00:00Let's bring in Alan Pincus, former Israeli diplomat, former advisor to two ex-Israeli prime ministers, and I'll name them, Shimon Peres and Eckhart Barak.
00:09Alan writes for The Independent. Alan Pincus, as always, great to have you on France 24. We appreciate your time and your analysis.
00:16I'm going to set you free now to say what you think and what you feel about the situation.
00:20I mean, clearly we've had strong words in the Knesset, which perhaps some would say there were some areas which really Trump didn't deal with.
00:27And then you go to Sharm el-Sheikh. And again, there's a lot of willingness, it seems, from the international community to help.
00:34But where does it go? How do you see this coming together or not?
00:38OK, you have an hour or do we have three minutes?
00:43You talk and I'll cut you off when we're done.
00:46By all means, cut me off.
00:48Look, the speech at the Knesset was Trump being Trump, you know, sitting on his laurels, collecting the sycophancy, collecting the compliments, winning the praises of a government and a Knesset that by a majority of which do not like this deal.
01:07And this is where Trump does deserve the credit for doing something that his predecessors did not do and refrained from doing and were afraid of doing, and that is pressure Israel.
01:19Then you move on to Sharm el-Sheikh.
01:22You mentioned you correctly, you know, the commitment that was made there in front of all these leaders.
01:28But conspicuously missing from that meeting was Israel.
01:32Now, there's a reason Israel was not invited, although there was this half-comical sequence of events when Mr. Netanyahu really wanted to go and Trump called the president of Egypt and he said, OK, fine, he could come, you know, like it's a prom party or something.
01:48And then Erdogan apparently or reportedly called and said, well, if he's going, I'm not coming.
01:53And OK, and in the end, Israel is missing from that forum.
01:57Now, you cannot have, forget lasting peace and all the cliches and the hyperboles about, you know, a transformative moment and a point of inflection and the dawn of a new Middle East.
02:10That's great. That sounds wonderful.
02:12But you can't have a deal if Israel is not there and the Palestinian who was there, Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, is not accepted by or acceptable to Israel as someone who can extend his governance to Gaza.
02:29And so while everyone is rightly happy today because of the release of the hostages and on the other side, I'm sorry, the release of Palestinian prisoners, I fear that the next stages are intractable.
02:44They are too ambiguous or they are too difficult to implement.
02:48And in the absence of goodwill, you know, it could all come crumbling down.
02:55I hope, I really hope I am wrong.
02:58But that depends on one ingredient, Mark, and one ingredient, well, at least one critical ingredient.
03:03And that is Trump's continued commitment.
03:05Because what he did by pressuring Netanyahu is prove two things.
03:09A, that it is doable and you can do this effectively, which neither Biden nor Obama nor Clinton nor George H.W. Bush did, all of which had to interact with Netanyahu.
03:23And the second thing that he did was he forced Netanyahu into doing something that he didn't want to do, which means, and he was hinting to that effect in Shalem, Shalem the Sheikh, whatever it is that the Middle East has in store in terms of the Israelis and Palestinians, it will probably need to be done under a different government in Israel.
03:50And for that, you're going to need election.
03:53And OK, so that's my monologue for you, Mark.
03:55You didn't even interrupt you once.
03:57I'm wondering, because you work with Shimon Peres, who is an absolute legend of Israeli politics and a man of peace and a man of great foresight and vision.
04:06How would he be seeing this right now?
04:10He would try to seize the opportunity.
04:12He would stop the war a year and a half ago.
04:15He would take the Biden plan of late 2023, the Biden plan of mid-2024, and most certainly he would embrace and endorse the Trump plan.
04:30By the way, so would Ehud Barak, and so would Ehud Olmert, and so would Ariel Sharon, the only intransigent actor here who wanted to prolong the war and will try.
04:42I don't have any doubts about this.
04:45He will try and subvert this and undermine this is Mr. Netanyahu.
04:51And the question is, how soon will that happen and how engaged or conversely, livid and disengaged Trump will be?
04:59Was it interesting for you when Trump made a point of being nice to Yair Lapid, the opposition leader in the Knesset, when he spoke to him and said, you're a good guy?
05:09Then he turned to Netanyahu and said, look, you're an opposition guy.
05:12He's actually quite a nice guy.
05:13Be nicer to him.
05:16He was nicer to him than he is to Democrats on Capitol Hill.
05:20What can I say?
05:23It's good that he kept the quorum, but to be honest with you, Mark, and this deserves a different conversation, there is no real opposition in Israel.
05:34The only opposition that exists is the public, and the public has been demonstrating against Mr. Netanyahu for three years, one year against his constitutional coup,
05:43and two years, one year on the war and one year on the hostage release.
05:50Had it not been for Trump, by the way, this is why he was received the way he was received in Israel.
05:55Had it not been for Trump, we wouldn't have this agreement and the hostages would not be hugging on their families in those wonderful and, you know, and tear-eyed moments.
06:09And so that he was nice to Yaya Lapid, yeah, that's, you know, the quorum is always nice.
06:15I don't think he knows who Lapid is.
06:18Alan Pincus, we need to leave it there.
06:20I know we could talk a lot longer, and certainly I'd like to hear more about your time with Shimon Peres sometime, sir,
06:25because that must have been a fascinating moment to live with.
06:27But Alan Pincus, former Israeli diplomat, former advisor to the two Israeli prime ministers, Shimon Peres and Echo Barak,
06:32and a writer for The Independent.
06:34Thanks, as always, for joining us here in France 24, sir.
Be the first to comment