Aaron David Miller

I mean, the anger and the hatred that has been stirred up on the part of Palestinian civilians

for what the Israelis have done and for what, in many respects, the Americans have enabled, not trying to trivialize or discount the attendant trauma of the shadow of October 7th, which is going to linger and loom over Israel for many years to come.

But in terms of sheer scale, this should be the priority now.

And we're not talking about reconstruction, just trying to figure out how to create a life, something that two million Gazans can somehow manage.

I'm not running the railroad these days and have no desire to.

But I would not have left Sharm el-Sheikh without constituting four high-level working groups chaired by a senior American as part of an interagency American process.

Four groups, one dedicated to humanitarian assistance and reconstruction, a second to governance, a third to international stabilization, and a fourth, and Trump has already moved in this direction by…

working with CENTCOM, the American military, to deploy 200 Americans to an Israeli military base near Gaza, which will help monitor the ceasefire.

Well, you know something?

The hardest day after the big peace conference is the morning after.

What do we do now?

How do we make this work?

It's going to take more than Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff.

It's going to require an interagency, international effort to scale this up.

Maybe we'll be surprised.

You know, it certainly wasn't a guide when it came to the success or failure of the Oslo process.

I was at the last, actually the only, effort that brought an American president, Bill Clinton, an empowered PLO leader, Yasser Arafat, and a very risk-ready Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak, to Camp David in July of 2000.

That summit failed.

And at the end of that two-week period, on the five core issues that need to be resolved, border security, refugees, Jerusalem, and the end of all conflict and claims, the gaps between Israelis and Palestinians were as wide and as deep as the Grand Canyon.

Twenty-five years later, those gaps are not Grand Canyon size.