By Amit Segal
Monday, October 13, 2025
I’ve been covering the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, for
25 years. Never before have I seen it in such a state of ecstasy as when the
president of the United States ascended the podium Monday, at the same time as
the last freed, living Israeli hostage arrived in the country and embraced his
family. Two years of suffering, pain, and anxiety ended in an instant.
“This is,” Trump said, “the historic dawn of a new Middle
East.” The big words justified themselves this time. In a region that places
great stock in symbols and perception, this Knesset session was meant to
broadcast to enemies and friends alike: Here, the United States of America and
the State of Israel are celebrating victory at the end of a two-year war,
together.
In the several years before October 7, 2023, a weak and
hostile Democratic administration distanced itself from Israel. This time—and
not because there are no windows in the Knesset plenum due to security—there
was no daylight between Jerusalem and Washington. “The last two years have been
a time of war. The coming two years will hopefully be a time of peace,” said
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his speech, invoking Ecclesiastes, a
passage recently read in synagogues on Sukkot.
We will, of course, still speak about the war in the
coming weeks and months. But the bigger question is: What kind of peace will it
be?
Since the 1970s, the prevailing view in Israel was that
the path to peace with the Arab states rested on the creation of a Palestinian
state. Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979 only after Israel
committed to a process for Palestinian autonomy in the West Bank and Gaza.
Jordan signed a peace treaty in 1994, a year after the Oslo Accords established
the Palestinian Authority (PA) as a form of interim Palestinian
self-government. Both of these concessions have led to violence.
Too many negotiations have been based on the idea that if
Israel granted the Palestinians a state five minutes from Israelis’ homes—no
matter how much terror came from there—it would be allowed to exist peacefully
in the Middle East.
Netanyahu, first elected in 1996, never believed this
myth for a moment. But a line of American Democratic presidents—Bill Clinton,
Barack Obama, and Joe Biden—did not allow him to wriggle free. For years,
pressure from the United States forced him to declare support for two states
for two peoples, no matter how implausible he knew that prospect to be.
And then came Donald Trump. The brilliant achievement of
the Abraham Accords was Israel’s ability to establish peace with four Arab
states, without making concessions on the Palestinian issue. It was a moment
led by the United Arab Emirates, a country that could not stand the corrupt,
terror-supporting Palestinian Authority. Saudi Arabia was meant to be next. The
date it was supposed to join: October 19, 2023.
Twelve days before that date, Hamas murderers invaded
Israel. Their immediate goal was to kill and rape as many as possible, but the
timing was also intended to block Israeli normalization with Saudi Arabia. For
two years, they succeeded. Israel drifted further and further from the moderate
Arab states. Qatari money, which bankrolled Hamas’s terror, kept Israel locked
in conflict. Meanwhile, the Jewish state received more and more condemnations
from the international community for causing supposed “starvation” and
“genocide.”
But over time, it became clear to these Arab states that
Israel would not put up with this status quo any longer. This was exemplified
first by Israel’s attacks on Iran, and more recently by its September 9 air
strike on senior Hamas leaders gathering in Qatar. It was clear that the
continuation of the war jeopardized the stability of the entire region.
Something had to change.
And so: In late September, eight Arab countries publicly
supported Trump’s 20-point peace plan for Gaza, a vital step toward pressuring
Hamas to accept the deal—which it did days later. On Monday morning, the first
phone call in two years took place between Netanyahu and Egyptian president
Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, ahead of a Gaza peace summit in Egypt with more than 20
world leaders. Turkey is considering resuming its flights to Israel, which have
been suspended since the beginning of the war. Indonesia’s president is
attending the Egypt summit and is considering signing a peace agreement with
Israel. Syria is wavering between a security arrangement and a comprehensive
peace agreement. When Saudi Arabia joins the Abraham Accords, it will not be
the last Arab country to do so.
Has Netanyahu and Trump’s approach of establishing peace
in the Middle East through the surrounding Arab states completely triumphed?
It’s more complicated than that. As part of the deal, Israel has to pay lip
service to a future vision (entirely hypothetical, in my view) of a Palestinian
state, predicated on the prospect that the Palestinian Authority will cease
supporting terror and change its ways. And, during the transitional phase of
the peace deal, the PA will have some level of presence in Gaza.
These gestures may be purely symbolic. But Hamas still
exists inside of Gaza, and it’s unclear what form the long-term governance of
the region will take. And so, though this is indeed a major breakthrough, the
answer to the question, “What kind of peace will it be?” remains to be seen.
For now, it’s safe to say: The path to peace in the
Middle East does not run through Ramallah.
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