Dan and I decided to turn parts of our ME201 discussion yesterday into today’s podcast, so you’ll hear a few voices from the class asking questions.
Supposedly, the ceasefire is now back on. Amit Segal is another great journalist to follow; he writes:
It’s Monday, October 20, and the strikes in Gaza have stopped, the ceasefire has been renewed, and humanitarian aid has resumed—and Israel is also preparing to receive a hostage’s body from Hamas tonight. So, does that mean yesterday’s strikes in Gaza wielded the desired results?
On one hand, as I wrote yesterday, just as the IDF did with Hezbollah following its immediate violation of the November 2024 ceasefire, yesterday was an opportunity for the IDF to use overwhelming force to enforce the ceasefire.
Initially, that seemed to be the direction Israel was taking. Hours after the IDF began striking targets in Gaza, Hamas announced that it would hand over the body of a hostage that it had just located “if conditions on the ground allow.” Some two hours later, an Israeli source said that the political echelon instructed COGAT not to allow the transfer of humanitarian aid to Gaza today. And now, with a hostage’s body expected to be returned tonight, it seems to have worked—at least on face value.
But as he writes—and as Dan and I have both stressed, repeatedly—the real problem is disarming Hamas and demilitarizing Gaza. Segal writes that there are two possibilities. First, as Trump seems (perhaps) to envision, a multinational force will enter Gaza and dismantle Hamas. Israel is dubious. It would prefer option two—sending in the IDF. Trump has said he’ll green light this if Hamas doesn’t disarm.
Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff are back in Israel, reportedly to urge Netanyahu not to take any action that could further endanger the ceasefire:
The pair also met with senior IDF officials to verify progress on the deal, the report says. “Do not act in a way that would endanger the ceasefire. We want to do everything to reach the second phase,” the envoys reportedly told Netanyahu, adding that while “self-defense” is acceptable, “risking the ceasefire” is not.
Netanyahu and Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer, who also attended the meeting, conveyed that Israel remains committed to the ceasefire framework and expects Hamas to uphold its side of the agreement, the Hebrew network adds.
In a highly unusual occurrence, the two Trump envoys also met with two IDF major generals today, Channel 12 says. According to the network, they sat down with the head of the IDF’s Technological Division and the head of Military Intelligence to assess Israel’s efforts to advance Trump framework.
JD Vance, too, is on the way. I’m not sure why. Perhaps to persuade Israelis that any concession would be preferable to having him lurk around and scold them over their ingratitude.
Trump, addressing the media, said that Hamas’s violation of the ceasefire “would be taken care of quickly.”
“They’re going to be nice, and if they’re not ... we’re going to eradicate them if we have to. They’ll be eradicated—and they know that.” He added that at this time, he has not told Israel to resume strikes in Gaza and that the US was “taking lots of steps to maintain ceasefire.”
While you’re reading Amit Segal, here’s an interesting account: Behind closed doors: How the deal with Hamas was born—the inside story:
If Israelis had heard how the President of the United States spoke about the hostages, it’s doubtful that he would have received such thunderous cheers at Hostages’ Square last Saturday night. To say they were a secondary concern for him would be an understatement — and even that understates it. Donald Trump favored eliminating Hamas the American way, and 20 living hostages (he was always confused about their number and minimized it — I wonder what Sigmund Freud would have said) seemed to him a marginal matter, collateral damage.
Only belatedly did he perceive how strategic the issue was for the Israelis, and therefore for their government as well. In the United States, presidents have usually not been criticized for meeting hostages’ families too little, but for doing so too often (for details, Google “Ronald Reagan”).
In one of the discussions before Operation Gideon’s Chariots B began, Benjamin Netanyahu spoke about the scar that would remain in Israeli society if the IDF conquered Gaza City at the cost of the hostages’ lives. Allow me to guess that he never really believed that moment would come. Indeed, in recent months, Netanyahu and Ron Dermer’s assessment was that an operation to conquer Gaza City, if it happens, may well begin, but most certainly would not reach completion. Here is the inside story. …
There’s a line in it that should really attract scrutiny: “Netanyahu called President Trump minutes [before striking Qatar], but the president was groggy after a late night of discussions. It took time to reach him. The strike went ahead.” Groggy? Too groggy to take an urgent call? How often does that happen? Journalists might want to ask.
Here, by the way, is the 60 Minutes interview with Kushner and Witkoff. Lesley Stahl is anything but an incisive interviewer—what a wasted opportunity!—but I still found it interesting. The very end of the interview contains a few surprises: Apparently, Iran has been calling, asking Trump for a deal. True? I have no idea. Witkoff seems so guileless that it’s hard to imagine he’s just making that up out of whole cloth; then again, no member of the Trump Administration could be constitutionally incapable of making something up out of whole cloth. It’s a job requirement.
The Ayatollah Khamenei does not seem to be of the same view. He just told Trump to “keep dreaming” if he think Iran’s nuclear facilities have been destroyed:
Khamenei also rejected Trump’s offer to resume nuclear negotiations that were cut short when Israel struck the Islamic Republic on June 13, leading to 12 days of war during which Trump ordered the unprecedented strikes on Iran. “The US president proudly says they bombed and destroyed Iran’s nuclear industry. Very well, keep dreaming!” said Khamenei in comments posted to his website.
Speaking of Witkoff’s guilelessness, an awfully queasy anecdote begins at about 26:40. The exchange was clearly planned in advance, because Stahl’s line of questioning indicates she’s heard this story from them before:
STAHL: So, you get to the meeting in Egypt and you’re in a meeting with the chief Hamas negotiator, right? And you’re meeting him for the first time. This is just a month after the attack in Doha.
WITKOFF: So, we got into the room. The lead negotiator was sitting right next to me.
STAHL: That negotiator was in Doha when the Israelis struck.
WITKOFF: Correct.
STAHL: He survived, but his son was killed. Is that right?
WITKOFF: That’s right. And we expressed our condolences to him for the loss of his son—he mentioned it—and I told him that I had lost a son and that we were both members of a really bad club: parents who had buried children. And, um, you know, Jared describes it maybe a little bit better than me—
STAHL: —because you were watching.
KUSHNER: Yeah. What I saw at that moment was very interesting. You had—we go into a room and you have the Qataris, the Turks, and the Egyptians. And then we meet the four representatives of Hamas, which is a terrorist organization. And I’m looking at these guys and I’m thinking, “These are hardened guys who have been through two years of war. They’ve obviously, you know, they green lit an assault that raped and murdered and did some of the most barbaric things. They’ve been holding hostages while they’re, they’re, while Gaza’s been, you know, bombed. And they’ve, they’ve withstood all the suffering. But when Steve and him spoke about their sons, it turned from a negotiation with a terrorist group to seeing two human beings kind of showing a vulnerability with each other.
Bonding with a blood-soaked monster over the shared experience of losing a son is strange, but perhaps that’s the sort of thing that happens in negotiations like this. Hostage negotiators do, in fact, build rapport with disgusting people; it’s part of the trade.
But they’re presenting this as if they were genuinely moved by it. They’re making a point of doing so.
Why is Witkoff telling us that he and a Hamas negotiator—men separated by a canyon of blood—bonded over their dead sons? In a closed room, sure, that’s a legitimate technique of crisis bargaining; hostage negotiators have long used tactics like this to unlock concessions. But Kushner and Witkoff aren’t presenting this as an account of the artful way they manipulated a terrorist. They seem to think we’ll be moved. We’re evidently supposed to think, “Well, these Hamas fellows may be mass-murdering sadists, torturers, head-choppers, rapists, and disembowelers par excellence, but deep down they’re just loving dads.”
Why would a man turn his own dead son into a prop for a K-mart catharsis on national television? Are the two of them just so deeply stewed in kitsch and Dr. Phil that this seems appropriate to them? Or are they cynically aware that their viewers are so insatiably hungry for this kind of kitsch that even an account of high-level diplomatic negotiations—with Hamas, no less—must be bathed in it?
I suppose the answer is probably both: they inhabit kitsch even as they weaponize it. That bizarre emotional tonality—the syrupy, self-dramatizing “we cried together” sentimentality—is the cultural signature of the Kushner-Trump ecosystem, where vulgar capitalism meets vulgar dramaturgy. They live in a world where emotional exhibition is the only recognized proof of sincerity. They’ve mastered the manipulation of that affective economy for political effect.
There’s an uncanny absence of aesthetic self-consciousness in the way they recount this vignette. They don’t hear how grotesque it sounds to stage-manage a “moment of shared fatherly grief” with a man who organized the slaughter of whole families. To them, emotion itself is redemptive. If you feel deeply (or perform the feeling), you’ve done something moral. It’s like a saccharine inversion of Calvinism, with sincerity replacing sanctity. The whole thing, of course, is the ethos of American televangelism and daytime talk. Confession is absolution. Sentiment is virtue. Every villain must have a sob story; every story must end in healing.
It’s exactly what Milan Kundera meant when he called kitsch “the absolute denial of s**t.” It’s the refusal to acknowledge the irredeemable. They’ve turned horror into pathos because horror without a redemptive moral, I suppose, would be intolerable to them.
And I suppose they belong to the class of Americans for whom the public display of private emotion (weddings staged for Instagram, funerals for prime time, “intimate” philanthropy) has become a natural register. There’s no boundary between PR and interior life. So, yes, I think—they mean it. They feel deeply and they know they’re on camera. They know perfectly well that their audience will lap up this therapeutic emotional pornography. The political culture from which The Apprentice emerged rewards men capable of collapsing the Arab-Israeli conflict into “enemies finding common humanity.” Nothing so dreadful that a little pathos can’t score it in D major. Cue the harpist.
Kitsch isn’t just bad taste. It’s a whole epistemology. It flattens reality into symbols of virtue and redemption. The Kushner doctrine—“issues are simple, people are complicated”—is also the Kitsch doctrine. It denies tragedy, denies insoluble conflict, denies evil that can’t be negotiated away.
Authoritarians and populists love kitsch because it short-circuits irony and thought while flooding the critical faculties with feeling. (Think of Putin’s “mothers of soldiers” photo-ops and Xi’s propaganda vignettes of filial piety: same mechanism.) Kushner and Witkoff are the American iteration—soft-core, techno-capitalist kitsch, not totalitarian, but the same trick. Their narcissism is sentimental rather than sadistic, but it serves the same purpose.
You can almost hear the pitch meeting:
“Leslie, here’s the heart of it. Two fathers. Both lost sons. Both tired of death. The moment peace became possible.”
Cue strings. Fade to flag.
The problem isn’t that Kushner and Witkoff are cynically sentimental; it’s that they no longer know the difference between sentimentality and morality—and neither, I suppose, does their audience.
Jared’s facial expressions are strange. He appears to be perennially tormented by a foul smell. Odd, too, that with all of his money—and especially given the MAGA royalty’s devotion to cosmetic enhancements—he hasn’t had his teeth fixed. A bit of an obvious oversight. His lower teeth, in particular, look almost English.
In any event, had I been in Stahl’s position, I would have asked the following. (Of course, I’d never be in Stahl’s position, because I’d ask the following):
* Under what legal authority were you negotiating with Hamas, a designated terrorist organization, on behalf of the United States?
* When you say President Trump “delegated authority,” do you mean he signed a formal directive, or merely told you, verbally, to do what you thought best?
* Was the State Department informed, and did any career diplomats participate or advise you? What about the National Security Council?
* You described the Israeli strike on Hamas negotiators in Doha as a “turning point.” Was the President aware of Israel’s plans to strike beforehand? If not, what’s wrong with our intelligence?
* Israeli journalists have reported that the President was “too groggy” to take Netanyahu’s call ahead of the strike on Qatar. Is this true?
* What intelligence did you have that convinced you Hamas was negotiating in good faith, and who provided it?
* You’ve said your Gulf business connections made this diplomacy possible. Could you specify which sovereign funds, royal courts, or construction conglomerates are your current or recent partners?
* When you say “we call it experience,” do you mean you personally stood to benefit from reconstruction contracts or investment flows tied to these governments?
* You mentioned a “Board of Peace” that will award reconstruction contracts. Who will appoint this board? Under what jurisdiction? Who audits it? Where can the public read its charter?
* Fifty billion dollars is a vast sum. Which governments have pledged it, and on what timetable? What oversight mechanisms will prevent it from vanishing into corruption or clientelism? Will the contracts go to your partners?
* You’ve said repeatedly that “issues are simple.” Which issues? The future of Gaza? Palestinian sovereignty? Refugee return? On what planet are those simple?
* You say Trump’s guarantee amounts to ensuring both sides “keep their word.” What enforcement mechanism does he possess, short of US military action or sanctions?
* If Hamas fails to disarm voluntarily, as seems likely, what precisely will the US do? Who carries the guns then—the “Board of Peace”?
* You speak of creating a Palestinian police force, an interim government, and tariff-free zones. Who are your Palestinian interlocutors? Under whose sovereignty will they serve? You keep saying “we’ll see.” Who exactly are we seeing? Name one Palestinian political figure you’d trust to govern Gaza.
* You claim “everything we do is transparent.” Will you publish the memorandum of understanding for the reconstruction plan, the participants, and the financial backers? How about your meeting notes and donor lists?
* If diplomacy is now a private franchise operated by billionaires with Gulf phone numbers, what exactly is left of the American state?
I don’t mean to be too critical. They did get the hostages out, and they will forever be inscribed in the Book of Life for that. I don’t even discount the possibility that they’ll pull the whole plan off.
We’ll see.
