President-elect Donald Trump with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 2020. Photo by Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images

Senior Columnist Rob Eshman January 15, 2025

The hostage deal that Israel and Hamas announced today reaffirms the critical role the United States has to play in bringing Israelis and Palestinians together.

But while today’s news is a victory, the U.S. must treat it as only a starting point for seeking lasting Middle East peace.

The first stage of the deal will see the release of 33 hostages — women, the sick and elderly, and children — in exchange for more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners, including 100 serving life sentences. It all feels too soon to jinx, but how wonderful it will be to see those who have suffered for so long in Gaza finally be free.

After that initial release, the parties will oversee the release of all the remaining hostages, including the bodies of more than 30 who are presumed to be dead. In return, Israel will completely withdraw from Gaza, and reconstruction of the shattered region will begin.

The U.S. will have a crucial role to play in that work. Its ability to do so successfully will depend on its next leader’s ability to take a long view of what’s needed in the region, rather than settling for an easy win.

“There is no limit to the amount of good you can do if you don’t care who gets the credit,” said the late President Ronald Reagan. That approach won’t work for President-elect Donald Trump, who cares deeply about getting all the credit for the hostages release. He posted on X, even before any official announcement that a deal had been reached, that this “EPIC” deal never could have happened without his November electoral victory.

President Joe Biden, whose team has been working to free the hostages since Hamas captured them in its Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, announced the deal after Trump. “Blessed are the peacemakers,” Biden said, spreading the credit that Trump had tried to hoard.

But you know what? Maybe let Trump take this win — and then push him to win again, by working to leverage an overall Middle East peace. Such a deal would enfranchise Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, rebuild Gaza, and bring Saudi Arabia, the center of Islam and the Middle East’s wealthiest state, into the Abraham Accords.

So yes, maybe Trump’s threat earlier this month that Gaza would have “all hell to pay” if the hostages weren’t released paid off. Maybe the private meeting that Steve Witkoff, Trump’s incoming Middle East envoy, had with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was the arm twist Netanyahu didn’t know he wanted. If lavishing praise on the incoming president encourages him to keep pushing the Israelis, Palestinians and the other regional actors to finish the deal and negotiate an even bigger one, then count me in.

Because without the U.S., it can’t happen.

That’s not conjecture; that’s history. We just saw evidence of it at former President Jimmy Carter’s funeral, where Stuart Eizenstat, the highest-ranking Jewish official in the Carter White House, said, “Jimmy Carter’s most lasting achievement, and the one I think he was most proud of, was to bring the first peace to the Middle East through the greatest act of personal diplomacy in American history, the Camp David Accords.”

Camp David wouldn’t have happened without Carter. The 1994 Israel-Jordan Accords happened after then-President Bill Clinton used carrots and sticks to bring about King Hussein’s signature. Experts can debate the reasons for the failure of the Oslo Accords, which Palestinians and Israelis negotiated without America’s knowledge. But Martin Indyk, who was a senior member of the State Department’s Middle East peace team at the time, said that the lack of U.S. involvement in holding the parties accountable played a role in dooming the deal.

What this shows: The U.S. still needs to be in the room where it happens when it comes to making progress in the Middle East. And the next four years is Trump’s time to be in the room.

One of the reasons behind the timing of the Oct. 7 attack is believed to be that Israel was poised to build on the success of the Abraham Accords, the trademark foreign policy achievement of Trump’s first administration, by announcing a normalization deal between Saudi Arabia and Israel. That would have further isolated Iran, a major sponsor of Hamas and Hezbollah, and dashed the hopes of every extremist — in Qatar, Tehran or Gaza City — who dreams of eradicating Israel.

Oct. 7 and Israel’s subsequent devastation of Gaza put an end to the Saudi deal — until now. One of the remarkable, shining rays of hope over the past 15 months of war is that the Abraham Accords held, as did Israel’s peace deals with Egypt and Jordan.

So, let Trump take the credit for this hostage deal, and then let him make more progress, and take more credit. And if someday that means the Nobel Peace Prize goes to, of all people, Trump — a man I have long criticized, and a politician with whom I agree about almost nothing — I’d stand in line to hang it around his neck.

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