According to media outlets across the political spectrum, the ceasefire in Gaza was negotiated by Steve Witkoff, a New York dealmaker who is known to be one of President Donald Trump’s most trusted friends.
For now, the finer points of the deal support the fact that it’s all business — Zionism, it appears, may be losing its hold over the US administration.
Into the breach, remarkably, may come a scenario in which Israeli Jews and Palestinians are required to co-exist in a single democratic state. Sound familiar? As it turns out, the Palestinians have a Madiba of their own, Marwan Barghouti.
On being hated
“As racist as you were,” said Gideon Levy, “I was more, because I was brought up here, and you were not brought up here.”
It was 14 January 2025, around 24 hours before the official announcement of the Gaza ceasefire, and Levy, Israel’s most notorious hard-left Jewish journalist was in conversation with Peter Beinart, one of the most notorious hard-left Jewish journalists in the United States. The platform for the discussion was The Beinart Notebook, the latter’s personal Substack video channel, which had arrived in my inbox with a subject line that said it all: “Gideon Levy on Being Hated”.
I had, of course, clicked on the link instantly. For the last 10 minutes, spurred on by Beinart, Levy had been providing a potted history of his journey from an ardent young Zionist to his status, at age 71, as the paramount native-born critic of the Israeli nationalist ideology.
As a boy in Tel Aviv in the late 1950s and early ’60s, Levy was surrounded by Holocaust survivors. His parents, he said, had fled Europe as refugees in 1939. Although he had been brought up in a non-political home, he remembered himself as a “good boy” who believed in the Zionist ideal and had no compunctions about joining the military.
Up until the age of 25, he had never heard the word “Nakba”; as a young man, he had fully subscribed to the notion that “the Arabs, the Muslims” wanted to drive all Jews into the sea.
“We wanted peace, because we say ‘shalom’,” recalled Levy, in a quip that stressed the blindness of the paradigm. “Nobody told us that they say ‘salaam’.”
He was already in his mid-thirties, Levy continued, when it first dawned on him that the paradigm may have been compromising his faculty of sight.
One day in the late 1980s, as a reporter for the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, Levy found himself in the West Bank on what appeared to be an “incidental” story about uprooted olive trees. There was something about the experience that drew him back for a few more visits, he said, until suddenly he was confronted with a pair of incontrovertible facts: first, “the real drama of Israel” was in the Occupied Territories; second, there was almost nobody from the Hebrew press on the beat.
Gradually, said Levy, he decided to dedicate his career to “covering the occupation”; over time, his political position shifted in increments towards the left. “Separating with Zionism, those are very painful decisions,” he informed Beinart. “They were not made in one day.”
But still, Beinart had been pushing for a “particular moment” in Levy’s process, an experience that may have counted as a “revelation”. And, as it turned out, much later in his career, Levy had travelled on a press junket to South Africa.
“This was the turning point in which I understood that I have to get out of the closet,” he said. “For many years I spoke about the two-state solution, knowing that it will never happen… I cheated myself, because I knew that nobody is going to evacuate those hundreds of thousands of Jewish settlers [from the territories]. Without their evacuation, there is no two-state solution.
“So this trip to South Africa, it made me believe in the one-state solution, in the way that the unthinkable should be thinkable. I remember before the fall of the apartheid system, and even after, everyone saying there will be a terrible bloodbath. And I remember two moments, I remember a white beggar at a junction in Johannesburg, and I remember someone I met, a black guy, who had a white secretary.”
From there, the discussion landed on the aforementioned exchange about inherited racism, with Levy insisting that Beinart couldn’t compete. The two men were laughing, relaxed, at ease, as if the shedding of their Zionist prejudices had entailed the lifting of a great weight.
For me, against the news that a ceasefire in Gaza was imminent, it all felt deeply significant. For starters, since very few others in the Jewish world were daring to draw the comparison, the citing of the South African example was an exceptionally bold move.
Throughout the hour-long interview, Levy and Beinart would return to the democratic transition in our country, in mutual acknowledgement that here was an instance where full-scale racial bloodshed had been averted.
Although, to a South African ear, Levy’s reference to white beggars and secretaries may have sounded naïve, there was nothing about the thrust of their conversation that was guileless. As highly experienced journalists, both men could point to the similarities as well as the differences — Beinart, in fact, was raised in the US by leftist South African parents, and has written extensively on how his upbringing shaped his consciousness.
Then, as if to amplify the significance in light of the impending ceasefire, there was the hatred that both men had drawn from their respective Jewish communities since the Hamas attack. Beinart, as the interviewer, did not let on that he had consistently been branded a “kapo” (a Jewish prisoner functionary in the Nazi concentration camps) for his views — instead, he encouraged Levy to take the reins.
There were a few brief stories that Levy told, but only one with his characteristically resigned smile. Early every morning as he was heading out on his run, he said, the same woman would pass him on the route and shout the word “boged” (Hebrew for “traitor”) before speeding off.
“That’s the beginning of my day,” he remarked drily.
More serious, as he had already informed Beinart, he had recently been physically threatened in a small town near the airport, where it was family custom that his son would visit the famous local shwarma joint before boarding a flight.
“It was really disturbing,” said Levy. “All of a sudden, there was a big circle around us. The first one recognises me and starts screaming, and then he calls, ‘Come, come, see who is dining here.’ Then he started to scream to the owners, ‘How do you feed this man?’ And then came the sentence which I will never forget: ‘You are a Nazi. You know why you are a Nazi? Because you care about the children of Gaza’.”
As a journalist first and foremost, Levy — who was extremely fortunate to escape the mob — turned the incident into an instructive and scathing piece, published in Ha’aretz on 5 January. If he was right about the South African example, it occurred to me, it would one day stand as testament to a nation that had lost its soul.
Of terrorists and peacemakers
In the third week of January, leading up to the inauguration of Donald Trump as the 47th president of the United States, every Middle East watcher worth their salt was reading up on Steve Witkoff.
A New York Jewish businessman and consummate dealmaker who had made his fortune in real estate, Witkoff had recently been appointed Trump’s envoy to the Middle East. Major media outlets from across the political spectrum were quick to catch on — the impending Gaza ceasefire was being driven, they had learnt, by Witkoff’s hardball negotiation style.
On 19 January, NBC News reported the statements of a Trump transition official with “direct knowledge” of Witkoff’s role in the process.
“Remember, there’s a lot of people, radicals, fanatics, not just from the Hamas side, from the right wing of the Israeli side, who are absolutely incentivised to blow this whole deal up,” said the transition official.
“If we don’t help the Gazans, if we don’t make their life better, if we don’t give them a sense of hope, there’s going to be a rebellion.”
The day before, on 18 January, Al Jazeera had published an analysis that — for the first time in 15 months — had been cautiously optimistic about a US government official. Quoting Zaha Hassan, a political analyst and fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Al Jazeera noted that Witkoff’s history of business dealings with the Gulf states had set him up as a “good broker for regional peace”.
Hassan said: “Given Trump’s desire in realising a Saudi-Israeli normalisation agreement and the Saudi requirement that such a deal would have to include a Palestinian state or an irreversible path to one, some hope exists that Trump, unlike Biden, will use the leverage of the office of the presidency in the service of a true ‘deal of the century’.”
And so, set against the backdrop of the dehumanisation and the hatred, a brand-new possibility began to take shape. The crux, it appeared, was that ideology had left the building. Where Biden was a self-proclaimed Zionist, Trump didn’t seem to give a damn — his loyalty was to the deal, and to “America First”.
“My proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier,” Trump declared in his inauguration address on 20 January, after legitimately taking the credit for the release of three Israeli hostages the day before.
Still, perhaps more so than ever, on this night he was also the master showman, a concealer of his hand. If Zionists were feeling comforted by the fact that family members of the remaining hostages had been granted pride-of-place in the hall, they would also have to contend with the following statement of Potus 47:
“We will measure our success not only by the battles we win but also by the wars we end, and, perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.”
I, for one, could feel the ideologies melting away. While there was no doubt that Trump would bring on apocalyptic human suffering with his environmental and immigration policies, not to mention his collapse of the international rule of law, on this point at least the good omens were all there. Because, that very same evening, Elon Musk had exploded a red-line ideology way up into the stars.
During his own speech on inauguration night, as it so happened, Musk had treated the global audience to what German Jews had deemed a full-blown Nazi salute.
Pro-Israel Twitter, led by Ben Shapiro, descended into existential chaos — we were all “f***ing idiots,” Shapiro suggested, because look, here was a picture of him and Musk at Auschwitz. The Anti-Defamation League, meanwhile, which had once been the US’s strongest bulwark against anti-Semitism, dismissed the salute as no more than an “awkward gesture”.
If Musk was simply trolling us, I thought, that was more than okay. The genuine upshot, the way I saw it, was that it was now beginning to matter much less that Beinart was being smeared as a kapo and Levy as a Nazi. In this strange new world, whatever horrors or liberations it brought, there was at least one thing that was becoming increasingly clear — the practice of name-calling was losing its sting.
This brought us back full circle to the power brokers and the realpolitik, a framework that — again, if Trump himself was to be believed — was about no more and no less than the arithmetic of the deal. What, then, were some of the hidden equations in the Witkoff deal?
As it turned out, over in Israel, while all of this was going down, the Benjamin Netanyahu-supporting Channel 14 was having a private meltdown about the end of the slaughter in Gaza. With a conservative estimate of almost 50,000 dead, and no hospitals or universities left standing, the “Bibistim” were not done with their campaign of revenge. Witkoff, the channel alleged, was “working for Qatar”.
Channel 14, it occurred to me, may have been suitably nervous — if Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states had agreed to normalise relations with Israel in return for the promise of Palestinian statehood, both the channel and the Israeli prime minister were in danger of becoming extinct.
But there was a glaring inconsistency. As one of the executive orders he signed on his first day in office, according to Reuters, Trump “rescinded sanctions imposed by the former Biden administration on far-right Israeli settler groups and individuals accused of being involved in violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank”.
In other words, or so it appeared, Trump had no intention of forcing the expulsion of Jewish settlers from what was theoretically the heart of the Palestinian state. Regarding the deep expertise of Levy, as outlined above, how could he then reasonably expect to preside over a roadmap to a two-state solution?
It was, as they say, a head-scratcher.
The most immediate explanation was that Trump, via Witkoff, had been bluffing about Palestinian statehood. But this was unlikely, given what a cold war with the Gulf states would do to the global oil market.
Then there was the possibility that Trump was simply exacting revenge on Biden; that a few months down the line, when the Gaza deal hit its third stage, he would reinstate the sanctions and begin to expel the settlers. But this assumed that Trump was bluffing, in his inauguration speech, about wars that the US would “never get into”.
The most unthinkable option, it therefore seemed to me, might have been placed (secretly, for now) on the table.
Had someone perhaps whispered something in Trump’s ear about the one-state solution? For the US and the Gulf states, which would presumably have to foot the bill for the peacekeeping buffer between the two entities (over and above whatever it would cost to rebuild Gaza), was this perhaps the cheapest solution?
If so, it occurred to me, it may have been a plan audacious enough to appeal to Trump. It was all wild conjecture, of course, but maybe Potus 47 had an ace up his sleeve. Maybe, just maybe, he had been thinking about Marwan Barghouti, the “Palestinian Mandela” who had been languishing in an Israeli maximum security prison since 2002.
Still chosen after all these years
“Now, you might be wondering, how can you compare a convicted murderer to Nelson Mandela?” asked Mehdi Hasan, the US’s most notorious leftist Muslim journalist, on the evening of 18 January. “The ‘terrorist’ title? Who cares, Israel calls every Palestinian they don’t like a ‘terrorist’. The US called Nelson Mandela a ‘terrorist’ and had him on a ‘terrorist watch list’ right up until 2008. But the murder convictions, on the face of it, are bad.”
As had become my habit in recent months, I had been watching Hasan on Zeteo, the online platform he had launched in response to what he considered the skewed Western coverage of the Israel-Hamas war. As part of that night’s segment, Hasan had provided his viewers with a brief character assessment of Barghouti, including the fact that he was a “unifying, younger leader with charisma, credibility, popular support and the ability to negotiate peace with Israel and end the illegal occupation.”
Described by The Economist as “the world’s most important prisoner”, by The Guardian as “the most popular Palestinian leader alive,” and by multiple news organisations as the “Palestinian Mandela,” Barghouti — said Hasan — had been chosen by the majority of Palestinians in a number of polls as the man they wanted as their elected leader.
“Being popular and being in prison, by the way, isn’t the only thing that Barghouti has in common with the late Nelson Mandela,” added Hasan. “Like him, Barghouti has spent decades working towards uniting his people under one banner, even agreeing to a two-state solution in order to end the occupation and the conflict with Israel.
“As an analysis by Al Jazeera last year noted, it may well be Barghouti’s commitment to a two-state solution that presents the most significant threat to an Israeli government seemingly determined to backtrack upon the agreements it undertook in Oslo in the 1990s. That commitment comes despite Barghouti being subjected to Israeli terror and violence for most of his life.”
Of course, at the time I was watching the segment, Trump had not yet lifted the sanctions on the violent Jewish settlers in the West Bank. But while, two days later, the board for peace-making would be flipped, at least one thing had remained the same since 2002 — Barghouti’s convictions for murder.
And here, although Hasan acknowledged that Barghouti was “no pacificist” — like Mandela, who had early on in his career sensed the necessity of an “armed struggle,” the Palestinian was far from ingenuous — there was, according to the journalist, a lot more going on beneath the surface.
The “red flags” were numerous, Hasan stated, beginning with the fact that the Israelis had been trying to kill Barghouti since long before they had convicted him of any crimes. Barghouti had also been captured by Israeli forces and kept incommunicado for a month (red flag number two); subjected to torture and “false information leaks that claimed he confessed to the crimes he was accused of” (red flag number three); and had faced trial in Tel Aviv although he had been arrested in the occupied West Bank, in direct contravention of the Geneva Conventions (red flag number four).
“His speeches in court were far from those of a violent criminal,” Hasan clarified. “Nor were they Hamas-style calls for the destruction of Israel.”
At this point, one of those long-ago speeches was shown to the viewer, and it was indeed a plea for peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
“But it never mattered what Barghouti said in court nor what defence he presented,” Hasan added, “because his verdict was decided before the trial even began. He knew it, which is why he was silent for the majority of the trial and refused to recognise the authority of Israel’s courts.”
By journalistic measures alone, I was thinking as I came to the end of the segment, this was an astounding piece — expertly presented with a clear narrative line; every statement of fact backed up by incontrovertible documentary evidence.
The substance, though, was the true shocker. Not only had Barghouti been in prison for almost 23 years, four years less than Mandela upon his release, but, according to his son — whom Hasan interviewed in the second part of the segment — he had remained “always present, always positive, always optimistic”.
As of this writing, Israel was still refusing to release Barghouti as part of the prisoners-for-hostages swap negotiated by Witkoff. To me and countless others, the reason for the refusal was obvious. But just as economic pressures, more than anything else, had ensured the release of Mandela in 1989, it was possible that the equations of the Witkoff deal would eventually ensure the release of Barghouti.
Again, what counted in the “Palestinian Mandela’s” favour was that — after a long succession of US administrations in thrall to the Zionist state — ideology had finally left the building.
How, then, would Israelis cope with such an event? How would the millions of Zionist Jews in the diaspora cope with such unthinkable developments?
The answer, for starters, was that Barghouti wasn’t Hamas; he was a member of Fatah, with whom the Israelis may have successfully negotiated had Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin not been assassinated by a messianic Zionist zealot in 1995. Then, of course, there were the answers of Beinart and Levy, who were looking to the South African democratic transition for guidance.
“Again and again, people don’t believe me,” the 71-year-old Levy informed Beinart. “I’m travelling now over 35 years, at least once a week in the occupied territories… At least once a week I go to the grassroots, victims of the occupation, not politicians, not intellectuals. Simple people, who yesterday lost their son, who lost their house, who lost their parents … and I can tell you that, again and again, I hear a desire for living together. But in normal terms, with dignity and equality.”
Beinart was in full agreement. “Yes, I identify with that so much,” said the younger journalist. “I am always being told that I am naïve about Palestinians by people who never talk to Palestinians … it reminds me of the white South Africans I grew up with [in the United States], they were all experts on black South Africans. I was thinking, ‘Where does this expertise come from?’”
The key question for Beinart, though, was reflective of my question above — would Israeli Jews ever consent to live in the united, equal and fully democratic state of Levy’s most cherished journalistic dreams?
“You cannot judge the future according to the conditions of the present,” said Levy. “Now, I hardly know one Israeli Jew who will be ready for this. If you tell them maybe the prime minister will be Palestinian, they leave the next day. But you know, what you are saying about South Africa is so true, finally the white ones stayed. Most of them, and again, I don’t want to romanticise South Africa, but most of the white people stayed.” DM
Read more by Kevin Bloom on the conflict in the Middle East:
- ‘Iran hates me’ — Imtiaz Sooliman opens up about Jihadism, Hamas and The Kiffness (11 December 2024)
- High noon at the ICC: Zionism’s intractable Netanyahu problem (24 November 2024)
- Open court: In dialogue with a South African Zionist leader, Benji Shulman (3 November 2024)
- Fascism’s strange resurgence — a ‘bad Jew’ South African breaks bread with the German media (9 October 2024)
- Conversations with Randa: How the life of a Gazan refugee maps Israel’s dilemma (17 July 2024)
- Holy War revisited — ‘You want it darker, we kill the flame’ (8 May 2024)
- Messianism and madness: An intimate hell ride through end times in the Holy Land (22 October 2023)