What happened on October 13 in Israel and Egypt was a tale of sound and fury signifying nothing. Yes, Israeli hostages were released, which is good news in that it ended the way they were being ruthlessly used as pawns by Hamas and Benjamin Netanyahu in a sordid game of political survival. Yes, Palestinian hostages were also released, since there is no other way to describe the thousands of men held by Israel under administrative detention, without charge, rounded up mainly to serve as currency in negotiations with Hamas. And yes, the summit in Sharm al-Sheikh was probably a successful effort to break the momentum of war and ethnic cleansing in Gaza—locking President Donald Trump into a statement in which he told Netanyahu that he would be remembered far more for ending the fighting in the territory than “if you kept the thing going, going—kill, kill, kill.”
But those successes aside, the events this week were by and large meaningless in the broader context of resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Not once did Trump mention a Palestinian state, as he marinated in a sea of sycophants, the crowning moment being his appearance in Egypt, surrounded by a bevy of global leaders whose expressions betrayed a conviction that they were trapped in an outlandish psychodrama.
The U.S. president’s plan for Gaza now enters its second phase, in which, among other things, Hamas must disarm. What happens if the organization continues to reject this condition? Will Israel resume its offensive? The Sharm al-Sheikh summit was designed specifically to prevent this from happening, and by now it’s perfectly clear that the Israeli army will not be able to fully disarm Hamas anyway. One of Netanyahu’s minor achievements is that Israel has been given an excuse to formally reject Palestinian statehood, a position evidently shared by the Americans. However, the price it has paid is that a vast majority of countries in the world now believe that no solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is possible without a Palestinian state.
Netanyahu and his religiofascist allies have apparently failed, for now, to carry through on the ethnic cleansing project for which they had been planning from the first days of the war. Everything in Israel’s actions at the time showed how this was a priority—from Netanyahu’s early efforts to persuade Egypt to open its borders to Gaza’s population, to Israel’s systematic destruction of all the institutions or infrastructures that made life in Gaza possible, to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, supposedly designed to feed starving Palestinians but that served mainly to shoot them as they neared its facilities, before concentrating them in southern Gaza as a preliminary step to driving them into Egypt.
The Palestinians stayed, but the Israeli plan may yet succeed. In the coming years, we may well see an increasing number of Gazans, who are enduring appalling living conditions, paying illicit networks to help them migrate out of Gaza into Egypt and beyond. In the West Bank, Israel will continue to make life intolerable for Palestinians, as it pursues more of the kinds of pogroms, home demolitions, and land confiscations that have taken place without interruption since 2023. The Israelis’ hope is that an increasing number of Palestinians will opt to cross into Jordan—a “quiet form of ethnic cleansing,” as a Jordanian friend described it. Ultimately, Israel’s fantasy is to see Jordan turned into a Palestinian state.
Also absent from the vulgar proceedings this week was any reexamination of how the United States and many Western countries were complicit in the horrors visited on the population of Gaza. The United States armed Israel throughout the war, as well as entering two conflicts on its behalf. According to William D. Hartung of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, Washington spent up to $33.7 billion on Israel between October 2023 and September 2025, of which $21.7 billion was military aid.
Western European countries will try to focus attention on how they shifted away from Israel in the later stages of the conflict, when it was starving Gaza’s population. However, several of the countries won’t be able to impose amnesia on how they curtailed, even at times criminalized, pro-Palestinian protests. Nor will countries such as Germany, France, Holland, and the United Kingdom be able to explain why they opposed South Africa’s genocide case against Israel before the International Court of Justice.
Only Spain, Ireland, and Belgium addressed the South African initiative with the seriousness it merited. And they were proven correct. In September of this year, the United Nations’ Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, East Jerusalem, and Israel concluded that the Israeli authorities and Israeli security forces “have committed and are continuing to commit … genocide against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip,” a decision that Israel and its facilitators tried desperately to discredit. They had already sought to do so earlier when the International Association of Genocide Scholars had reached a similar conclusion. However, there was not much for them to say when the foremost Israeli scholar of genocide, Omer Bartov, wrote a guest essay in the New York Times, arguing:
"Israel’s actions could be understood only as the implementation of the expressed intent to make the Gaza Strip uninhabitable for its Palestinian population. I believe the goal was—and remains today—to force the population to leave the Strip altogether or, considering that it has nowhere to go, to debilitate the enclave through bombings and severe deprivation of food, clean water, sanitation and medical aid to such an extent that it is impossible for Palestinians in Gaza to maintain or reconstitute their existence as a group.
My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people."
These verdicts won’t soon disappear, because the world does not end at the borders of the United States and Western Europe. If the two-year-old Gaza atrocity has done anything, it has underlined that there are many states that have incorporated the Palestinian cause into their resentment of the West, and that refuse to see Israel as anything more than a neocolonial outlaw state.
It took Trump ten long months to grasp that Israel had become a major liability for U.S. power in the Middle East and the world, and that Netanyahu was out of control—ten months in which the president kept the Israeli killing machine oiled and running, even as America was hemorrhaging credibility. But at least Trump did what the cataleptic Joe Biden had failed to do, namely use U.S. leverage to impose two ceasefires on the Israeli government.
Assuming the war does end, Gaza will remain a stain on the post-Cold War world—a U.S.-dominated world that had allegedly reached, to borrow from Francis Fukuyama, “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” Gaza reaffirmed the ludicrousness of that proposition, crafted in a cosseted Western bubble. Paradoxically, the avatar of this lie is a country, Israel, whose emergence in 1948 was taken by many Westerners to represent a triumph against the cruelties of Nazi Germany—the personification of a tyrannical order.
Will Western liberal values ever recover from Gaza? Not likely, as, aside from a few intrepid European outliers, no one will be able to hide for long from the culpability for the Gazan genocide. Any new call to arms by the United States and its major European partners in defense of international law and humanitarian values will be met with mockery. Nor will they be able to live down a very real impression that underpinning their actions in the past two years has been an unstated, yet evident, racism—a sense that Western countries were unwilling to extend to Palestinians the universal protections, humanitarian values, and compassion afforded to Israelis. Even in Western media coverage of the release of the hostages this week, how much attention was really paid to the Palestinians released when compared to the Israelis?
So, looking back on the October 13 ceremonies, the only thing we can conclude is that nothing prevents a Gaza war from happening again. Trump may imagine that he resolved a conflict of “some people say 3,000 years, some people say 500 years,” but all he really did, and good for him that he did so, was to put an end to two years of mass murder by Israel against a largely civilian population. The Gaza wound won’t soon heal, and will continue to divide the West from the rest. Netanyahu often repeats that Israel is at the heart of a clash between civilization and barbarism. The joke is on him. Since October 2023, many have come to agree with Netanyahu’s description, but not quite in the way he means it.
