Following the Middle East summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Donald Trump’s Gaza ceasefire deal has been compared in the media to the Good Friday agreement which brought an end to the conflict in Northern Ireland and the Dayton accords which achieved a (so far) lasting peace in the Balkans. The fact is that Trump’s deal differs significantly from both.

It is largely imposed from the outside. It’s highly transactional in nature. And it lacks a clear blueprint as to what happens next.

But it’s worth noting that one of the defining things about the US president as a politician is the way that he will typically make an exaggerated claim about an achievement which then sets the framing for the rest of the world to react to. So he boasted of his ceasefire deal that it was “not only the end of war, this is the end of the age of terror and death”.

Others have run with the Good Friday agreement comparison. The Christian Science Monitor asserted on October 2, the day after the US president unveiled his 20-point plan: “Mr. Trump’s blueprint rests on the hope that what worked in Northern Ireland will work in Gaza, and on one assumption above all: that Israelis and Palestinians are ready to accept that continued violence won’t get either of them what they want.”

This, of course, is no small assumption,........

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