The sun sets over the battered Gaza Strip, seen from the Israeli border on Tuesday.JALAA MAREY/AFP/Getty Images
After joyous days of bombs no longer dropping, hostages returning and aid flowing, the difficult questions are beginning to cut through the fog of no-longer-war. How, at what is widely considered the lowest moment in Israeli and Palestinian politics and mutual relations, can any lasting peace be carved out of this ceasefire?
I cannot think of a single individual in the Middle East who embodies that question, and knows how to approach it, better than a defiantly cheerful Israeli man named Mohammad Darawshe.
Mr. Darawshe and his tightknit family, who have lived for centuries in the village of Iksal, near Nazareth, were devastated by the Hamas atrocities on Oct. 7, 2023. His cousin Awad Darawshe, 23, was the Israeli paramedic who was murdered by Hamas militants while trying to save the lives of concertgoers at the Nova music festival. Mohammed, who works for the kibbutz community that was ravaged by Hamas, was close with families of hostages.
Aid trucks arrive in Gaza after dispute over return of hostages’ bodies tests fragile ceasefire
But he was also deeply affected by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s two-year military campaign in Gaza and the crackdowns on Arab citizens promoted by his far-right cabinet ministers. His 21-year-old daughter was arrested on campus by Israeli police and incarcerated for five days for wearing a map of Palestine with the words “I love you” across it. The humanitarian horrors of the war, the toll of his own country’s bombings and the denial of aid for fellow Arabs across the border, left him emotionally scarred.
“My wife and I, after realizing it really was a ceasefire … we cried, not from happiness, but from the pain that we endured over the last two years,” he told me. “It’s a feeling that we hadn’t even allowed.”
There is, he says, a deep breakdown of trust, not just between Israel and the Palestinians – that’s been the case for most of this century – but also within both nations.
“There’s a deep psychological fatigue in our communities. After years of recurring violence and failed diplomacy, people have stopped believing that peace is even a possibility. My own children have grown up with the idea that war is cyclical and inevitable – that any calm is just a pause before the next eruption. That mindset is corrosive, and it shapes how we respond to any political overture.”
Family members grieve at the funeral for Israeli soldier Daniel Shimon Perez, who was killed during the Oct. 7 attack and whose body was released by Hamas this week.Ronen Zvulun/Reuters
Mr. Darawshe hasn’t just experienced an erosion of trust – it’s his job to document it. As an executive with Givat Haviva, the intercommunal-relations organization tied to the kibbutz movement, he regularly polls Israelis on their levels of trust, and this year found that 72 per cent of Jewish Israelis do not trust, or are afraid of, Arab Israelis, and 52 per cent of Arabs now feel the same about Jews. Both figures, he says, are about three times higher than they were before the war.
What makes this distrust an obstacle to peace is that it extends to the regimes that govern Israel and Gaza. A lasting settlement is unlikely when there’s no authority that legitimately represents its people or negotiates in good faith. It helps that most countries, including Canada, now recognize Palestine as a state, so there will be a pre-existing state to negotiate a new governance structure around – but there’s nobody to fill that vacuum.
Like many Arab observers, Mr. Darawshe feels not only that Hamas has to disarm and step away from the power, but that the vacuum will be hard to fill because the current leadership of the Palestinian Authority is deeply distrusted by Gazans. Polls show the PA would almost immediately gain legitimacy and an ability to govern if Israel were to release from prison the politician Marwan Barghouti, often called the Nelson Mandela of Palestine. But perhaps for that very reason, Mr. Netanyahu has refused to include him among the hundreds of prisoners released this week.
Israelis return to Oct. 7 sites, but some don’t see long-lasting peace
“There’s an absence of any real horizon for Palestinians,” Mr. Darawshe tells me. “The ceasefire may stop the bombs, but it doesn’t offer a path to freedom, dignity, or statehood. It reorganizes the mechanics of control – who rebuilds, who monitors borders, who manages trade – without addressing the root issue of occupation.”
This has led him to conclude, perhaps surprisingly, that the only way to avoid a return to war is by replacing Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories with an international oversight body.
“I don’t think the current Israeli government wants peace, and I don’t think the current Palestinian situation can produce a leadership that can move toward a peace,” he says. “That’s why I actually do welcome Trump’s engagement, why I welcome international engagement. In the next two to five years, I don’t see the emergence of a peaceful alternative, and that’s why an outside, strong intervention is the way forward.”
That, in this environment, is the most optimistic view you’re likely to find.