What Does “Finish the Job” Mean? Netanyahu’s Goal Clashes with Peace Deal

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s oft-repeated vow to “finish the job” against Hamas has become the primary obstacle to the U.S.-led peace plan for Gaza. A central question at the heart of his Monday summit with President Donald Trump is what this phrase actually means, and why it is so fundamentally incompatible with a negotiated settlement.
On the surface, “finishing the job” implies the complete military and political destruction of Hamas. This would mean killing or capturing its entire leadership, dismantling all of its military infrastructure, and ensuring it has no residual ability to govern or launch attacks from the Gaza Strip. For many Israelis, nothing less will suffice after the trauma of the October 2023 attack.
This maximalist goal, however, requires a protracted, open-ended military campaign that could take many more months, if not years, to achieve, with immense human cost. It is a goal that is fundamentally at odds with the core concept of the U.S. peace plan, which is a ceasefire to halt the fighting.
A negotiated deal, by its very nature, would likely leave some remnants of Hamas’s political structure intact, even if its military wing is disarmed. It requires a compromise that Netanyahu’s “finish the job” rhetoric does not allow for. The American plan seeks to neutralize Hamas through disarmament and political isolation, whereas Netanyahu seeks to do so through total military annihilation.
For the peace plan to have any chance of success, President Trump must either convince Netanyahu to redefine his goal or to accept that the deal’s disarmament provisions are a more practical way of “finishing the job.” Without a resolution to this semantic but deeply significant clash, the two sides will remain on completely different tracks.