament was in its own interest. “I think we can show Hamas that disarmament is the right thing for long-term peace and for the future. And the Gaza reconstruction plan, under President Trump’s oversight, is an unbelievable plan. Gaza is meant to become an amazing place.”
Hamas is going to disarm. Maybe. And Witkoff will meet with Hamas as many times as it takes to convince Hamas that Gaza will be an awesome place.
These are the kinds of quotes coming out of this effort.
“We’ve talked to a number of Hamas people, and we’re hearing throughout the Arab world that people don’t want to be at war anymore. They want peace. They want a better economic future for their families. They want credible homes,” said a second US official on the briefing. “They want what everybody else in this world wants — just a good life, and a good life doesn’t occur through military means.”
A senior US official told Axios, “This is our show, not his show,” referring to Netanyahu. The official added, “We managed to do things in Gaza in recent months nobody thought was possible, and we are going to continue moving.”
The official said stressed, “If he wants us to deal with Gaza, it will have to be our way. We worked over him. Let him focus on Iran and let us deal with Gaza. We are not going to argue with him. He will do his politics and we will keep moving forward with our plan. He can’t really go against us.”
In his opinion, the US is “doing him a favor.”
“If this fails he can say, ‘I told you so.’ We know that if it succeeds he will claim credit,” the official added to Axios. “Nobody in Israel believed we will get this far – but we managed to do it.”
Do what? Name people to imaginary positions ruling over a territory run by terrorists while acting like they can turn it around by sinking more money into it and remaining convinced that the terrorists will come around?
If Team Witkoff thinks that’s incredible, wait till they discover what the geniuses before them managed in Afghanistan. At a mere cost of a trillion or two and a whole lot of American lives.
I’ve been saying this from Day 1, we need to get out and stay out before we duplicate the disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan because the only thing that’s been proven so far is that nothing has been learned from anything since 9/11.
