EP354 · Society · first published 2025-10-06
Trump, Israel and Hamas | Atte Kaleva | Negotiator 354
Member of Parliament Atte Kaleva maps the actors and power relations of the Middle East: the fragmentation of Israel's electoral system and Netanyahu's dependence on small hardline parties, the difference between Hamas and Fatah, the Palestinian Authority's prisoner and martyr payments, and the collapse of the Iranian axis through Hezbollah, Assad and the loss of Iran's air defences. The conversation was recorded on 3 October 2025, days after Trump's twenty-point plan was published and before Hamas had answered. Kaleva reads the plan as a ceasefire and hostage step rather than a peace plan, argues its novelty is that every regional actor is involved, and offers a cautious optimism that proved justified within a week. It includes a detour into Finnish constitutional review, where Kaleva himself sits on the Constitutional Law Committee. Published 6 October 2025.
Trump, Israel and Hamas | Atte Kaleva
Summary: In episode 354 Sami Miettinen interviews Member of Parliament Atte Kaleva about power relations in the Middle East, Trump’s twenty-point Gaza plan, and why the logic of the region’s actors does not emerge from the news feed. Published 6 October 2025.
A note on reading this. This is an expert interview in which the guest speaks in his own name. Kaleva is a National Coalition MP and a researcher on jihadism and terrorism, and his readings of the region are his own. They are marked here as his assessments, forecasts as forecasts, and contested political positions as opinion. The article takes no position on the parties to the conflict. The episode was recorded on Friday 3 October 2025 — four days after Trump’s plan was published and before Hamas’s answer was known — so it is a snapshot, not an outcome. A separate section at the end, verified after the fact, sets out what actually happened.
Who is speaking
Atte Kaleva is a National Coalition member of the Finnish parliament who has researched jihadism and terrorism since the early 2010s and published a book on the subject, Jihad ja terrori (2018). He was in Yemen studying Arabic and gathering material for a doctoral dissertation when he and his spouse were kidnapped in Sanaa in December 2012; the captivity lasted until May 2013. He also sits on parliament’s Constitutional Law Committee, which turns out to matter later in the episode.
The episode opens on his appearance the previous evening on A-studio, and the clip that came out of it concerned blood money.
The first correction: who pays the blood money
Miettinen’s question assumes it is Hamas. Kaleva corrects him immediately, and this is a good illustration of why the episode exists at all:
It is not in fact Hamas that pays this blood money, but the Palestinian Authority that holds power in the West Bank — the PLO and Fatah, Mahmoud Abbas’s people.
The scheme as he describes it is tariff-based. If an attacker kills an Israeli, he receives a set payment. If he dies in the attack — becomes a martyr — the money goes to his family. If he ends up in an Israeli prison, the family receives a monthly stipend. The Palestinian Authority calls it a martyrs’ fund; the established term in English debate is pay for slay. Kaleva notes that the UN holds a good deal of material on it.
The other half of the mechanism is that Israel collects West Bank taxes and remits them to the Palestinian Authority — deducting from the remittance the sum the Authority has paid out in these payments.
The distinction between Hamas and Fatah is not pedantry here. It is the load-bearing theme of the episode: Gaza and the West Bank are two different things governed by two different actors.
Israel: why the electoral system explains the politics
Kaleva’s analysis of Israeli domestic politics starts from how it votes. The whole country is a single constituency, and the threshold is low relative to the number of small single-issue parties that result. The Knesset therefore fills with small groups that have few seats but very firm red lines — from the liberal side as much as from the fundamentalist ultra-Orthodox side.
When there are many red lines, governing gets hard. Kaleva’s formulation is sharp:
Netanyahu is in a certain sense the hostage of these small hardline movements.
He names the coalition’s most radical figures — Smotrich and Ben-Gvir — and then moves to the claim that is the episode’s most contested and also its most carefully argued.
In Kaleva’s reading, Netanyahu long opposed the two-state model and permitted Qatar to fund Hamas precisely because Hamas in power in Gaza makes it hard for Western countries to recognise a Palestinian state. The logic as he sets it out: you cannot commit to a two-state model in which one state is a democracy and the other is governed by a terrorist organisation. This is Kaleva’s interpretation of Netanyahu’s calculation, not a statement by Netanyahu, and should be read as such.
Palestine: 2006 and after
The chain of events is short and it explains the present.
Israel withdrew from Gaza entirely. Kaleva raises a detail usually left out: thousands of greenhouses remained, successful businesses in which many Palestinians worked. They were looted immediately and that was the end of it.
In the 2006 Palestinian Authority elections Hamas won in Gaza and Fatah in the West Bank. Fatah disputed the result in Gaza as well, and what followed was effectively civil war: Hamas members killed Fatah members and drove the rest out. Hamas took Gaza, Fatah was left governing the West Bank.
Miettinen’s interjection matters: have there been elections since? There have not. Kaleva adds that the situation is good on neither side. Hamas governs Gaza authoritatively. Mahmoud Abbas is 89, unpopular and the subject of corruption allegations, which in Kaleva’s view are probably well founded.
On Abbas, Kaleva raises the dissertation he wrote in Moscow in the 1980s, in which he argued that the Holocaust was a conspiracy between the Nazis and the Zionists to drive Jews to emigrate from Europe to Palestine. The dissertation and its contents are a matter of public record and have been widely discussed internationally.
The Cold War inheritance
This is the most explanatory passage in the episode for why European debate lines up the way it does.
Kaleva recalls that around Israel’s founding the Finnish left too looked on Israel with sympathy — the kibbutzim were seen as socialism that worked, a kolkhoz that, unlike a kolkhoz, actually produced. After 1967 the alignment flipped.
His explanation is Cold War bloc logic: on a general left view the Soviet Union was good and the United States bad, and everything the United States supported was bad. Since the United States traditionally supported Israel, the Soviet Union positioned itself automatically on the other side to dam American influence — without, in Kaleva’s telling, being especially fond of the Arabs.
This is an interpretation rather than settled history, and the article presents it as one. Its value is that it makes the shape of the present debate intelligible rather than merely irrational.
Jihad: the greater and the lesser
A short but useful clarification, which Kaleva says deserves an episode of its own.
The Quran knows two kinds of jihad. The greater jihad is inward struggle against un-Islamic impulses — his example is wanting a beer and not drinking it. The lesser jihad is outward: if the community of Islam, the umma, is threatened or attacked, every able Muslim man is ultimately obliged to defend it.
In everyday usage the word has narrowed to the second. The distinction matters if you want to read the region’s actors in their own terms.
The regional map and the collapse of the Iranian axis
Kaleva sorts the region into four groups.
1. The Iranian axis. Iran acts through proxies: Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas, the Houthis in Yemen, and for a long time Assad’s Syria. Assad was an Alawite rather than strictly a Shia, but was counted as Shia. That is the “Shia axis”: Iran, Syria, Hezbollah.
Its collapse is the episode’s central geopolitical observation:
- Hezbollah lost its operational capacity in the pager attack, which Kaleva regards as an exceptionally skilful operation. He adds in passing that Iran’s ambassador’s pager also exploded — and asks where he had got hold of one.
- Assad has fallen, and Iranian influence through Syria has been dammed.
- Hamas has been neutralised or is being neutralised.
- Iran’s air defences have been disabled almost entirely.
The last is what Kaleva calls genuinely remarkable. With no air defence, Israeli or American air forces can fly over Iran as they please, and fixed targets — enrichment plants, other nuclear-programme facilities, government facilities — are exposed. He also corrects Miettinen’s framing precisely: Iran’s army has not been destroyed; its air defence has been disabled. The army remains capable and the ayatollahs still run the country.
Worth noting: when the strikes came, the other states in the region did not protest.
2. The Sunni states. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Jordan and Egypt oppose Iran — and this loose grouping includes, in practice, Israel. The Saudi concern is concrete and economic: the kingdom’s Shia minority lives along the Persian Gulf in the Dammam area, where Saudi oil and gas are produced. If Iran can stir separatist agitation there, oil production is at risk — in Kaleva’s words an existential problem.
3. Turkey and Qatar. These have, in his account, certain sympathies towards the Muslim Brotherhood, which the region’s other Sunni states regard as a subversive terrorist organisation. He is careful to say the countries are not themselves the Brotherhood.
4. Russia. Russia fought in Syria on Assad’s side to keep its last Mediterranean naval base and a foothold in the region. With Assad gone, that foothold has gone.
Kaleva’s own summary: “This cocktail is fairly confused.”
Why Hamas attacked on 7 October 2023 — two calculations
This is the episode’s most important analytical passage, because it treats the attack as a strategy rather than only as an atrocity.
Kaleva gives two reasons.
First: interrupting the Abraham Accords. The agreements struck during Trump’s first term had come close to normalising relations between several regional states and Israel. Kaleva judges that had it been anyone other than Trump, it would have been a Nobel Peace Prize achievement. Hamas did not want the Saudis and others normalising.
Second, and colder: a provocation calculation.
They calculated quite skilfully that if they carried out a sufficiently brutal terrorist attack, it would provoke Israel into responses so forceful that the world’s sympathies would then turn towards the terrorist organisation.
Kaleva says plainly that this sounds absurd — and that it is exactly what has happened. His assessment is that the strategy has produced good results from Hamas’s point of view, because many European countries have since recognised a Palestinian state. That is his reading of why those decisions were taken; other justifications have been offered publicly.
Trump’s twenty-point plan: what is new in it
Kaleva starts with a terminological correction worth noting:
This is not a peace plan from Trump, it is a ceasefire plan.
Its aim is to stop the killing, free the hostages and disarm Hamas. Only then does a peace plan come into view.
So what is exceptional about it? Kaleva’s answer is one thing: every actor in the region is involved in some way, Hamas excepted. He compares it to the Oslo agreement of the early 1990s, in which the surrounding Arab states were not involved. In summer 2025 France and Saudi Arabia had issued a joint declaration that regional Arab states — and Finland — joined; what distinguishes Trump’s plan is the breadth of participation.
On Oslo he adds a historical note: although the agreement came close to passing, at precisely that moment, after the Soviet collapse, a large fundamentalist ultra-Orthodox population had moved to Israel from Eastern Europe and could not accept agreements with the Arabs. That population is now considerably larger and more influential.
Pressure is needed in both directions
Kaleva’s structural analysis of the negotiation is the episode’s most usable insight, and it is a negotiating observation rather than a political one.
Pressure on the Palestinian side comes from the Sunni Gulf states, now that Iranian influence has been squeezed out.
Pressure on Netanyahu’s side can come from exactly one person in the world: the President of the United States. And on Kaleva’s reading Trump has bound his own prestige to the process by making himself the figurehead of the transitional authority — which makes backing out expensive for him.
Connected to this is the episode’s sharpest single observation, Netanyahu’s bilingualism: he says in English that he is on board and then immediately tells his own supporters in Hebrew that the two-state model is not accepted. Kaleva’s conclusion is that Trump’s unpredictability is, here, actually an asset:
Trump is the person capable of making Netanyahu an offer he cannot refuse.
Miettinen offers his own frame: what is on the table is effectively a one-and-a-half state model, proceeding with Gaza first and the West Bank later.
Gaza’s economic future
Kaleva frames Gaza’s problem not primarily as a military one but as an incentive problem, and this is the episode’s most constructive stretch.
Gaza’s population has suffered most both from Hamas’s rule and from Israeli counter-measures, and there is bitterness, antisemitism and a sense of having no prospects. The population is very young. In Kaleva’s view the transitional authority would have to be able to create economic incentives for Gazans to abandon terrorism and move to a market economy.
There is no reason Gaza could not become the Dubai of the Mediterranean.
When someone sees their standard of living rise, the appeal of going off into the desert to wage jihad falls, because there is more to lose.
On Trump’s earlier and much-mocked “Gaza Riviera” idea, Kaleva is deliberately two-sided. He rejects outright the version in which the population would be moved out — that would be a war crime and cannot be done — and notes that the new plan no longer mentions any transfer. But in the economic idea itself he sees “a small seed of truth”, and reads part of the mockery as an instance of what he calls the Orange Man Bad narrative: whatever Trump says must be laughed at.
He also makes an observation about Trump’s negotiating method that generalises: he proposes something completely outlandish, everyone recoils, and when he then backs off a little the result sounds realistic.
And his calculation of why the deal might hold:
If we could get a solution that benefits Gazans, Israelis, the surrounding Arab states and the United States, and the only losers were Iran and Hamas — then this starts to sound quite attractive.
Why the Arab states cannot come first
One concrete obstacle that often goes unnoticed in public debate.
Kaleva says that when he speaks to these countries’ representatives informally, the message is emphatic: they are tired of the permanent Palestinian victimhood and of the fact that billions have been pumped into the area and produced terrorism and violence.
But the operational obstacle is this: Saudi or Moroccan troops cannot be sent to Gaza if there is a risk of Arab-against-Arab fighting with Hamas operatives. Somebody has to do the dirty work first, and only then can they arrive at a clean table to stabilise the security situation.
The same applies to Egypt and Jordan. Both have serious problems with the Muslim Brotherhood: in Egypt, after Mubarak fell, the Brotherhood was the only functioning opposition force, was elected in free elections and then, in Kaleva’s account, took more power for itself than Mubarak ever had, until the army removed it. Jordan has a large Palestinian refugee population and does not want more.
Israeli domestic politics: conscription and the Supreme Court
Two structural tensions that define Netanyahu’s room to move.
The ultra-Orthodox conscription exemption. When Israel was founded there were few fundamentalist Jews, and many of them opposed the founding of the state on the grounds that only the Messiah establishes the state of Israel. Ben-Gurion brought them in by promising they need not do military service — their service would be spiritual, studying Torah and praying. Service is three years for men and two for women. The group is now so large that the exemption is untenable, and Kaleva finds the others’ question — why do I have to spend three years in the army — entirely understandable. Former defence minister Gallant tried to change it and Netanyahu removed him.
The Supreme Court as constitutional court. Israel has no constitution but a collection of basic laws — there was no time to write one, because the attack after the state’s founding was immediate. The Supreme Court functions as a de facto constitutional court, judging bills against the spirit of the basic laws.
The structural problem is the appointment mechanism: the judges choose their own successors. With the court, on Kaleva’s description, having moved left, left-leaning judges appoint new left-leaning judges. Netanyahu has accused the court of being politicised and sought to move the appointment power to the prime minister, which the left opposition and the court resisted — and for which he is accused of acting against the basic laws.
The detour worth reading: Finnish constitutional review
Miettinen turns the conversation to Finland, and this becomes the episode’s most surprising passage — because Kaleva sits on the Constitutional Law Committee himself and defends the Finnish arrangement.
Miettinen says he used to favour a constitutional court but changed his mind after discussing it with the Coalition’s Heikki Vestman. Kaleva gives three reasons.
First, what the committee does. It reviews in advance those laws that touch fundamental rights, human rights or international agreements. If a law is not constitutional, it must be passed in the order prescribed for constitutional amendments — a two-thirds majority and left to rest over the next parliamentary term, or a five-sixths majority as urgent, as was done with the border security law. In Kaleva’s view the framers deliberately left a back door, but one narrow enough that no government can restrict fundamental rights on a simple majority.
Second, on politicisation. His answer is candid rather than defensive:
Of course it is politicised, because I cannot forget my values and attitudes when I walk into that committee. But what makes it not politicised is that when I go in there, I am no longer wearing the Coalition’s cloak.
He describes the difference concretely: in the chamber he presses the green button for government bills, including ones he does not personally think sensible, because he is committed to the programme. In committee he listens to the experts and forms his own judgement on whether a thing can be done — even when he thinks the bill itself is foolish.
Third, the counter-question. This is his strongest argument against a constitutional court, and it follows directly from the Israeli example:
Who appoints the judges?
If the judges appoint themselves, you get the same self-perpetuating clique as in Israel; if politicians appoint them, you are in the American situation. He adds an observation about selection within Finnish legal education: a right-leaning law student is in his estimation more likely to go into criminal law or corporate law, where the salaries are, while others gravitate to constitutional law — so the split is already somewhat politicised at that stage.
Miettinen adds his own argument: under the present system even weighty laws can be renewed in a reasonable time.
(The same question about constitutional review is taken from the opposite direction in episode 178, where two Coalition candidates reach the opposite conclusion — Values Adrift, the Rule of Law at Risk.)
The flotilla, ideology, and what to take from it
The last stretch of the episode is its most opinionated, and should be read as such.
Kaleva criticises Greta Thunberg’s flotilla sharply: there were dozens of boats running on marine diesel, little aid could fit aboard, and he describes seeing videos in which supplies were packed into plastic tubs and thrown into the sea in the hope they would drift to the Gaza shore. His conclusion is that this was virtue signalling and moral posturing rather than helping Gazans. That is his assessment of the flotilla’s motives.
Miettinen adds that participants in an earlier flotilla were offered the chance to watch Israel’s compiled video of the events of 7 October 2023, and declined. Kaleva takes this as an example of strong ideology displacing facts.
His broader claim is that Islamism, Marxism and what he calls woke activism are united by opposition to Western society, capitalism and the market economy, and he asks who benefits from this internal corrosion — answering: Russia, Iran, perhaps China, though he says China does not actively destabilise.
The rhetorical image attached to this — that Islamists, communists and LGBT activists are literally in the same boat, and that on gaining power each group would turn on the others — is his argument and his forecast, not an observation. Its historical support is his account of the Iranian revolution: progressive university youth, Marxists and Khomeini’s Islamists deposed the Shah together, after which Khomeini’s forces killed, imprisoned or exiled both the Marxists and the progressives. The revolution ate its children.
Hamas’s calculation: why surrender may not pay
The episode’s last analytical passage, and a cold one.
Trump’s plan guarantees Hamas members amnesty or safe passage out of Gaza if they give up their weapons. Miettinen asks whether Hamas could bring itself to wind itself up.
Kaleva answers that by Western logic it would be sensible — but that Hamas’s own calculation is different. The organisation has achieved its aims: by killing Israeli civilians and its own civilians it has reached a position in which several countries have recognised Palestine. From its point of view the attack succeeded. And in Kaleva’s view the organisation places no value on human life, its own people’s or the other side’s.
From which follows his forecast: with Trump’s threat being to give Netanyahu a free hand in Gaza, Hamas may conclude it can provoke even more forceful reprisals, increasing support for Palestine and bringing further recognitions.
I am not sure they have any interest in not continuing that war down to the last Palestinian civilian.
What happened next
This section is not from the episode; it is added afterwards, because the episode was recorded in the middle of the sequence.
Trump announced his twenty-point plan on 29 September 2025 at the White House alongside Netanyahu. The episode was recorded on Friday 3 October 2025, when Hamas’s answer was still outstanding and, per BBC sources, acceptance did not look close — and it was in exactly that situation that Kaleva offered his cautious optimism.
That same day Hamas said it accepted parts of the plan, including relinquishing power and releasing all remaining hostages, while other elements required further consultation. Trump told Israel to stop bombing Gaza immediately. On 9 October 2025 Israel and Hamas agreed the first phase: release and return of the hostages, a significant increase in humanitarian aid, and a partial Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.
Kaleva’s cautious optimism was, then, vindicated within a week. Whether the hardest part of the plan — the disarmament of Hamas — is achieved remains unresolved as this article is written, and it is precisely the point Kaleva regarded in the episode as the least likely.
What stays with you
Four things.
The news feed does not convey the logic. Kaleva’s own justification for the whole episode is that an ordinary reader finds it hard to understand why different actors do what they do, because it requires a deep understanding of the region. Once the underlying logic is known the behaviour is logical — and that logic does not emerge from any single news item.
The Iranian axis collapsed in pieces, and the whole is large. Hezbollah, Assad, Hamas and the air defences are four separate news stories that together shift the regional balance more than any one of them does alone. That the region’s other states did not protest the strikes says more about this than their official statements do.
The solution is, in negotiating terms, a question of pressure. Pressure is needed on both sides, and only one person in the world can apply it to Netanyahu. This is the episode’s most transferable observation, and it applies to stuck negotiations well beyond this one.
Gaza’s problem is also an incentive problem. Kaleva’s most constructive claim is that the question is not only weapons but whether a young Gazan has anything to lose. It is the point where he and Trump’s ridiculed property scheme meet — and where he at the same time rejects clearly the version of it that would be a war crime.