Two years into the longest and most brutal war between Israel and its adversaries, the Trump administration and key Arab countries are pushing harder for peace.

Negotiators for Israel and Hamas have been meeting for several days in Egypt, trying to choreograph complex moves to return remaining Israeli hostages — alive and dead — to their families and to end Israeli bombardment that has killed nearly 70,000 people and reduced most of Gaza to rubble.

These would be the first steps in an envisioned 20-point plan unveiled by President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu on September 29 to free the hostages, stop the bombing, end Hamas’ nearly two-decade-old grip on Gaza, and reconstruct the enclave under a provisional administration more responsive to Palestinian needs, less threatening to Israel, and more acceptable to the international community.

Doubts about the viability of the plan, which would put governance and reconstruction under a “Board of Peace” chaired by Trump and including former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, are myriad.

New York Times correspondent Mark Landler compared the scheme to the Coalition Provisional Authority set up in Iraq after the U.S. invasion, a body staffed mostly by young Americans with scant knowledge of the region but eager to solidify their credentials with the George W. Bush administration. Others noted the irony of giving any power to a British overlord given Britain’s checkered history as the colonial ruler of pre-1948 Palestine.

Creating such an authority assumes that a long-lasting ceasefire can even be achieved. Then there would be the task of building and deploying a stabilization force drawn from supportive Arab and Muslim states. How this is to be accomplished, who will lead the force, and what its mandate will be, is not clear. Neither is what would happen during the inevitable months it would take to assemble. Also undecided: how Hamas members would be identified, what weapons, if any, they could keep, and what country would accept those seeking to leave Gaza.

A Century-Old Conflict

The Israeli-Palestinian dispute is more than a century old and has frustrated decades of U.S. mediation going back to pressure on the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to renounce terrorism and recognize Israel in the 1980s. The PLO did so in 1988, recognizing Israel’s right to 78% of British mandate Palestine and demanding in return sovereignty over 22% comprising Gaza and the West Bank, which Israel captured from Egypt and Jordan, respectively, during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.

Following this decision, Israelis and Palestinians, meeting privately in Norway, reached the 1993 Oslo accords, which were supposed to provide Israel security and the Palestinians a path to an independent state. But Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister at the time, was assassinated in 1995 by an Israeli extremist. Netanyahu — who has long opposed Palestinian statehood — was subsequently elected and began to undermine the process.

Flurries of optimism were quickly extinguished after a failed 2000 summit, a second Palestinian uprising, the death of PLO leader Yasser Arafat after prolonged confinement in his West Bank headquarters, and 2006 parliamentary elections — pushed by the U.S. in the name of democracy promotion — that Hamas won. Arafat’s successor, Mahmoud Abbas, has not allowed elections since then and is widely regarded as ineffective and his administration as corrupt. It is hard to say who speaks for the Palestinians now, while Israeli opposition to an independent Palestinian state is even more entrenched after the atrocities of October 7, 2023.

The Trump peace plan does not promise Palestinians a state and requires the Palestinian Authority created by the Oslo Accords to “reform itself” before it can participate in Gaza’s governance. The plan says that only after those unspecified reforms have occurred, “the conditions may finally be in place for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood, which we recognize as the aspiration of the Palestinian people.”

Meanwhile, Netanyahu’s governing coalition is underpinned by right-wing extremist parties that envision the annexation of the West Bank and the full expulsion of the Palestinians from Gaza.

For its part, Hamas, which seized control of Gaza in 2007 after a brief struggle with Fatah, the main party in the PLO, said it was willing to “hand over the administration of the Gaza Strip to a Palestinian body of independents [technocrats] based on Palestinian national consensus and with Arab and Islamic support” — a plan that differs tangibly from Trump’s proposed “Board of Peace.”

Also unclear is when and to what degree Israel will withdraw from Gaza and the consequences of violating a ceasefire, particularly for Israel. Hamas has demanded a quicker and deeper withdrawal than the Netanyahu government appears willing to accept, and the issue remains under discussion in Egypt.

Given Netanyahu’s track record of either rejecting or delivering a conditional “yes” to multiple U.S. presidents, history suggests we may see the ceasefire breaking down before it has a chance to take hold.

Working in favor of a ceasefire is the Israeli people’s deep exhaustion from the prolonged conflict, which has isolated the country internationally, reduced its support even among Jewish Americans, and traumatized many of the Israeli soldiers called up repeatedly to fight. Palestinians in Gaza hope for an end to the bombing and the arrival of urgently needed food and medicine. If that can be achieved, it will be a major accomplishment. But ambitions to resolve the broader conflict should be kept in check.