Phase One

A dramatic start to the 42 days of the first phase of the ceasefire - a quick analysis

The plan was to drop a post on the new Bob Dylan movie on Friday, but I couldn’t. Digging through the news over the hostage and ceasefire deal made it hard to wrap up the week with a cheerful instalment to do with entertainment among all the hostage anguish. It is not an overstatement to say that it felt like October 7th all over again considering the psychological torture that was once more inflicted on Israel and Jews everywhere as details started to emerge. Yet yesterday everything turned with the release of Emily Damari, Romi Gonen and Doron Steinbrecher (in the photo above). There is so much to say here that I will summarize it in bullet points that I feel are the key takeaways:

Bring Them Home - Israel changed, it re-united around its core value to ‘bring back everybody’ even considering how incredibly cruel and potentially lethal the terms of the deal are. As we know now, this ethos was not central to how the Nethanyahu coalition had handled the hostage crisis thus far. So a major change.

Bibi’s Coalition - And this coalition is under pressure as the party that actively worked against a hostage deal under Ben-Gvrir, resigned from cabinet (but they will still vote to support it). Again, it points to a changing environment in Israel that may be starting to shift the power balance away from Bibi Nethanyahu and his troubled coalition.

Hamas - But that does not mean a change in the direction of the war, if anything the news made clear once more that Hamas is a murderous totalitarian group that even yesterday called for the destruction of Israel and the continued annihilation of Jews. That’s the goal and it is not restricted to the few remaining Hamas battalions in Gaza, think West Bank too. Hamas is billing the ceasefire as their success. And as things stand after 15 months they do look strong, they are controlling and pacing the hostage release and can still count on support from many countries in the Middle East and beyond.

Next Phases - So Hamas is showing remarkable resilience although the ‘release party’ yesterday was relatively small and staged with the help of the Red Cross acting as Hamas’ taxi service, note that the international organization has by the way done absolutely nothing for the hostages in these past 15 months. Anyway, it does raise questions about the viability of the next two phases of the deal when Israel will withdraw further and the rebuilding of Gaza is part of the agenda. There are already questions if, given the hostile situation, we can see the conclusion of this first phase.

Kaag - That rebuilding mandate has fallen into the lap of the freshly appointed UN Middle East envoy Sigrid Kaag, former Dutch finance minister who happens to be married to a Palestinian leader, actually he was one of Arafat’s cabinet members. She is calling on the world and hinting at a $100 billion reconstruction price tag. She is far from neutral and selling a vision that still somehow discounts the deep pool of anti-Israel hate, nurtured by the UN itself among others. Is this even a realistic vision at this point in time? And: who on earth will fund it if the outcome is the same as last time and the time before that?

International Community - And that brings us to the fact that the hostages were effectively abandoned by most of the world. Yes there was Trump’s call to ‘unleash hell’, but it was still limited in scope as all it did was dusting off the Biden deal from some eight months ago and threatening Nethanyahu to get off his horse. Where was the real hellish pressure on Qatar, on Egypt, on Turkey? The three key Hamas handlers? Where was Europe? Where was the UN and indeed the aforementioned Red Cross? The hostages and Israel at large have been utterly neglected in all of this, we should not forget that.

The State of the Hostages - We also know that the hostages have been starved, tortured, raped and abused in the most horrific ways possible. Yet Romi, Doron and Emily looked relatively fine as they emerged from the Hamas tunnels yesterday. Hamas, and they have done this before during the first hostage release in 2023, prepare their victims for the world by getting them ready, like washing and feeding, days in advance. They may look fine and physically things may work out, but after 471 days in captivity they are traumatized and scarred for life. It is comparable to the trauma of Holocaust survivors.

Trump’s Hubris - So, while rightly credited to get the deal moving, and the freed hostages can indeed thank the new president for their lives, we have to worry about what Trump takes away from the deal. Trump will bask in its perceived success but will be mistaken to think that all foreign policy crises can be resolved as easy this. In fact this one has not even begun to be resolved, and then we have Ukraine and China/Taiwan. Again, short-term tactical successes without clear goals are not foreign policy. Brace yourselves for what comes next.

Flip Side of the Deal - The much underreported part of all this is that Israel is releasing some of the worst of Palestinian terrorists back into Gaza. It’s part of the deal and we can only hope Israel’s tracks them and will mete out justice at some point in time. Among them was the man that knifed Ari Fuld, brother of Israeli tech guru Hillel Fuld, to death in 2018. I started following Hillel around that time and since met with him in Israel. One just cannot imagine the grief that the Fuld family is going through right now.

So? - It has only just started and we are thus still in the middle of a brutal and intractable war with many dimensions and global implications. You may think Iran is out, but a lot of others are ‘in’. The international community may think we’re done and ready to start to build, but it feels like we are just starting the next wave of fighting while buying time to get the remaining 94 hostages out. Anyway, more on that later. Let’s rejoice about what happened yesterday evening in Israel. Try and keep your eyes dry:

Bonus Content

I did an interview (in Dutch) with Antisemitism News last week about, yes, antisemitism in Canada. The site is run by Bas Belder who is a Dutch politician and former Member of the European Parliament (MEP) and Amanda Kluveld who is journalist and Holocaust researcher. Thanks to both for giving me some space to talk about this.