Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is Fresh Air.
I'm Dave Davies.
This week began with outbursts of celebration as the last 20 surviving Israeli hostages in Gaza were returned to their families and nearly 2,000 Palestinians held in Israeli prisons were released. That was all part of the ceasefire agreement which finally halted two years of war in Gaza, the conflict sparked by the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.
Our guest today, Aaron David Miller, spent years in the U.S. State Department trying to forge peace between Israel and the Palestinians, working under Democratic and Republican presidents. He says that in bringing this ceasefire agreement to fruition, President Donald Trump dealt with Israeli leaders in ways no other president has.
He says Trump's transactional approach to politics and diplomacy probably helped in this case. Today we'll look at how the ceasefire came to be and consider the challenges that remain for Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Aaron David Miller spent 25 years in the State Department, playing a key role in the Oslo peace process in the 1990s.
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Chapter 2: What events led to the recent ceasefire in Gaza?
He's received the State Department's Distinguished Superior and Meritorious Honor Awards. He's now a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the author of five books. We recorded our conversation yesterday. Aaron David Miller, welcome to Fresh Air. David, it's great to be here with you.
I want to begin with an excerpt of President Trump's speech at the Israeli Knesset on Monday. Let's listen.
This is not only the end of a war. This is the end of the age of terror and death and the beginning of the age of faith and hope and of God. It's the start of a grand concord and lasting harmony for Israel and all the nations of what will soon be a truly magnificent region. I believe that so strongly. This is the historic dawn of A new Middle East.
And that's President Trump with a pretty expansive view of the accomplishment here. I mean, you've said this isn't even really a peace agreement, right? What is it?
Look, the reality, this is not the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. This is not the Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty. Agreements succeed or fail when they're tested over time. This is not even a peace agreement. What this is... and I don't want to take anything away from what this is, is a remarkable moment. I worked on this process largely in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations since the 1980s.
Any agreement between Israelis and Palestinians, let alone one between two combatants who are pledged to one another's mutual destruction, is an extraordinary achievement. What this is... is a chance after two years of Israelis and Palestinians visiting a parade of horrific horrors on one another.
What this is, is the possibility of ending the war in Gaza and maybe building a broader bridge so that Israelis and Palestinians can find a pathway forward.
Right. Since the announcement last Friday, Hamas did release the living hostages and Israel did cease offensive military operations and withdrew behind a designated line in Gaza. We'll talk about the longer term prospects in a bit. But do you think that these conditions, I mean, the cessation of hostilities will hold over the coming weeks?
You know, I do, and I usually don't, having failed largely over a quarter of a century in helping to create circumstances for conflict-ending agreement between Israel and Palestinians. I usually default to the negative on this. But I think, and it's fascinating to consider...
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Chapter 3: How did Trump's transactional approach influence the ceasefire?
what the first phase actually promises. It contains, in my judgment, the three basic elements that, in fact, could create a foundation. And those elements coincide with the reasons, the international community, the region, the United States. cared about Gaza beginning on October 7.
First, it does address conclusively the issue of the remaining hostages, 20 men alive who have been returned, 28 hostages who are no longer alive. Only some have been returned. And that's going to be an issue. Whether it's a deal breaker, I doubt it. But it will be an issue. Hamas has committed itself to locating and returning the bodies. of 28 hostages.
And remember, out of the 250, one or two that were taken on October 7 by Hamas in this willful and indiscriminate attack against civilians, sexual predation, mutilation, and even the execution of hostages, 130 have been returned through negotiations. These 48 and then roughly the balance have died in captivity. It takes the hostage issue off the table.
And once that occurs, it undermines, undercuts the justification. and even the credibility of Israel's comprehensive military actions in Gaza, what we've seen over the course of the last two years, particularly the large-scale offensives against Rafah, Khan Yunis, and most recently Gaza City.
And it also obviates the need for the massive deployment of Israeli divisions, tens of thousands of Israeli soldiers. If, in fact, this is correct, it will create a new environment which has never existed beyond several weeks or months. And that is to say an environment which will allow not just the dribbling of humanitarian assistance into Gaza, but the flooding of the zone.
And once the zone is flooded... prices on the black market decline, the advantages that accrue to criminal gangs, and even Hamas in terms of the diverting of humanitarian aid and the use of that aid for recruitment, all of these things begin to end. And those three elements were the reasons the international community, the United States, the region cared about Gaza.
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Chapter 4: What challenges remain for Israel and Palestinians after the ceasefire?
In a way, David, it's a paradox, because it could be that in reducing the urgency, no hostages, no major military campaign resulting in the exponential deaths of thousands of Palestinians, and no humanitarian catastrophe, that people may actually begin to care less about what happens in phases two, three, and beyond.
I want to talk about how we got here. That is to say, how this agreement came together. And I thought we'd begin by listening to another moment in President's speech to the Israeli Knesset Monday. He's praising Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for his role in the process. And then he added this.
And he is not easy, I want to tell you. He's not the easiest guy to deal with. But that's what makes him great. That's what makes him great. Thank you very much, baby. Great job.
So all smiles there between Trump and Netanyahu. But you've made the point that President Trump has done something presidents that you have known and worked with couldn't, and that is to rein in Israel, to bend it to his will in a way. How was he able to do this?
That's a core question. There are basically three reasons why this agreement came to pass. Number one, Hamas is much weaker. particularly on the military side, and it's the military commanders, not the external leadership that are making the decisions. Number two are key Arab states, two of Hamas's principal backers of the three, the third being Iran.
Qataris and the Turks basically leaned on Hamas in a way that they had rarely have ever done before. But it's the third factor. Let's be clear. We would not be having this conversation
Had Donald Trump not done something that is quite unique, almost unprecedented in the annals of the U.S.-Israeli relationship, no president that I ever worked for, Jimmy Carter to Bush 43, and I'd add in Obama and Biden, no U.S. president ever talked to an Israeli prime minister or pushed him and pressured him.
on an issue that that prime minister considered so vital, not only to his politics, but his definition of Israel's national security. In June of 1996, when Bill Clinton finished his first conversation with Benjamin Netanyahu, an exasperated Clinton walked out of the office and exploded. Who's the effing superpower here? That's what Clinton said about Netanyahu. Donald Trump answered
that question, at least for now. And let me also add, having worked and voted for Republicans and Democrats, this is a man who is presiding over the erosion of American norms and institutions and undermining the very nature of constitutional government that his inaugural oath impelled him to protect. And yet, he deserves enormous credit for what he's done here.
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Chapter 5: Why is this ceasefire not considered a comprehensive peace agreement?
It won't last that long. Spring, probably. He knows that to win an election, he's going to need Donald Trump, not just as a bystander, but as an open campaigner.
Because Trump is enormously popular in Israel.
More popular in Israel, Dave, right now than Benjamin Netanyahu. And the notion somehow that we don't intercede in Israeli politics and they don't intercede in ours is just an urban myth. You saw what the president did during that speech to the Knesset. And only three American presidents before have addressed the Knesset. Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton... and George W. Bush.
I mean, none of them would have even come close to basically turning to the president of Israel and saying implicitly, why don't you grant him a pardon?
I mean, he just he said the words. That was remarkable. Acknowledging Netanyahu's criminal charges for corruption. I'm curious, speaking of that, what do you make of the notion that Netanyahu has sustained the campaign in Gaza in part so he wouldn't have to answer the corruption charges at home?
I mean, you know, on trial for bribery, fraud and breach of trust in a Jerusalem district court four years now, almost five years in running now. Yeah, I think that's a part of the calculation. But staying in power and the vulnerabilities and risks to a leader. He's the longest governing prime minister in history of the state of Israel. He believes he is indispensable.
You said that Trump did things that no other president had ever done in dealing with Israel. And, you know, Trump's negotiating style is also, well, unique, I think we can say, among presidents. You know, he's known as this freewheeling, transactional deal guy. And, you know, there's also the fact that he and the Trump organization, the Trump family…
have a lot of business deals in the Arab world, particularly in Qatar, which Trump accepted an airplane from. And, you know, a lot of not just Democrats but independent government ethicists say this isn't what a president should be doing. You don't want foreign leaders to have leverage over the president who has to guard the nation's interests, not their own.
Did these business relationships help him in this case?
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Chapter 6: What are the implications of the hostage situation on the ceasefire's success?
And in many respects, it is the absence of core principles that allows him to pivot in a way that no other American president had.
And I think that may explain why now. I think the September 9th strike by Netanyahu on Doha against the external leadership persuaded Trump that Netanyahu was now undermining something that was important to him.
That was the strike on Hamas negotiators in Doha, right?
In Doha. Right. And I think he began to understand that Netanyahu was undermining the Abraham Accords, creating a degree of instability in a region of the world where economic profit and financial gain requires stability. And I think he began to see that Netanyahu was making him look weak. And to use Trump's favorite term with respect to Putin –
Netanyahu was even playing him and believed that he had a much wider margin to do anything he wanted, he, Netanyahu, and that Trump would support him. So I think, yeah, I think that notion that this is something important to me and I'm going to pivot from acquiescing and enabling Benjamin Netanyahu in Gaza to constraining him.
We're going to take another break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Aaron David Miller. He's a former State Department negotiator, currently a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. We'll talk more about the Gaza ceasefire and prospects for the region after this break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is Fresh Air.
So let's talk about what's going to happen next. I mean this is, as you say, not a comprehensive peace agreement but an important, meaningful step. A lot of humanitarian aid can come in now. I mean we've already seen chaotic footage of boxes of food being tossed off flatbed trucks. What's your sense of how this can be funded, organized and effective?
I think the funding question is critically important. There was a report I had read that we're talking about $70 billion dollars. for the reconstruction. Or maybe it's not even the reconstruction day.
Maybe it's, to use a different word, maybe it's the reconstitution of gossip, because I don't know how you reconstruct a situation in which 60 to 80 percent of the housing stock and residential commercial structures have been destroyed. In order to have any chance of doing that,
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Chapter 7: How do funding and organization affect humanitarian aid in Gaza?
And the more I think about it, The more I go back to your initial point about Trump's transactional nature, he's willing to break all kinds of traditional diplomatic crockery. And I would bet before this deal progresses substantively, there probably will be other direct meetings between administration officials. and Hamas, which, of course, is going to drive the Netanyahu government crazy.
I wonder now, just your question prompts the notion that maybe to actually end up doing this deal, the U.S. may have to construct this channel.
You're saying that Trump might have to deal with the Hamas officials that are outside of Gaza. Do they have a different perspective from those who are actually on the ground?
They're divided as well, but I think they have a much greater sense of wanting to maintain the coherence and the cohesion of the organization itself, which may in fact increase their margin of flexibility. So I think that's another data point. where Trump has gone to where no other American president has been before on that issue alone.
Let's talk a bit about the role of the Gulf states, particularly Qatar, these states that are on the western end of the Persian Gulf. They played a critical role in pressuring Hamas to accept this deal, I gather, at Trump's insistence. Going forward, what are their interests? I mean presumably they have resources to fund reconstruction, but what will they want from us?
I might add that before his newly found love affair with the Qataris last year – I think the president described Qatar as a sponsor of terrorism. Qatar now, of course, is the president's newfound friend. You've got the 747, which the president will retrofit and probably try to use.
As the new Air Force One, right?
The new Air Force One. So Qatar is going to remain, whether its critics like it or not, I suspect, as a key contact point. They did sign one of the, what, four signatories of the piece of paper that was signed in Sharm. The Egyptians, the Turks, the Israelis, and the Americans signed.
And that agreement was what?
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