October 14, 2025
Sharm el-Sheikh stayed lit long after the last motorcade left. Egypt’s ushers moved like stagehands, flags stood in perfect symmetry, and the choreography produced a single line that echoed from Cairo to Brussels: Hamas has to go. It was not a conversion story. It was a coordination story.
The circle at the table told you everything. Egypt presided; Saudi and Emirati envoys sat slightly forward; Qatar hovered in the problem-solver’s chair; Turkey positioned itself as indispensable; Indonesia and Pakistan added moral cover from the wider Muslim world. Across the water in Europe, Macron repeated the “two-state horizon,” and in London the British prime minister spoke openly about a path to Palestinian statehood. The same capitals that once sheltered or financed militants now speak with one voice about removing them. When that many governments agree on one enemy at one moment, it isn’t repentance. It’s a wardrobe change.
That was the real substance here. Hamas was a garment — useful for a season, now unwearable. The brand is toxic; the patrons need distance. Changing the dress is the condition for re-entering the room where maps are drawn. Strip out the militia; keep the project. The new garment is already on the rack: technocratic administration, donor oversight, Gulf reconstruction money under Western audit, and the return of the word statehood to official paragraphs.
It worked because power, not etiquette, set the tempo. This wasn’t diplomacy in the old sense; it was orchestration. Behind the still photographs, Washington pressed every lever — Egypt’s gatekeeping, Qatar’s survival instinct, Turkey’s leverage hunt, the Gulf’s demand for investable quiet — while Israel’s military and intelligence pressure narrowed everyone’s choices. The hostages moved. Coffins began to return. The clock kept ticking.
The quiet brilliance of Trump’s method was not affection but geometry. He didn’t need to like the actors; he needed them in the same frame, saying the same sentence, bound to the same timetable. He said it openly: “I don’t like everyone in this room.” He didn’t have to. The point was to bring adversaries close enough to take partial credit for an outcome they could no longer stop. That is how you silence critics — by making them co-owners.
The obvious question now is not whether Hamas disappears. It’s what walks in wearing its shoes.
The outline is visible in the communiqués: Gaza demilitarized under verifiable benchmarks; border and air/sea control held by Israel; day-to-day governance by a vetted civilian authority; reconstruction funds released in tranches tied to compliance; a multinational board to “assure” delivery. Strip out the slogans and the architecture is clear. This is not local sovereignty. It is managed dependency.
The states that pushed Hamas must go will pivot quickly to what comes next. Saudi Arabia wants a framework that makes sense for its bigger realignment; the UAE wants a modernized neighborhood with clean balance sheets; Egypt wants relevance secured by gates it controls; Turkey wants a chair at every table; Europe wants the moral dividend of a Palestinian “political horizon.” Each of them will present Israel with a friendly invoice: after victory, vision.
Jerusalem’s room for error is very small. Israel has the leverage to finish what the war began — tunnels, mid-level command, production lines — under the diplomatic umbrella that now exists. But every tactical success feeds the next strategic demand. The very coalition that supports Hamas’s elimination will soon press to reopen the file that never goes away: borders and capital. The contest will move from Rafah’s corridors back to the hill that cannot be divided by adjectives.
Three things will decide whether Israel shapes the next act or is written into it.
First, enforcement before adornment. Keep the perimeter where it must be kept; treat every breach as a test of the new rails; move faster than the narrative can flip. The public timetable was a tool to force compliance; it must not become a tool to penalize deterrence.
Second, terms on the digital dress. Reconstruction will arrive with servers, biometrics, payment rails, and “smart” security. Whoever writes those protocols will quietly govern Gaza. Co-author them or don’t let them deploy. The aim is not repression; it’s preventing a re-branded proxy from learning to speak fluent donor.
Third, price the horizon. If Europe and the Gulf want a statehood track, put a tariff on the word horizon: curricula in writing, clerical oversight in law, prisoner payments ended in policy, policing standards audited in practice, external border regime tested — not as press lines but as verified crossings of behavior. No proofs, no passage. That kind of conditionality splits the “unity” front that is easy to announce and hard to honor.
Beneath the choreography lies the humanitarian theater — the moral façade for a geopolitical reset. Coffins, convoys, medical tents, midnight applause — these images carry meaning. They also carry a function. They are the moral camouflage for a redistribution of influence that runs through supply chains, cabinet formations, and defense alignments. The optics say mercy. The ledger says realignment.
Even before the ink dried, the pattern repeated. Within hours of the Sharm el-Sheikh signing, new strikes hit Khan Younis and Gaza City, killing at least nine. Cameras still showed bulldozers raising white flags through rubble as headlines declared “lasting peace.” It was the purest image of this era’s choreography — ceasefire by press release, bombardment by reflex. The war had changed its dress, not its nature.
None of this means Israel loses. It means Israel must refuse the most seductive sentence in every era: the war is over. Wars end when an enemy loses the will or the means to continue. Proxies lose both only when the narrative that feeds them collapses. That collapse happens in classrooms, broadcasts, courts, pulpits, and paychecks. Israel cannot codify that alone. But Israel can make it the price of everyone else’s speech about the “day after.”
Look again at the frame from Sharm el-Sheikh: flags in perfect symmetry, the photograph every editor wanted. It looked like diplomacy; it was, in fact, an exorcism — the ritual retirement of a proxy whose usefulness had expired. The applause that followed was sincere. So were the quiet calculations that followed the applause.
The chant is uniform now: Hamas has to go. Let it go. Help it go. And then watch what is stitched in its place. The next garment will not be a green headband and a rifle. It will be a boardroom, a compliance dashboard, a “reformed” bureaucracy, a curriculum with all the right verbs. The devil does not need Prada. He wears power — cut and resewn to the fashion of the moment.
