‘The voice is Jacob’s but the hands are Esau’s’
The most striking fact about the ceasefire agreement is that while Hamas may have signed it, the terrorist organization did not set its terms. The return of all the hostages, the lifting of the siege on Gaza City, and the partial withdrawal of Israeli troops were shaped not in Hamas’s bunkers but in negotiations brokered by the United States with Israel, Qatar, and Turkey—two of Hamas’s former patrons now uneasy with the company they keep: ties once held sacred had now became a liability rather than an asset. What shifted their strategic calculus so dramatically?
Israel’s airstrike on Doha—an operation aimed at decapitating Hamas’s leadership—was the turning point. Acknowledging the mission’s failure, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu quickly claimed sole responsibility, insisting the decision had been his after consultations with the security cabinet. His effort to separate Israel’s actions from any American coordination, however, only produced a fog of implausibility. How could Israeli aircraft cross Saudi airspace with missiles bound for a city adjacent to the US Central Command without Washington’s knowledge or acquiescence?
Critics charged that Israel had driven a wedge through US–Qatari relations, unleashing a torrent of overwrought commentary about Israel’s recklessness. Yet such accounts misunderstand the deeper dynamics of Middle Eastern hostilities. For Qatar, the true danger lay not in the failed Israeli strike but in Saudi Arabia’s apparent permission for the Israeli flyover. For years, Doha’s support for Hamas—as part of a wider patronage of Muslim Brotherhood networks—had been designed to buffer Qatari independence against Saudi pressure. But the attack on Doha exposed how that alliance, far from protecting Qatar, had invited risk. A nation the size of Connecticut perched on a Saudi peninsula, Qatar now needed a more effective deterrent against both Saudi and potentially Israeli threats. In truth, its most pressing anxiety concerns how to preserve its foothold in Syria against growing Saudi encroachments, not its relations with Jerusalem.
Israel’s continuing operations around Gaza City—enabled by a steady flow of US weapons—reshaped the strategic alignments of the two states most crucial to Hamas’s endurance. For Hamas, hostages were its principal leverage; for Qatar, brokering their release had magnified its diplomatic stature in the past. The bargain—Israel trading Palestinian prisoners convicted of murder for kidnapped Israelis—had sustained Doha’s image as indispensable mediator even as it exposed the costs of its old alliances.
Türkiye followed Qatar’s strategic trajectory. President Erdoğan has long sought to anchor Türkiye’s regional ambitions in its Muslim identity, embracing the Brotherhood and defending Hamas rule in Gaza. Yet Erdoğan also understands that his country’s military and economic interests, particularly in Syria, require accommodation with Washington. Thus, his public denunciations of Israel’s conduct have been accompanied by private directives to Hamas leaders to release all hostages—and, reportedly, to assist in recovering the remains of those murdered in captivity.
The announcement of a ceasefire and the return of hostages ignited jubilation in both Israel and Gaza. But for many observers, the notion that Donald Trump and his team could restore hope amid such ruin seemed implausible, even absurd. How could a man so relentlessly devoted to self-promotion become an unlikely instrument of peacemaking? Yet The Art of the Deal may indeed offer the best lens through which to view his success in securing what eluded the credentialed architects of diplomacy in the previous administration.
This moment ought to restrain the moral theatrics that have too often replaced sober analysis. Hamas has long wrapped its campaigns in the delusion that transforming Israel into an abattoir could redeem Palestinian defeats. It thrives on the destruction it engineers, knowing that each round of devastation will summon demands for a ceasefire preserving its infrastructure and replenishing the coffers of its leaders. For years, Qatar’s sponsorship ensured that this cycle of carnage and reconstruction continued—some wars shorter than others but each truce shallower, each payoff larger.
The October 7 onslaught shattered any pretense that Hamas’s wars were mere repetitions of the past. Unlike previous clashes—from 2008 through 2021—October 7 was designed not to echo history but to reverse it: to reinsert Palestinians into a moral narrative of redemptive violence, where bloodshed could undo 1948. The massacres were not simply acts of terror; they were ritual performances of revenge.
That leap into barbarism shocked the modern conscience but only briefly. In its aftermath, Hamas discovered that atrocity could enhance legitimacy. By obliterating the fragile consensus around “two states for two peoples,” its cry of “Palestine from the River to the Sea” resonated through the Middle East and beyond. Erdoğan defended Hamas; protesters across the West waved its banners in city streets, interrupting classes, graduations, and concerts—all in the name of “liberation.” The massacres were thus reframed as moral theater, violence transfigured into virtue.
To call Israel colonial, racist, and genocidal is to indulge in a narrative detached from evidence but nonetheless seductive. It turns Hamas into a providential force, and its leaders into martyrs of justice. But this mythology traps Palestinians in a cycle of victimhood that precludes the very statehood they claim to seek. Theirs is a political culture that elevates grievance over governance, tragedy over transformation.
Evangelizing martyrdom, Palestinian politics has built its identity around the Nakba, the catastrophe of 1948, rather than around the arduous work of institution-building. Statecraft requires compromise, calculation, and the will to secure material stability—qualities absent from movements that glorify self-sacrifice and see every negotiation as betrayal. State building may be arduous and uncertain, but it is the only one that leads toward independence.
Storytelling, when untethered from analysis, can enchant but it cannot explain. And so, the question remains: when President Trump demanded that Hamas “hurry up or face consequences,” whom was he really warning—the terrorists holding the hostages, or the world still reluctant to confront the myths that sustain the savagery seemingly too costly politically or economically for its leaders to confront?
Only states could broker an agreement to bring back all the hostages and generate the forces to end the Gaza War. States are compelled to engage in rational, strategic calculations to protect territory and resources. Their calculations may sometimes be wrong but they are, at least, subject to bargaining and trading one set of goods for another. The pivot from Hamas to Qatar and Turkey, from terrorist movement to independent states crafted the preconditions for what can easily become another chapter in The Art of the Deal.
