Fazal Masood Malik & Farhan Khokhar, Canada
The Treaty of Versailles took six months to negotiate. Its failure took just twenty years to manifest in a global catastrophe, resulting in World War II. President Donald Trump’s Gaza proposal, hastily assembled and prematurely celebrated, appears destined for an even swifter unravelling. The parallels are not merely instructive; they are dangerously ominous.
Consider the scene last Friday, on 4 October 2025. Within hours of Hamas issuing a carefully qualified response to his 20-point plan, President Trump declared victory on social media, posting the Palestinian group’s statement as if it represented full acceptance. The White House’s haste was such that officials initially attributed Hamas’s own words to the president himself.
Meanwhile, Israeli strikes killed 70 Palestinians that very day, even as Trump proclaimed that Israel had “temporarily stopped bombing Gaza.” This disconnect between rhetoric and reality echoes the declarations of peace in 1919, signed while Germany remained under crushing blockade. The true drivers of this diplomatic drama have little to do with justice and everything to do with political survival.
Western governments – their moral credibility shattered by images of Gaza’s destruction flooding social media daily – desperately need something to show “progress towards peace” to domestic audiences who are increasingly rejecting their leaders’ complicity. Muslim governments face an even worse predicament with populations who are witnessing massacres in real time while their rulers do nothing.
Everyone needs this “hot potato” to cool, regardless of whether the solution addresses root causes or not.
The comparison to Versailles extends beyond mere diplomatic theatre. Both agreements prioritise the political needs of their architects over sustainable peace. Woodrow Wilson needed his League of Nations to justify American casualties to voters back home. Georges Clemenceau required visible French revenge. David Lloyd George had to appear tough to British constituents.
Today’s cast performs similar calculations. Mr Trump needs a foreign policy “win” to tout. Benjamin Netanyahu requires something to show Israelis while keeping his far-right coalition intact. Arab leaders desperately seek credibility with populations who have watched them do nothing while Gaza burns. European governments need cover for their continued arms sales to Israel.
Predictably, the result is a proposal that addresses none of the conflict’s fundamental causes. Hamas has agreed to release hostages but explicitly rejected disarmament, the very thing Israel claims as its central war aim. The group also dismissed the proposed interim administration to be led by Mr Trump and Tony Blair, viewing it as colonial oversight rather than genuine Palestinian governance.
Mr Netanyahu, for his part, insists that “Hamas will be disarmed and Gaza will be demilitarised; either the easy way or the hard way” while maintaining Israeli forces “deep inside the strip.” These are not the words of peace but of continued occupation dressed in diplomatic language.
Yet Hamas faces an impossible choice that history has presented before. The Treaty of Hudaybiyyah, signed by the Prophet Muhammadsa, appeared so unjust that his senior companions opposed it. Yet by prioritising peace over immediate rights, it created conditions that, within eighteen months, enabled far greater gains than military victory could have achieved.
Hamas understands this lesson but also knows that accepting “unreasonable” terms requires genuine peace in return; something Israel’s strategic calculus makes unlikely. For Israel and its Western allies, sustained tension in the Middle East serves geopolitical aims. Peace would undermine Israel’s narrative of an existential threat that justifies massive military aid and diplomatic protection.
The structural impossibilities embedded in this proposal reveal themselves through simple mathematics. The White House’s own map shows Israeli forces retaining control of approximately 55% of Gaza even after the supposed “withdrawal”. Palestinian technocrats would nominally govern while Hamas retains its weapons and Israel maintains military dominance.
This arrangement violates basic principles of sovereignty while satisfying no party’s core demands. It bears a striking resemblance to the Rhineland occupation that poisoned Franco-German relations throughout the 1920s.
Yet, even these obvious contradictions pale in comparison to the domestic political dynamics that doom this agreement. Mr Netanyahu’s coalition partners, Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, have already threatened to topple the government if Hamas survives in any form.
Mr Ben Gvir declared he would quit if Israel becomes “part of a national defeat that would be shameful.” Mr Smotrich called the plan a “serious mistake” that ensures “a growing erosion of Israel’s position.” These are not marginal voices but essential pillars of Mr Netanyahu’s parliamentary majority. When faced with choosing between peace and power, the prime minister’s track record suggests which he will select.
The Palestinian side presents equal fragility. Hamas’s statement that disarmament should be “discussed within a comprehensive Palestinian national framework” amounts to indefinite postponement. The group understands that laying down weapons means losing its claim to represent Palestinian resistance, creating space for more radical factions to emerge.
Already, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and smaller militant groups question Hamas’s willingness to negotiate. The region has witnessed this pattern before, with each compromise by existing leadership breeding harder-line successors. Yet, pursuing both rights and peace simultaneously – the fatal flaw of the Oslo Accords – guarantees achieving neither.
The international guarantors of this proposed peace inspire even less confidence. American credibility has been shattered by Mr Trump’s transparent prioritisation of personal glory over substantive progress. His warning that Hamas must “move quickly, or else all bets will be off” while Israeli bombs continued falling reveals the hollowness of American mediation.
European nations, having supplied many of the weapons currently destroying Gaza, lack moral authority with either party. Arab governments, having failed to take meaningful action during two years of warfare, possess no leverage with their own populations, much less with combatants.
These credibility deficits matter because any agreement requires external enforcement. Versailles failed partly because America refused to join the League of Nations, which it had championed, leaving no power capable of maintaining the settlement.
Today’s situation is worse. No external actor commands sufficient respect from all parties to serve as an honest broker. The appointment of Jared Kushner, Mr Trump’s son-in-law, whose investment firm has received billions from Saudi Arabia and who has praised Gaza’s “very valuable waterfront property,” to help negotiate details only underscores this legitimacy crisis.
The timeline for failure writes itself with depressing clarity. Within six months, “technical violations” will proliferate as both sides test boundaries. Hamas will be accused of rearming, true or not, providing Israel with justification for renewed operations. Palestinian groups excluded from negotiations will launch attacks to prove their relevance.
Mr Netanyahu, facing the collapse of his coalition, will discover urgent security threats that require military action. By eighteen months, full-scale fighting will resume, likely spreading beyond Gaza as delegitimised Arab regimes face populations radicalised by their governments’ impotence. This prediction requires no special insight, merely pattern recognition.
The Oslo Accords collapsed because they postponed rather than resolved fundamental disputes about sovereignty and territory. The Abraham Accords, Mr Kushner’s previous contribution to Middle Eastern peace, ignored Palestinian aspirations entirely, helping create conditions for the horrors of 7 October. Each agreement that avoids core issues – Palestinian self-determination, Israeli security, refugee rights, Jerusalem’s status – merely accumulates grievances for future explosion.
The tragedy is not that this deal will fail but that its failure will spawn something worse. Unlike 1919, today’s collapse will unfold under constant global scrutiny through social media, with nuclear-armed regional powers as potential participants.
The over 66,000 Palestinians already killed and the trauma inflicted on Israeli society represent merely the opening chapter of this cycle. When Versailles failed, at least its architects could claim ignorance of how peace agreements could seed future wars. Today’s negotiators have no such excuse.
History suggests which choice will be made. The only question is whether anyone will remember these warnings when Gaza explodes again, or whether the world will once more express shock that a peace built on injustice proved to be no peace at all.
