Peace in Gaza?

The two praiseworthy things I remember from Donald Trump’s first term are Operation Warp Speed that brought us the Covid vaccine and the Abraham Accords. I haven’t had much to praise in Trump 2 except his 20-point peace plan for Gaza, which has gotten the Israeli military to stop its military campaign (for now) and Hamas to return the 20 living Israeli hostages and, as of today (10/15/2025), the remains of eight others, with more being searched for, in some cases under the rubble. Israel, meanwhile, has returned some 2,000 Palestinian captives to Gaza. Now, as Fareed Zakaria and other commentators have stated, comes the hard parts in the next 19 steps. With not all the remains of dead Israeli hostages returned to Israel, the Netanyahu government is threatening to halve the number of aide trucks permitted to enter the strip. Oh my!

​As a 3rd-generation American Jew, I am expected by some, I’m sure, to support Israel no matter what. As a Christian convert for the past 59 years, however, I am not in agreement with the Israeli policy of what strikes me as excessive retribution for Hamas’s deadly incursion into Israel on October 7, 2023, just two years ago. I do understand, to be sure, my ancestral people’s hair-trigger response since the Holocaust and the founding of the State of Israel. If you do ten bad things to us, we will do a thousand back to you. Hamas has certainly lost personal, but civilian Gazans have lost tens of thousands of family members, including people, women, and children, with something like more than 80% of the Strip’s buildings now in ruins and unlivable.

As a Yale freshman in fall, 1956, I had the wonderful opportunity to be in a group of perhaps fifty other classmates to listen to a lecture by the famous Harvard behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner (d. 1990), who was on the threshold of retirement. What I remember most is his pronouncement that in his considered opinion, negative reinforcement of behavior—things like fear of punishment (or actual punishment)—will achieve at best short-term success. Only positive reinforcement, he believed, would achieve longer-term positive results. In this context, I wonder what Israeli might have done instead of all-out war in response to Hamas’s heinous incursion.

So now it remains to be seen by the time this blog is published sometime in November whether Israeli and Hamas can keep the peace as they gingerly work their way through the remaining 19 steps of the Trump peace plan. We shall see. I am cautiously optimistic and am willing to use positive reinforcement myself on our President to see if that can help encourage him to moderate his Constitution-offending policies and to do more for “the other 80%” of the U.S. population. He has it in him, I think, but capacity and willingness are two different things.

As the saying goes, time will tell.
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I am enjoying a lovely fall here in beautiful Boulder, Colorado. May the peace in Gaza be lasting.

Israelis welcome some of the last living hostages home.