‘Project Sunrise’? Hamas’ quest to destroy Israel thwarting Trump peace plan
TEL AVIV—Despite its evident appeal, few Israelis think near-term success is in store for the Trump administration’s “Project Sunrise.” Drafted by President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and White House Envoy Steve Witkoff and recently shown “to prospective donor countries … including wealthy Gulf kingdoms, Turkey and Egypt,” the ambitious proposal would invest $112.1 billion in Gaza over 10 years to transform the war-ravaged territory bordering Israel, Egypt, and the Mediterranean Sea into “a ‘smart city’ with tech-driven governance and services.”
Israeli skepticism concerning the reconstruction of any part of Gaza dominated by Iran-backed Hamas derives from several factors.
More than two years after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, massacre in southern Israel, Israel Defense Forces currently control approximately half of Gaza. Israelis by and large doubt that the Hamas-dominated half can be rehabilitated without Hamas’ removal and doubt that Hamas, which the IDF has severely weakened, can be removed without further fighting.
Israelis, moreover, remember the first Trump administration’s failed effort, led by Kushner, to fashion a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Unveiled at a White House ceremony in January 2020, “Prosperity to Peace” envisaged the renovation of Palestinian communities in the West Bank and Gaza at a price tag of $28 billion over 10 years. The plan went nowhere. While Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who attended the White House unveiling, embraced the extensive and detailed proposal as a basis for negotiation, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who declined to show up, promptly said no.
Israelis also remember that while their governments were open to Obama administration and George W. Bush administration peace efforts, Palestinians flatly rejected them.
And Israelis recall that Palestinians have been dismissing plans for partitioning the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea since before Israel was established and before West Bank and Gaza Arabs adopted the name Palestinian.
The principal reason, though, that Israelis – and responsible observers elsewhere – see little chance that the Trump administration’s “Project Sunrise” will transform Gaza any time soon stems from Hamas’ deepest political and religious commitments. No peace will come to Gaza unless Hamas departs, suffers a decisive military defeat, or renounces – with matching conduct – the war of annihilation against Israel that its 1988 charter declared an Islamic imperative.
In early October President Trump exaggerated when he announced that Hamas and Israel had agreed to his Gaza peace plan. Israel expressed broad support while raising specific concerns. However, Hamas agreed only to return the 20 remaining living hostages – whom it had held in gruesome conditions for some two years – and the bodies of the last 28 deceased hostages. In exchange, Israel released 1,950 Palestinian prisoners: 1,700 detained since Oct. 7, and 250 convicted of serious crimes. Israelis have greeted the return of the hostages with jubilation even as Hamas has yet to fulfill its obligations: The body of the last deceased hostage, Ran Gvili, remains in Gaza.
Little further progress toward peace will occur in the portion of Gaza controlled by Hamas so long as, in defiance of the Trump plan, Hamas keeps its arms, the area stays militarized, and Palestinians remain faithful to, and indoctrinate their children in, militant Islam. Because of their beliefs, the jihadists are unlikely to change their ways.
In “What Hamas Really Wants: The Ideology of the Islamic Resistance Movement,” Cole Bunzel draws on English and Arabic sources to illuminate Hamas’ determination, even when it considers compromises and makes concessions, to destroy Israel.
Appearing in a recently published collection, “October 7: The Wars Over Words and Deeds,” edited by Asaf Romirowsky and Donna Robinson Divine, Bunzel’s essay also casts light on oversights and miscalculations that left Israel vulnerable. Although some such strike against Israel was foreseeable, Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack was not foreseen – not by the uppermost echelons of the Israeli political and national-security establishment; not by the vast majority of Middle East scholars and journalists; and not by policy analysts and diplomats. Fewer authorities and experts would have supposed that Hamas was deterred if more had taken seriously the jihadists’ openly and repeatedly stated aims – in Hamas’ founding commitments; in the organization’s pronouncements over many years concerning the Islamic concept of hudna, or armistice, and its embrace of the “phased solution”; and in Oct. 7-mastermind Yahya Sinwar’s statements.
According to Bunzel, an assistant professor at the University of Florida’s Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education (I serve on the academic advisory board), the “exceptional cruelty and bloodlust motivated by profound hatred” that the jihadists exhibited on Oct. 7 reflected “violent, annihilationist intentions toward Israel.” In the spirit of the Muslim Brotherhood, of which it is the Palestinian offshoot, Hamas – an acronym in Arabic for “Islamic Resistance Movement” – seeks “the Islamization of society and politics” and not just in Gaza and the West Bank but in all of Israel. In accordance with the Brotherhood’s professed objectives, moreover, Hamas’ conquest of Israel represents only one arena of the Islamists’ multi-front war against the West.
Hamas’ founding purpose was to eliminate Israel. “Upon the outbreak of the First Intifada in December 1987, the Political Bureau of the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza, headed by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, released the first communiqué in the name of the Islamic Resistance Movement,” Bunzel writes. Hamas aims, the communiqué stated, “to liberate Palestine in its entirety from the Mediterranean Sea to the River Jordan” and to replace it with “an independent Islamic state.”
Hamas’1988 Charter followed swiftly. The charter asserts that “there is no solution to the Palestinian issue except through jihad.” It stresses that Israel constitutes occupied “Muslim territory” whose “liberation is an individual duty binding on every Muslim, and so the banner of jihad must be raised to oppose the seizure of Palestine by the Jews.” And it rehearses farcical antisemitic tropes. It accuses Jews of driving “the French Revolution, the Communist revolution and most of the revolutions we heard and hear about.” And it charges Jews with using their wealth “for the purpose of sabotaging societies and achieving Zionist interests” and “to control imperialistic countries and instigate them to colonize many countries in order to enable them to exploit their resources and spread corruption there.”
Following the 1993 Oslo Accords, in which the PLO recognized Israel’s right to exist, Hamas refined its strategy. While maintaining that war with Israel would end only with the Jewish state’s destruction, Hamas recognized the advantages of a hudna – a temporary cessation of hostilities that might last many years. “Hamas’s leaders emphasized that a hudna would not imply recognition of Israel, and that recognition would never be considered,” writes Bunzel. “The very point of a hudna was to preserve the Palestinian claim to the land on which Israel had been established, so that the jihad to recover the land could be resumed at a future date.” Hudna was a component “of what Hamas sometimes described as ‘the phased solution’ (al-hall al-marhali) to the liberation of Palestine, meaning that it represented one phase in the long struggle to destroy the Jewish state.” Part of Hamas’ phased solution consisted in appearing to focus on improving Gazans’ quality of life while building hundreds of miles of military tunnels – cost estimates range from hundreds of millions to over a billion dollars – under the territory’s civilian population.
In 2017, Hamas issued “A Document of General Principles and Policies.” Many viewed the document as tempering the organization’s goals. However, observes Bunzel, Hamas still called for Israel’s destruction by means of the “phased solution.” While accepting the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza as “a formula of national consensus,” Hamas regarded such a state as a step toward “the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea.”
Yahya Sinwar embraced Hamas’ overriding goal. Shortly after his 2017 election as Hamas leader, he declared, “Over is the time Hamas spent discussing recognizing Israel. Now Hamas will discuss when we will wipe out Israel.” In September 2022 remarks at “The Promise of the Latter Days Conference: Palestine After Liberation,” Bunzel reports, Sinwar underscored the imminence of war against the Jewish state: “[Our] military preparation, planning, and training, in both present and past, above ground and in its depths, in the darkness of the sea and in the sky above, spring from our belief in the nearness of liberation. This means that there is a need to prepare for what comes next, given that its future occurrence is an undeniable reality.”
Hamas has as much chance of desisting from seeking Israel’s annihilation and concluding a durable peace agreement with the Jewish state as a leopard has of changing its spots. Inattentiveness – on the part of Israeli political leaders and military commanders, Middle East scholars and journalists, and policy analysts and diplomats – to Hamas’ beliefs thwarts responsible diplomacy and intensifies the danger not only to the Jewish state but also, given Hamas’ Muslim Brotherhood ties, to the United States and the West.