Trump is the master of selling nothing

With a little searching, you'll find a photo on the internet from Sharm el-Sheikh that tells you everything you need to know about Donald Trump's much-trumpeted Middle East peace deal. There he stands in presidential glory - in an Egyptian resort town that exists solely for wealthy tourists to pretend they're experiencing Egypt - surrounded by some 30 world leaders who've flown in for a pause in a war that will almost certainly restart. 

The substance of the agreement - the bit about who governs Gaza, whether Palestine gets statehood, how reconstruction happens - is all kicked down the road. Netanyahu's already said he'll never allow a Palestinian state. Hamas says Palestinians should decide who governs them, which seems reasonable except that Israel has demanded veto power over any Palestinian leadership.

And then there's the money angle, because there's always a money angle. The documents suggest this isn't really Trump's deal at all - it's a Gulf Cooperation Council production, with Trump as the front man. The theory goes that Gaza is being set up as an investment opportunity, an emirate in waiting, with Gulf money flowing in contingent on a signing ceremony for a document that contains an imaginary 20-point plan. It's theatre. Expensive theatre. The kind where everyone's dressed beautifully, the lighting is impeccable, and nobody can quite remember what the plot was supposed to be about.

Trump calls it the 'Trump Declaration for Enduring Peace and Prosperity', which is all aspiration but of hollow substance. Even the BBC's Jeremy Bowen, who has the unenviable job of explaining Middle Eastern politics to people eating their breakfast, couldn't hide his bewilderment. 

"It's almost devoid of content," he remarked.

But it gets even more bizarre. Before Trump flew off to play statesman in Egypt, he gave a speech to the Israeli Knesset that should have set off every alarm bell in the building. Picture this: a man who's just brokered what he insists on calling a peace deal, standing before parliament, and his opening gambit is essentially a greatest hits compilation of his generous arms supply to Israel.

"We make the best weapons in the world," he boasted, "and we've given a lot to Israel, frankly." 

Frankly! As if he's doing them a favour by mentioning it. 

"Bibi would call me all the time asking for this weapon, that weapon - some I'd never even heard of, but we made them."

Read that again. So here's this great peacemaker, this supposed saviour ending a war that's cost nearly 67,000 Palestinian lives, and what's he doing? Boasting about flogging weapons. It's rather like a pyromaniac collecting a fire safety award while showing everyone his favourite Zippo. 

"And you used them well," he said, presumably with one of those winks you could spot from a bloodied Gaza.

This isn't the language of a peacemaker. This is a salesman at a trade show, proud of his quarterly figures. Sixty-seven thousand dead and Trump's talking about weapons deliveries like they're Amazon packages that arrived on time. The cognitive dissonance is so profound it's almost elegant in its shamelessness.

But let's talk about what this "peace deal" actually is, shall we?

It's a ceasefire. Just a ceasefire. Not peace, not even a peace process - not a settlement of any sort. Just an agreement to stop shooting for a bit while everyone has a row about what comes after.

Hamas hands over hostages. Israel's let out some prisoners, a few so starved their own families couldn't recognise them. The photos show Palestinian detainees stepping off buses in grey tracksuits, skeletal and dazed. One journalist who was detained lost 60 pounds in ten months. Meanwhile, the freed Israeli hostages had been held in chains, starved, and kept in isolation. This is what passes for victory on both sides.

The immediate aftermath tells its own story. The ceasefire is holding, mostly, except when it isn't. Israel is still shooting people it considers threats. Aid trucks that were supposed to flood into Gaza are arriving at a trickle - 12 trucks in one morning when the agreement stipulates 600 per day. The Israeli military has reportedly told the United Nations it's reducing aid because Hamas hasn't handed over all the bodies of dead hostages quickly enough. Using starvation as a negotiating tactic. Very peaceful.

And Trump's solution? He's threatening to disarm Hamas "violently" if they won't hand over their weapons promptly, which is what the Israeli military's been attempting for the past two years. Sixty-seven thousand dead later, they haven't managed it. But Trump thinks the Americans can just nip in and have it sorted, quickly and possibly violently. The man can't even commit to his own threats. He's leaving himself wiggle room on the violence front, as though it's a negotiating position rather than an actual war.

What we're watching is a masterclass in selling nothing. Trump has managed to convince half the world that he's achieved something historic when all he's actually done is pause a war that will almost certainly restart.

This is about establishing a sufficiently long ceasefire to determine who secures the reconstruction portfolios. Palestinian justice and Israeli security make for excellent talking points, but the actual business at hand involves reconfiguring regional power architectures and redrawing the lines of economic dependency. Property development, disaster capitalism, call it what you like.

Trump's comments about reconstruction certainly lean that way. He mentioned that "wealthy nations" want to help rebuild Gaza by putting up "whatever money is necessary". This is from the man who once suggested clearing Gaza's coast of Palestinians so international investors could buy beachfront property. When Trump talks about reconstruction, he's not thinking about people. He's thinking about real estate. It's what he knows. It's what he is.

The summit in Sharm el-Sheikh featured Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, and the head of FIFA. So naturally, when you're trying to broker peace in the Middle East, the obvious choice is the head of a football federation that has been running a masterclass in corruption for the past 20 years or more.

Meanwhile, Gaza itself remains a catastrophe, with 15,000 amputees from war injuries. Thousands need urgent medical evacuation.

Winter is coming and hundreds of thousands are living in tents, if they're lucky enough to have tents. The World Bank estimated in February that it would take $53 billion to rebuild. That was before several more months of bombardment. Most of the hospitals are destroyed. The schools are rubble. The water treatment plants are gone.

This is what Trump calls winning. 

"Israel, with our help, has won all that they can by force of arms," he told the Knesset. 

Won what, exactly? A depopulated territory where nothing works and everyone is starving? Where rival gangs are executing each other in the streets because the place is now lawless. Trump actually praised Hamas for executing suspected collaborators, interpreting it as a crackdown on gangs, one of his "preoccupations" back home. The man managed to find common ground with Hamas over summary executions. Extraordinary.

That's not peace. The truth is that none of this is what it appears to be. Peace isn't on the table. What's on the table is a sufficiently long pause for the vultures to work out who gets the reconstruction contracts. Palestinian justice and Israeli security - both lovely ideas, in theory - but the real negotiation concerns who owes whom, which dependencies get rewired, where the oil money ends up flowing.

Trump's not making peace. The serious people are inside dividing the spoils while he stands in the corridor, utterly convinced he's directing the entire production. He's holding the coats while the serious players carve up the spoils, convinced he's the one running the show, when in reality he's just useful, and temporarily so.

The world is so desperate for this war to end that we're willing to accept this hollow ego fest as an acceptable compromise, knowing deep down that you can't build peace on weapons shipments and vague promises. Neither can you broker a lasting peace when your opening line is bragging about arms deals. And you certainly can't claim moral authority when the bodies are still being dug out of the rubble while you're planning where to put the luxury hotels.

Trump's Gaza deal isn't peace, it's just another business opportunity dressed up in diplomatic language, sold to a world that's too exhausted to ask the difficult questions. Meanwhile, in Gaza, amid the vast ruins, emaciated children and legions of amputees wait for medical care, someone's probably wondering what all those weapons Trump was so proud of supplying were actually necessary, or is this much vaunted peace just a temporary pause in the dying.

That's not peace. That's just successful marketing.