The war in Gaza has not ended; it has changed its shape. What began as a brutal confrontation has now hardened into a political and geographic experiment, one whose contours may define the region’s next decade. Beneath the surface of ceasefires and reconstruction plans lies a deeper transformation: the reappearance of the Palestinian question, after years of deliberate absence, as a central axis in the regional and global conversation.

For nearly two decades, Israel and much of the Arab world succeeded in marginalising that question. Strategic normalisation, economic incentives, and the pursuit of calm made it possible to sustain the illusion that the conflict could be frozen indefinitely. That illusion has collapsed. The sovereignty vote in the Knesset, the statements in Washington, and the summit in Sharm el Sheikh are all expressions of a single fact: the question has returned to presence. Whether through annexation debates or statehood initiatives, it has become inescapable again.

Gaza resembles nothing so much as a new Berlin

The American vision that has emerged from this moment is vast in ambition and uncertain in outcome. President Trump’s envoys have constructed a regional framework that joins the recovery of Gaza to a broader architectural project – one linking Arab capital, American protection and Israeli restraint. It is an edifice that depends on constant movement: on momentum before substance, on appearance before solidity. For the moment, it works. Hostages have been released, the guns are quieter, and the promise of a new Gaza is being drawn on every conference table.

Yet within that promise........

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