DAVE DAVIES, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies.
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UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER: (Non-English language spoken).
DAVIES: This week began with outbursts of celebration as the last 20 surviving Israeli hostages in Gaza were returned to their families, and nearly 2,000 Palestinians held in Israeli prisons were released. That was all part of the ceasefire agreement which finally halted two years of war in Gaza, the conflict sparked by the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.
Our guest today, Aaron David Miller, spent years in the U.S. State Department trying to forge peace between Israel and the Palestinians, working under Democratic and Republican presidents. He says that in bringing this casefire agreement to fruition, President Donald Trump dealt with Israeli leaders in ways no other president has. He says Trump's transactional approach to politics and diplomacy probably helped in this case. Today, we'll look at how the ceasefire came to be and consider the challenges that remain for Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
Aaron David Miller spent 25 years in the State Department, playing a key role in the Oslo peace process in the 1990s. He's received the State Department's Distinguished, Superior and Meritorious honor awards. He's now a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the author of five books. We recorded our conversation yesterday.
Aaron David Miller, welcome to FRESH AIR.
AARON DAVID MILLER: Dave, it's great to be here with you.
DAVIES: I want to begin with an excerpt of President Trump's speech at the Israeli Knesset on Monday. Let's listen.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: This is not only the end of a war. This is the end of a age of terror and death and the beginning of the age of faith and hope and of God. It's the start of a grand concord and lasting harmony for Israel and all the nations of what will soon be a truly magnificent region. I believe that so strongly. This is the historic dawn of a new Middle East.
DAVIES: And that's President Trump with a pretty expansive view of the accomplishment here. I mean, you've said this isn't even really a peace agreement, right? What is it?
MILLER: Look, the reality - this is not the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. This is not the Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty. Agreements succeed or fail when they're tested over time. This is not even a peace agreement. What this is - and I don't want to take anything away from what this is - is a remarkable moment. I worked on this process, largely in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, since the 1980s. Any agreement between Israelis and Palestinians, let alone one between two combatants who are pledged to one another's mutual destruction, is an extraordinary achievement. What this is is a chance after two years of Israelis and Palestinians visiting a parade of horrific horrors on one another. What this is is the possibility of ending the war in Gaza and maybe building a broader bridge so that Israelis and Palestinians can find a pathway forward.
DAVIES: Right. Since the announcement last Friday, Hamas did release the living hostages, and Israel did cease offensive military operations and withdrew behind a designated line in Gaza. We'll talk about the longer-term prospects in a bit. But do you think that these conditions - I mean, the cessation of hostilities - will hold over the coming weeks?
MILLER: You know, I do. And I usually don't, having failed, largely, over a quarter of a century in helping to create circumstances for a conflict-ending agreement between Israelis and Palestinians. I usually default to the negative on this. But I think - and it's fascinating to consider what the first phase actually promises. It contains, in my judgment, the three basic elements that in fact could create a foundation. And those elements coincide with the reasons the international community, the region, the United States cared about Gaza, beginning on October 7.
First, it does address conclusively the issue of the remaining hostages - 20 men alive, who have been returned, 28 hostages who are no longer alive. Only some have been returned, and that's going to be an issue. Whether it's a deal breaker, I doubt it, but it will be an issue. Hamas has committed itself to locating and returning the bodies of 28 hostages. And remember, out of the 251 or 252 that were taken on October 7 by Hamas in this willful and indiscriminate attack against civilians, the sexual predation, mutilation and even the execution of hostages,130 have been returned through negotiations - these 48, and then roughly the balance have died in captivity. It takes the hostage issue off the table. And once that occurs, it undermines, undercuts the justification and even the credibility of Israel's comprehensive military actions in Gaza, what we've seen over the course of the last two years, particularly the large-scale offensives against Rafah, Khan Younis and, most recently, Gaza City.
And it also obviates the need for the massive deployment of Israeli divisions, tens of thousands of Israeli soldiers. If, in fact, this is correct, it will create a new environment which has never existed beyond several weeks or months. And that is to say an environment which will allow not just the dribbling of humanitarian assistance into Gaza, but the flooding of the zone. And once the zone is flooded, prices on the black market decline. The advantages that accrue to criminal gangs, and even Hamas, in terms of the diverting of humanitarian aid and the use of that aid for recruitment - all of these things begin to end.
And those three elements were the reasons the international community, the United States, the region cared about Gaza. In a way, Dave, it's a paradox because it could be that in reducing the urgency - no hostages, no major military campaign resulting in the exponential deaths of thousands of Palestinians and no humanitarian catastrophe - that people may actually begin to care less about what happens in phases two, three and beyond.
DAVIES: I want to talk about how we got here. That is to say, how this agreement came together. And I thought we'd begin by listening to another moment in president's speech to the Israeli Knesset Monday. He's praising Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for his role in the process, and then he added this.
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TRUMP: And he is not easy. I want to tell you, he's not the easiest guy to deal with. But that's what makes him great. That's what makes him great.
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TRUMP: Thank you very much, Bibi. Great job.
DAVIES: So all smiles there between Trump and Netanyahu, but you've made the point that President Trump has done something presidents that you have known and worked with couldn't. And that is to rein in Israel - to bend it to his will, in a way. How was he able to do this?
MILLER: That's a core question. There are basically three reasons why this agreement came to pass. No. 1, Hamas is much weaker, particularly on the military side. And it's the military commanders, not the external leadership, that are making the decisions. No. 2 are key Arab states, two of Hamas' principal backers are the three, the third being Iran. Qataris and the Turks basically leaned on Hamas in a way that they had rarely, if ever, done before. But it's the third factor.
Let's be clear. We would not be having this conversation had Donald Trump not done something that is quite unique, almost unprecedented. In the annals of the U.S. Israeli relationship, no president that I ever worked for - Jimmy Carter to Bush 43 - and I'd add in Obama and Biden. No U.S. president ever talked to an Israeli prime minister or pushed him and pressured him on an issue that that prime minister considered so vital not only to his politics, but his definition of Israel's national security. In June of 1996, when Bill Clinton finished his first conversation with Benjamin Netanyahu, an exasperated Clinton walked out of the office and exploded. Who's the effin' superpower here? That's what Clinton said about Netanyahu. Donald Trump answered that question, at least for now. And let me also add, having worked and voted for Republicans and Democrats, this is a man who is presiding over the erosion of American norms and institutions and undermining the very nature of constitutional government that his inaugural oath impelled him to protect, and yet, he deserves enormous credit for what he's done here.
DAVIES: Yeah. You know, for so long, it seemed that Trump would back Netanyahu no matter what. I mean, he sent the U.S. aircraft to drop bunker-busting bombs on, you know, Iran's underground nuclear facilities. It seemed he was with Netanyahu lock, stock and barrel. That changed. How did Trump make it clear to Netanyahu that things had to change? Do we know?
MILLER: I mean, partly, it's a paradox. Yeah. He acquiesced in Netanyahu's Gaza campaign for nine months. In fact, he reversed almost everything that the previous administration under Joe Biden did to signal its displeasure, opposition to Israeli policies in Gaza. He built up an enormous amount of currency with Netanyahu. There's no question - Trump 1.0, recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, moving the embassy, recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, saying almost nothing about Israel's annexationist policies on the West Bank. He created a sugar high for Netanyahu. He had the wherewithal to actually then deliver - in the words of a former U.S. ambassador to Israel Sam Lewis, he applied ample amounts of honey, Dave, but he also was able to apply ample amounts of vinegar. And if Barak Ravid from Axios' reporting is accurate, Trump actually left Netanyahu with no choice. Comply or we will leave you.
DAVIES: He's alleged to have said this directly...
MILLER: Yes.
DAVIES: ...To Netanyahu?
MILLER: Yes.
DAVIES: I will abandon you.
MILLER: I will leave you. So the reason I'm persuaded about this is that over the course of the last six months, Trump did things in and around Benjamin Netanyahu which also made him unique among his predecessors. He authorized his hostage negotiator to open up a direct dialogue with Hamas in March. He came to an agreement with the Houthis in Yemen, about which the Israelis learned after the fact. He suspended sanctions against the Ahmed Sharaa government in Syria over the objections of the Israelis, and he announced negotiations with Iran, much to the dismay of the Israeli prime minister, in the presence of that Israeli prime minister.
And I think Netanyahu did not have to be threatened with specific sanctions. Trump had signaled to Netanyahu that there would be costs and consequences. One final point - and because Benjamin Netanyahu is now focused on, more than anything else, how to win the next election - government comes to term in October of 2026 - it won't last that long. Spring probably. He knows that to win an election, he's going to need Donald Trump, not just as a bystander, but as an open campaigner.
DAVIES: Because Trump is enormously popular in Israel,
MILLER: More popular in Israel, Dave, right now than Benjamin Netanyahu. And the notion somehow that we don't intercede in Israeli politics and they don't intercede in ours is just an urban myth. You saw what the president did during that speech to the Knesset, and only three American presidents before had addressed the Knesset - Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. I mean, none of them would have even come close to basically turning to the president of Israel and saying, implicitly, why don't you grant him a pardon?
DAVIES: I mean, he just - he said the words. That was remarkable - and acknowledging Netanyahu's criminal charges for corruption. And Korea - speaking of that, what do you make of the notion that Netanyahu has sustained the campaign in Gaza, in part so he wouldn't have to answer the corruption charges at all?
MILLER: I mean, you know, on trial for bribery, fraud and breach of trust in Jerusalem District Court four years now, almost five years and running now. Yeah, I think that's a part of the calculation, but staying in power, and the vulnerabilities and risks to a leader. He's the longest-governing prime minister in history of the state of Israel. He believes he is indispensable.
DAVIES: We need to take a break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Aaron David Miller. He's a former State Department negotiator, currently a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. We'll talk more about the Gaza situation after this short break. This is FRESH AIR.
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DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and we're looking at the ceasefire agreement that halted the fighting in Gaza and talking about prospects for lasting peace. Our guest is Aaron David Miller, a former veteran State Department negotiator, now a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. We recorded our conversation yesterday.
You know, you said that Trump did things that no other president had ever done in dealing with Israel. And, you know, Trump's negotiating style is also, well, unique, I think we can say, among presidents. You know, he's known as this freewheeling, transactional deal guy. And, you know, there's also the fact that he and the Trump Organization, the Trump family have a lot of business deals in the Arab world, particularly in Qatar, which Trump accepted an airplane from. And, you know, a lot of not just Democrats but independent government ethicists say this isn't what a president should be doing. You don't want foreign leaders to have leverage over the president, who has to guard the nation's interests, not their own. Did these business relationships help him in this case?
MILLER: I think - I'm sure they did. In fact, if Trump cared about any part of them - at least, the Gulf was the thing, partly for the reasons that you say. The seamless lack of boundaries between what constitutes Trump's business interests and the American national interest has long been erased. The Abraham Accords, his signal achievement - don't want to take anything away from that - in Trump 1.0. He relishes authoritarians that don't have democratic constraints. He loves to be flattered. No, the Gulf is the thing for him. And cultivating those relationships, which both Witkoff and particularly Jared Kushner have done, particularly the Emiratis and the Saudis - basically, yes, that certainly contributed to the Arab dimension of Trump's transactional nature.
It's the Israeli dimension, though, to me, that is key. And what Trump was able to do and what made his transaction, in my judgment, possible in the one area that made this deal possible, which was his relationship with Benjamin Netanyahu, was two things which have impeded and constrained American presidents - almost all of them - from expanding the margin of pressure that they're prepared to place on an Israeli prime minister. One is the emotional identification. Trump, unlike Bill Clinton, who wrote in his memoir, I loved Rabin as I love no man - Clinton was in love, literally, with the idea of Israel, the people of Israel, the security of Israel.
Joe Biden - I listened to him three days after October 7 talk about the, quote, "black hole" of loss, unquote, and the savagery of what occurred on October 7 and conflate that almost certainly with the tragedy that had occurred in his own personal life. Trump has freed himself from, in my judgment, the emotional constraints which have prevented a number of American presidents in having the kind of conversations that Trump had with Netanyahu.
But it's more than that. It's the politics as well. Trump is the first American president who has such a tight grip on the Republican Party that, in effect, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has cultivated the Republican Party for years as a sort of higher court of appeals if he ever was boxed in by a Democratic president - which he was, I might add, in 2015, when Obama did the nuclear deal with Iran. John Boehner invites Netanyahu to address Congress, and Netanyahu takes it up. It's - tries to end-run the Obama administration. Benjamin Netanyahu cannot end-run Donald Trump because Trump owns the Republican Party. American views of Israel - look at the Pew polls - have fundamentally been altered as a consequence of Israeli policies in Gaza. So Trump has more running room, more room to maneuver on Israel than any other American president.
DAVIES: You know, one other thing you said in an interview that I read about Trump and his ability to execute this maneuver - you said he's transactional. He's situational. And in many respects, it is the absence of core principles that allows him to pivot in a way that no other American president had.
MILLER: And I think that may explain why now. I think the September 9 strike by Netanyahu on Doha against the external leadership persuaded Trump that Netanyahu was now undermining something that was important to him.
DAVIES: That was the strike on Hamas negotiators in Doha, right?
MILLER: In Doha.
DAVIES: Right.
MILLER: And I think he began to understand that Netanyahu was undermining the Abraham Accords, creating a degree of instability in a region of the world where economic profit and financial gain require stability. And I think he began to see that Netanyahu was making him look weak. And to use Trump's favorite term with respect to Putin, Netanyahu was even playing him and believed that he had a much wider margin to do anything he wanted - he, Netanyahu - and that Trump would support him. So I think - yeah. I think that notion that this is something important to me, and I'm going to pivot from acquiescing and enabling Benjamin Netanyahu in Gaza to constraining him.
DAVIES: We're going to take another break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Aaron David Miller. He's a former State Department negotiator, currently a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. We'll talk more about the Gaza ceasefire and prospects for the region after this break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is FRESH AIR.
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DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies. Today, we're looking at the ceasefire agreement that halted the fighting in Gaza and talking about the prospects for lasting peace and recovery in the territory. Our guest is Aaron David Miller, a former veteran State Department negotiator who was a senior member of the team working on the Oslo peace process in the 1990s. He's the author of five books and currently a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. We recorded our conversation yesterday.
So let's talk about what's going to happen next. I mean, this is an - as you say, not a comprehensive peace agreement, but an important, meaningful step. A lot of humanitarian aid can come in now. I mean, we've already seen chaotic footage of boxes of food being tossed off flatbed trucks. What's your sense of how this can be funded, organized and effective?
MILLER: I think the funding question is critically important. There was a report I had read that we're talking about $70 billion for the reconstruction. Or maybe it's not even the reconstruction, Dave. Maybe it's - to use a different word, maybe it's the reconstitution of Gaza, because I don't know how you reconstruct a situation in which 60% to 80% of the housing stock and residential, commercial structures have been destroyed. In order to have any chance of doing that, you really have to deal with the politics and the security issues because you're going to need a stable, predictable environment in order to deliver, to move from humanitarian assistance delivered on an emergency basis to a organized, developed concept for reconstruction.
And that means three issues. No. 1, how do you deal with the demilitarization, the decommissioning of Hamas' weapons? No. 2, who fills the security vacuum? Hamas has deployed what? They figure it's several thousand policemen into areas from which the Israelis have - urban areas, largely, from which the Israelis have redeployed. That's Hamas in control. But the 20-point plan talks about an international stabilization force composed, I would gather, from security forces from Arab and Muslim countries. That's the second issue.
And the third, of course, is who or what is going to govern Gaza. There's talk of a Board of Peace with Donald Trump as chairman, and Tony Blair has been mentioned. What about Palestinian representation? There's talk of a technocratic government, identifying Palestinians that have some degree of legitimacy and credibility. But what does it actually mean to govern? And who do you get to staff up the administrative structure that is going to be required - the thousands - in order to engage in this process of governance?
DAVIES: You know, in terms of the immediate situation, I mean, we've seen Hamas fighters emerging in some places, patrolling intersections, getting in gun battles. And it was interesting that on Monday in Egypt, I believe, Trump was asked about Hamas doing these policing activities, and he essentially said the U.S. was giving them temporary approval. He said, quote, "they've been open about it, and we gave them approval for a period of time," unquote. That's kind of remarkable, isn't it?
MILLER: I mean, he - they're making a virtue out of necessity, I think. And I think a lot of it flows from one other point, which I find extraordinary - that in order to close this deal on Hamas' side, Trump authorized Witkoff and Kushner to meet directly with Khalil al-Hayya, probably the most important external part of the Hamas leadership. That was extraordinary.
Trump had done it once before - in March - to openly negotiate, to construct a channel with Hamas. And the more I think about it, the more I go back to your initial point about Trump's transactional nature. He's willing to break all kinds of traditional diplomatic crockery. And I would bet, before this deal progresses substantively, there probably will be other direct meetings between administration officials and Hamas, which of course is going to drive the Netanyahu government crazy. I wonder now - just your question prompts the notion that maybe, to actually end up doing this deal, the U.S. may have to construct this channel.
DAVIES: You're saying that Trump might have to deal with the Hamas officials that are outside...
MILLER: Exactly.
DAVIES: ...Of Gaza?
MILLER: That's...
DAVIES: Do they have a different perspective from those who are actually on the ground?
MILLER: They're divided as well. But I think they have a much greater sense of wanting to maintain the coherence and the cohesion of the organization itself, which may in fact increase their margin of flexibility. So I think that's another data point where Trump has gone to where whether American president has been before on that issue alone.
DAVIES: You know, let's talk a bit about the role of the Gulf states - you know, particularly Qatar - these states that are on the western end of the Persian Gulf. They played a critical role in pressuring Hamas to accept this deal, I gather, at Trump's insistence. Going forward, what are their interests? I mean, presumably, they have resources to fund reconstruction, but what will they want...
MILLER: Yeah.
DAVIES: ...From this?
MILLER: I might add that before his newly found love affair with the Qataris, the - last year, I think, the president described Qatar as a sponsor of terrorism. Qatar now, of course, is the president's newfound friend. You've got the 747, which the president will retrofit and probably try to use.
DAVIES: As a new Air Force One...
MILLER: Right.
DAVIES: ...Right? Yeah.
MILLER: The new Air Force...
DAVIES: Yeah.
MILLER: ...One. So Qatar is going to remain, whether its critics like it or not, I suspect, as a key contact point. They did sign - they're one of the - what? - four signatories of the piece of paper that was signed in Sharm. The Egyptians, the Turks, the Israelis and the Americans.
DAVIES: And that agreement was what?
MILLER: Well, if you should read it...
DAVIES: I don't think Trump described it in a lot of details.
MILLER: ...It's six very, very general paragraphs talking about comedy, the need to resolve problems through negotiations, not by force. It contains no - not a single detail. Now, there may be other side agreements of which we're not aware. It would not be surprising to me if there were. So the Qataris, the Emiratis, the Saudis - Trump is looking to them, obviously. And clearly, Trump has no intention of paying for any of this. Nor should he, I might add. This is really a Palestinian issue, needs to be much more tethered to key Arab states that have the resources and the driving interest for stability and, at some point, Dave, to try to be as helpful as they can in making sure that Gaza-first, which is a necessity, does not become Gaza-only.
DAVIES: Meaning that...
MILLER: Meaning we have to move.
DAVIES: ...You need a broader...
MILLER: Yeah.
DAVIES: ...Agreement.
MILLER: Meaning we have to move. Otherwise, this - I don't want to trivialize this. Too many lives have been lost - so many horrors inflicted on October 7 and then on Israel's prosecution of the war, thousands of kids losing not just one parent but both, this parade of horrors. If it's left only to Gaza, if it's one and done, and Trump having claimed he's resolved seven conflicts, having not resolved any, with the possible exception of giving the Azeris and the Armenians a new pathway forward, he's now added an eighth - the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If there isn't a way to build a bridge from Gaza to a broader process to deal with the core issues that have kept the Israeli-Palestinian conflict alive, then we're going to end up in a deadly and cruel and unforgiving wash, rinse and repeat cycle on this.
DAVIES: We need to take a break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Aaron David Miller. He's a former State Department negotiator, currently a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. We'll talk more about the Gaza situation after this short break. This is FRESH AIR.
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DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and we're looking at the ceasefire agreement that halted the fighting in Gaza and talking about prospects for lasting peace. Our guest is Aaron David Miller, a former veteran State Department negotiator, now a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. We recorded our conversation yesterday.
President Trump's 20-point peace plan - I mean, there's the outlines of something which, to provide governance, there will be a technocratic, apolitical Palestinian committee to actually run Gaza. Not clear who would appoint it, who it would be. And then above that, a supervisory Board of Peace to oversee the governing committee, chaired by President Trump, maybe a leadership role for Tony Blair. It's going to take a while for all that to develop. In the meantime, you know, you have tens of thousands of Gazans walking north up to Gaza City who are going to see what they can find. Many of them will find their homes gone or damaged beyond repair. You know, if this were a natural disaster on the U.S. coastline, there would be a government emergency sponsor. There would be insurance claims. Do we have any idea what recourse these folks will have in the near term to reconstruct their lives?
MILLER: I mean, I wish I had an answer for that. I'm sure there are any numbers of plans in NGO, nongovernmental organizations, U.N. agencies, for how to do this. I mean, I'd ask myself the question - is it beyond the capacity of the international community to mobilize on an area roughly twice the size of the District of Columbia? Winter is coming. The lack of access to potable water, to proper sanitation, to medical care, to a regular food supply, to shelter, to dealing with the psychological trauma of individuals whose entire families have been destroyed, large numbers of horrible surgeries and amputations. I don't know how to approach this, only to answer the question that if, in fact, this is going to work, then the first phase of this beyond the president's 20-point plan has to be a concerted, organized, determined, focused effort to deal, Dave, with the question you just asked - to create some sort of transitional reality.
I mean, the anger and the hatred that has been stirred up on the part of Palestinian civilians for what the Israelis have done and for what, in many respects, the Americans have enabled - not trying to trivialize or discount the attendant trauma of the shadow of October 7, which is going to linger and loom over Israel for many years to come. But in terms of sheer scale, this should be the priority now. And we're not talking about reconstruction, just trying to figure out how to create a life - something that 2 million Gazans can somehow manage.
DAVIES: And, you know, we still have a situation where Israeli armies occupy portions on the east side of Gaza, including some areas that used to be residential. They are not required by this agreement to leave, right? Hamas has not been demilitarized, so there's a real security issue. And, you know, President Trump and his team worked really hard to get this far. And as you note, it is an important accomplishment to put an end to the fighting and to return the hostages. But I guess the question is, can he apply the same attention and power and will to these other, much tougher questions?
MILLER: Now, I'm not running the railroad these days and have no desire to. But I would not have left Sharm el-Sheikh without constituting four high-level working groups chaired by a senior American as part of an interagency American process.
DAVIES: Yeah. To clarify, Sharm el-Sheikh - that's the resort in Egypt where, on Monday, international leaders gathered...
MILLER: Exactly.
DAVIES: ...To do something.
MILLER: Right. Four groups, one dedicated to humanitarian assistance and reconstruction, a second to governance, a third to international stabilization and a fourth - and Trump has already moved in this direction by working with CENTCOM, the American military - to deploy 200 Americans to a Israeli military base near Gaza, which would - will help monitor the ceasefire. Well, you know something? The hardest day after the big peace conference is the morning after. What do we do now? How do we make this work? It's going to take more than Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff. It's going to require an interagency international effort to scale this up. Maybe we'll be surprised.
DAVIES: You know, you worked on the Oslo peace process in the 1990s. A lot of people won't remember this in any detail, but it was a long series of negotiations and a lot of interim agreements. And one of the principles, as I recall, was that the parties would not insist on a full and permanent resolution of all the big questions at once, but there would be a series of interim agreements which would, over time, build trust between the two sides and encourage more advanced efforts to diffuse tension, encourage peace, eventually share land. I'm wondering if - does that approach make sense to you in retrospect, and is it a guide for how to move forward now?
MILLER: You know, it certainly wasn't a guide when it came to the success or failure of the Oslo process. I was at the last - actually the only - effort that brought an American president, Bill Clinton, and empowered PLO leader, Yasser Arafat, and a very risk ready Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak to Camp David in July of 2000. That summit failed. And at the end of that two-week period on the five core issues that need to be resolved - border security, refugees, Jerusalem, and the end of all conflict and claims, the gaps between Israelis and Palestinians were as wide and as deep as the Grand Canyon. Twenty-five years later, those gaps are not Grand Canyon-size - they are galactic in scope. So the notion that somehow you could leap forward and resolve these core issues in a way that would be acceptable to Israelis and Palestinians with the shadow of October 7 looming large strikes me as an idea tethered to a galaxy far, far away rather than to the realities back here on planet Earth.
The 20-point plan is, in essence, a phased arrangement. It has a Phase 1, people acknowledge it as Phase 1. There's even some talk about Phase 2 or 3, although there's no real operational detailed roadmap as to how to get from one phase to the other. If you could get these two parties to actually identify an aspirational end state that they held in common, or even to have an American president at some point identify such an aspirational end state. I may be one of the last humans on the planet to believe that the only solution to solving this problem is separation through negotiation.
DAVIES: A two-state solution?
MILLER: Yes.
DAVIES: Yeah.
MILLER: Yes. A two-state solution. It's the only thing to me that answers all of the mail - demography, overlapping religious space, territory, the need for separation, particularly in the wake of October 7. But you can't - we can't even do that.
DAVIES: Let's take another break here, and let me reintroduce you.
We are speaking with Aaron David Miller. He's a former state department negotiator and currently a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. We'll continue our conversation in just a moment. This is FRESH AIR.
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DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and we're speaking with Aaron David Miller. He's a former state department negotiator, currently a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. We're talking about the ceasefire agreement that halted the fighting in Gaza and prospects for lasting peace and recovery in the territory. We recorded our conversation yesterday.
You know, when Trump suggested pardoning Netanyahu at the Knesset on Monday, there was applause. But, you know, once the excitement of the hostage return begins to subside, what kind of support will Netanyahu have in Israel?
MILLER: So, all you need to govern in Israel is 60 plus one seats, and this is a very coherent, cohesive Israeli coalition, and even though it's a minority government, the two religious parties have now withdrawn over the conscription issue. The fact that they want to get-out-of-the-army-free card for most of their Haredi, the ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students, they also know that going into the wilderness now with the anger of the Israeli public, venting on them because their sons didn't serve, they're going to hang together, as will the two right-wing parties. And with Trump's support, it is conceivable that Benjamin Netanyahu, already the longest governing prime minister in the history of the state, could win an election. With a different government right of center minus the extremists - two extremist parties, accountability, it's hard to believe. But I don't see anything. It'll take a government decision to appoint a state commission of inquiry.
DAVIES: And you're talking about holding Netanyahu accountable for the intelligence failures in the...
MILLER: Yep.
DAVIES: ...2023...
MILLER: Right. The Prime Minister, Shin Bet, Mossad, DMI, the Director of Military Intelligence, all of that. There has to be some reckoning, at a minimum - forget accountability - to understand exactly why October 7 was possible and why the Israeli defense forces could not save, during the first 24 hours, the civilians in the Gaza envelope communities adjacent to the border.
DAVIES: You know, Trump praised Netanyahu for this agreement, and they had the terrific interaction before the Knesset, but the International Criminal Court still see Netanyahu as a war criminal for the campaign in Gaza. How does that affect his relationships with Arab allies and prospects for future collaboration?
MILLER: Look, you know, one of the most disheartening things to me was - and I'm very conscious of the fact that an existential conflict or one that the parties perceive to be nearly so, the influence of outside actors, however well-intentioned they may be, are minimal. I still do not understand why, in the course of two years, the international community, key Arab states, both Israel's treaty partners and Abraham Accord country partners and the United States, failed to impose a single cost or consequence - a single cost or consequence...
DAVIES: For the campaign in Gaza. Yeah.
MILLER: ...That would have altered the trajectory of either of these combatants. And the International Court of Justice will continue to debate and will, at some point, make a judgment on the issue of genocide. That's not going to solve or fix anything. I would have argued that instead of virtue signaling and doing performative things on the issue of Palestinian statehood, Europeans ought to have looked at their relationship with Israel, the second - largest trading block as the EU. Europeans did nothing. The Germans impose a partial arms embargo, and yet they're buying $4 billion of aero defense systems from the Israelis.
So Israel's brand and the impact of what the Israelis have done in Gaza, that issue is going to reverberate for years. And whether Israel's brand can be reconstituted will depend almost completely, I think, on whether or not you can actually have a new generation of Israeli leaders that will emerge.
DAVIES: You know, you've been at the project of peace in this region for much - maybe most of your professional life. In the '90s, there seemed to be a real moment of hope for a solution. Different situation today. Can you still find reasons for hope?
MILLER: I can't. Let me sum it up. Jack Kennedy described himself as an idealist without illusion. That's where I am. And frankly, that's where I think anybody interested seriously in working on this issue needs to be. If you only accept things the way the world is, things never change. And if you only accept things the way you want them to be, you're going to fail. It is the balance between the world the way it is and the aspirations of what we want for a better world, better America, conflict-ending solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That's where we need to be.
And you give me, Dave, you give me the leaders, leaders who are masters of their political constituencies, not prisoners of their ideologies, leaders who are willing to recognize that not only do their own needs need to be requited, but the needs and requirements of others, you give me those two leaders, and you give me an American mediator who's prepared to apply a lot of honey and a lot of vinegar, and I'll give you a chance - a serious chance - to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
DAVIES: Well, Aaron David Miller, thanks so much for speaking with us.
MILLER: Dave, it was great. I really enjoyed it.
DAVIES: Aaron David Miller is a former state department negotiator and is currently a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace. We recorded our conversation yesterday morning. Since then, a dispute has arisen between Israel and Hamas over the pace of returning the bodies of deceased hostages. That dispute has slowed some of the aid coming into Gaza. Meanwhile, President Trump has told Hamas to disarm or, quote, "we will disarm them, and it'll happen quickly and perhaps violently," unquote. Hamas has so far not committed to do so.
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DAVIES: On tomorrow's show, we hear from Julian Brave NoiseCat, son of an Indigenous Canadian father and white mother. He codirected an Oscar-nominated documentary about abuse at missionary boarding schools Native children were required to attend, and he's written a new memoir. I hope you can join us.
FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our managing producer is Sam Briger. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Ann Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Therese Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nyakundi and Anna Bauman. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Our consulting visual producer is Hope Wilson. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. For Terry Gross and Tonya Mosley, I'm Dave Davies.
(SOUNDBITE OF AARON GOLDBERG'S "TROCANDO EM MIUDOS") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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