The magnitude of Donald Trump’s success in giving peace a chance in Gaza can be gauged by the headlines and coverage of normally fiercely anti-Trump mainstream media outlets. Britain’s leading left-wing newspaper, The Guardian, gave its story a title drawn from one source’s praise for Trump in the piece: “‘Trump is like a juggernaut’: How the Gaza ceasefire deal was done.” The BBC, for its part, ran a report under the similar, and similarly favorable, headline: “How Trump secured a Gaza breakthrough which eluded Biden.”
It might not be so surprising that the Republican columnist Marc Thiessen argued in the Washington Post for Trump to get the Nobel Peace Prize, but it was startling to see The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman tentatively concur. The Washington Post’s editorial board entertained the thought as well: “Yair Lapid, leader of the Israeli opposition, said that Trump should win the Nobel Peace Prize,” the editors noted, and in their view “the president and others involved are now serious contenders going forward.”
This peace is newborn and vulnerable, of course, and its implementation will not be without great difficulties. Neither Hamas nor Israel considers this conflict truly over, even as fighting ceases. Hamas would perpetrate another attack like that of October 7, 2023 any time it had the capability. Israel went to war to destroy Hamas but found that the task could not be accomplished without inflicting an appalling toll on civilians. Israel could not afford to alienate the entire world with the kind of campaign that would be necessary to annihilate Hamas, but short of achieving that goal there was no obvious endpoint to the war. An outsider—President Trump—was needed to give it one.