The sin­gle most impor­tant qual­i­ty of a polit­i­cal sur­vivor is the abil­i­ty to detect where true pow­er lies. Israeli Prime Min­is­ter Ben­jamin Netanyahu has seen his world shrink. Tra­di­tion­al­ly friend­ly gov­ern­ments lined up to recog­nise a Pales­tin­ian state. The con­temp­tu­ous response of much of the inter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty to his speech at the Gen­er­al Assem­bly.

Netanyahu was able to brush this all aside and parse that the future of his nation and his own lega­cy will not be deter­mined in Can­ber­ra or in declin­ing Euro­pean pow­ers led by lame duck lead­ers, it will be set­tled in Wash­ing­ton, Riyadh and Doha. Netanyahu wasn’t talk­ing to the UN or its ane­mic mem­ber states. He was talk­ing to his own base and to the White House.

The joint press con­fer­ence by the two lead­ers, at which the US pro­pos­al to end the war was unveiled, showed that Netanyahu retains the con­fi­dence and sup­port of Pres­i­dent Trump. Pres­i­dent Trump in turn exerts an emperor’s pow­er over the inter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty, par­tic­u­lar­ly those parts of it whose poli­cies are dri­ven by a desire for progress and wealth and not by street rab­ble, online influ­encers and aca­d­e­mics clad in cor­duroy.

And so, as some states, in their desire to project rel­e­vance and pres­tige, moved to recog­nise a Pales­tin­ian state which isn’t there, the Trump admin­is­tra­tion craft­ed a pro­pos­al to actu­al­ly end this war. A plan that unlike uni­lat­er­al recog­ni­tion, can achieve the things our gov­ern­ment says it cares about – lib­er­a­tion of the hostages, an end to civil­ian suf­fer­ing, a future with­out Hamas, the de-rad­i­cal­i­sa­tion of Gaza and its peace­ful recon­struc­tion for its peo­ple. In oth­er words, true last­ing peace and gen­uine coex­is­tence rather than tem­po­rary cease­fires to allow the domes­tic polit­i­cal flak for west­ern lead­ers to briefly set­tle, or idle joint let­ters that try to say every­thing but say noth­ing at all.

Israel has accept­ed the pro­pos­al which will oblig­ate it to per­ma­nent­ly end its mil­i­tary cam­paign in Gaza, and to release thou­sands of Pales­tin­ian ter­ror­ists and fight­ers it cur­rent­ly holds. The gov­ern­ments of the major play­ers in the Islam­ic and Arab world, includ­ing Sau­di Ara­bia, Pak­istan, Qatar, Turkey and Indone­sia, have also backed it.

The ques­tion is what will Hamas do? And what will our gov­ern­ment, that has insin­u­at­ed itself into the con­flict through its recog­ni­tion procla­ma­tion, do to ensure this com­pre­hen­sive peace plan becomes a real­i­ty? Aus­tralia has shown a will­ing­ness to pun­ish Israel in a great num­ber of ways for what it sees as its intran­si­gence, what will it do to ensure the Pales­tini­ans uphold their side of the bar­gain?

For starters, our gov­ern­ment can’t sim­ply say it endors­es this peace plan, it needs to work with the UK, Cana­da and France in apply­ing max­i­mum pres­sure on all Pales­tin­ian fac­tions to accept and imple­ment it with­out delay.

If this plan suc­ceeds, Netanyahu’s stock as a polit­i­cal sur­vivor will enter new stratos­pheres. But if it fails despite the will of the Unit­ed States, Israel and the Islam­ic world, it will reveal a ter­ri­fy­ing truth – the course of war and con­flict, and all the mis­ery it entails, is deter­mined not by the peace­mak­ers but by ter­ror­ists and rogues, and all our inter­ven­tions are for naught. If this is revealed to be so, the total destruc­tion of Hamas, will be the only option.