EditIsrael and Gaza — the deal under the table
Peace is no longer an outcome; it’s a commodity, and the market rewards those who can fake it longest
Trumpism has turned today’s diplomacy into a business of managed appearances, and I’ve seen this before — in Kyiv’s winters of sirens, when promises came faster than power generators, writes Sed Tkachuk.
Volodymyr (Sed) Tkachuk is a communications specialist and free-lance journalist, signing Sed Tkachuk. His other columns can be found here.
Sharm el-Sheikh , September 2025. Cameras clicked, translators murmured, and pens gleamed under artificial light. At a long white table sat representatives of Turkey, Egypt, Qatar, and the United States — all eager to sell the illusion of a breakthrough. Missing were the only two sides that mattered: Hamas and Israel. Still, the “peace signing” went ahead, as if choreography could substitute for consent.
It was called a ceasefire. It was, in truth, a photo op — another performance in a global series that has outlived its authors.
For Trump, the deal was a brand, not a belief. His second term has been a spectacle of contradictions — promising no more “forever wars” while treating every conflict as a corporate turnaround. He wanted something clean to sell to voters. Naturally, the celebration ends with fireworks on “hedge fund street” — where fortunes chase “insights” like sparks in the dark.
When talks stalled, he tried the personal interest route — pleading with Israeli President Isaac Herzog to pardon Benjamin Netanyahu, the embattled prime minister whose trial for corruption drags on like an unwanted guest. The request was equal parts absurdity and desperation: a former real-estate mogul asking for clemency on behalf of another man addicted to leverage.
Trump’s ceasefire collapsed, of course. Like one of his bankrupt hotels, the structure looked impressive on paper but was hollow inside. To him, the war wasn’t tragedy — it was just another failed business venture, another deal that didn’t close.
Benjamin Netanyahu is a man who has phenomenally learned to turn fear into currency. Every time the courts close in, missiles rise on the horizon. Every scandal coincides with another “defensive operation.” His politics depend on perpetual siege; his popularity thrives on the echo of sirens.
Critics — Israeli and international alike — now say it plainly: he lies to stay in power, and he wages war to stay relevant.
Netanyahu speaks of existential threats while presiding over existential despair. He claims to defend Israel’s morality while overseeing the destruction of Gaza’s hospitals, schools, and refugee camps. “Iron walls,” he once said, “bring peace.” They don’t. They bring shadows — the kind that hide what nations no longer wish to see.
Hours after the “peace” announcement, Hamas convoys rolled through Gaza, firing at Palestinians accused of helping Israel. Revenge arrived before the ink had dried. The ceasefire lasted less than a news cycle. Thousands of fighters returned to their battle positions.
By evening, Israeli drones were circling again — “retaliating” for the retaliation. Each side replayed its role with grim familiarity, the choreography of endless recurrence. It seemed as though the press, too, was following someone’s conductor’s baton. The deal under the table was never meant to hold; it was written for the cameras, not the children who would die beneath them.
A couple generations of Palestinians have now grown up knowing nothing but dependency — living on food aid, foreign-funded hospitals, a humanitarian bureaucracy that replaced governance, and fanaticism of destroying Israel.
It is not their fault. It is the world’s — ours — for allowing an entire people to be reduced to an administrative category, or used as cannon fodder for someone else’s power.
They did not choose to inherit a future built on ruins. We built the system that made it inevitable. We treated the symptoms and funded the suffering.
And yet, if reintegration into the global order is ever to happen, Israel must help lead it — not with bombs, but with responsibility.
Children raised on rations are now adults fluent only in survival. They need something larger than food — they need a world that stops feeding on them.
Even truth has become a liability. Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied territories, was sanctioned by the U.S. after accusing Israel of genocide. Her crime was not inaccuracy, but impatience — saying aloud what diplomats still whisper in private corridors.
“This is the shame of our time,” she told reporters. “The collapse of the international legal order.”
She is wrong only in the tense. It has already collapsed. We’re just negotiating its ruins.
Trumpism has turned today’s diplomacy into a business of managed appearances. Trump still sells “historic deals.” Netanyahu still brands his wars as “defensive.” Europe still drafts statements “expressing deep concern.” Everyone profits from endurance.
Every empire has its Gaza — the place it bombed, condemned, then forgot.
Peace is no longer an outcome; it’s a commodity. The market rewards those who can fake it longest. The West once claimed moral clarity; now it rents it out by the hour.
I’ve seen this before — in Kyiv’s winters of sirens, when promises came faster than power generators. Then, as now, the world mistook resilience for recovery. History no longer repeats itself; it just syndicates the franchise — Israel as Russia, Gaza as Ukraine.
The deal under the table will fade from headlines. But Gaza remains — a monument to endurance, and to the quiet collapse of conscience that made it necessary.
In the end, there was no peace — only signatures.
And in the distance, the hum of drones — signing their own.
Caption: US President Donald Trump shows a signed document at the Gaza Peace Summit in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, 13 October 2025. US President Donald Trump alongside Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi with leaders from more than 20 countries attend the summit in Sharm El-Sheikh. EPA/YOAN VALAT / POOL
Updated: October 20, 2025 - 06:19
