Duvi Honig is Founder / CEO of the Orthodox Jewish Chamber of Commerce
Hamas has accepted the American fifteen-point plan for Gaza. Read that sentence again and ask yourself when Hamas has ever accepted anything it intended to honor.
It hasn't. What we are watching is not a peace process. It is a stall - a smoke screen thrown up by an organization that has learned the single most important fact about the current moment: the pressure it is under has an expiration date, and that date is the end of Donald Trump's term.
Hamas is not negotiating. It is running out a clock. Every working group, every sequencing dispute, every round of talks in Cairo buys the organization more time to survive intact, rearm quietly, and wait for a Washington that no longer cares. Disarmament is the one item it will never actually deliver, because disarmament is the only item that would end it. Everything else on that list - sanitation, reconstruction, technocratic committees, international forces - is scenery.
Prime Minister Netanyahu understood this when he told US Special Envoy Jared Kushner that Hamas needed to make concessions and disarm before Israel could move forward with the rest of the plan, including the withdrawal of the IDF from Gaza.
Netanyahu is right, and he should not move an inch off that position.
His position is not due to the upcoming Israeli elections, although that is being claimed by some pundits, it has to do with Israel's survival.
During the four-hour meeting, Kushner pressed Netanyahu to “not create obstacles" to the implementation of the plan. Insisting that a terrorist army lay down its weapons before Israeli soldiers leave the field is not an obstacle. It is the entire point.
But here is what should keep every Jew awake at night, and it has nothing to do with Gaza.
Last Thursday, the Vice President of the United States was asked how the war with Iran ends. Vance said preventing a nuclear Iran was Washington's second priority, with the first being to “keep oil and gasoline cheap for Americans."
Goal number one, cheap gas. Goal number two, no Iranian bomb.
Absorb that ranking. The man widely assumed to lead the next Republican administration has publicly placed the price at the pump above stopping the Islamic Republic from acquiring a nuclear weapon. Not as a slip. Not under hostile questioning. As a stated hierarchy, in order, on national television.
This is the same administration that once counted seventy-four separate occasions on which the President declared Iran could never be allowed a bomb. That was the promise. This is the revision. It arrived not because Iran changed, but because gasoline got expensive and an election is coming.
So consider what Hamas sees, and what Tehran sees. They see an America whose commitment to stopping a nuclear Iran is now formally subordinate to a domestic price index. They see a leadership that will trade strategic red lines for pump relief when the polling turns. They conclude, correctly, that they need only endure.
Two years from now, that hierarchy will be the foreign policy of the United States, and it will not be a Democratic administration that produced it. It will have come from the party Israel counted on most. G-D forbid to think about where that leaves Jerusalem.
I write this as someone who has spent years arguing for the American-Israeli alliance and who believes in it still. But an alliance is not a guarantee, and no ally's promise survives contact with its own gas prices. Israel cannot build its survival on a foreign administration's priority list, because that list gets reordered - and we have just watched it happen in real time.
So let us be clear about what we have in front of us. Hamas has accepted a plan it has no intention of fulfilling, in order to survive until the man pressuring it leaves office. Netanyahu is correct to demand disarmament first, and correct to refuse the sequence Washington is pushing. The American guarantee Israel has leaned on for two generations has just been publicly reranked below the price of gasoline by the man most likely to inherit the White House.
Hamas is playing for the calendar. Iran is playing for the calendar. Israel must play for something that does not expire.
In the end, only G-D protects Israel. Everything else is a smoke screen.