It’s difficult to say what the most telling fact is in the Middle East triumph of President Donald Trump and Israel. Is it that terrorist Iran backs the president’s 20-point peace plan for Israel and Gaza? Is it that key Muslim neighbors, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey, are all on board? Is it that Hamas, which started the war, will hand over all Israeli hostages, who are its last remaining bargaining chips, even while Israel keeps hold of more than half (53%) of Gaza?
What matters is that these and many other stunning developments add up to a massive win for the Middle East, the Palestinian people, Israel, the hostages and their families, and, not least, the United States.
No one knows if Trump’s deal will lead to an overarching peace, which has eluded all American, Israeli, and Arab leaders since 1948. But even without it, there is more progress and hope now than at any time since at least the 1978 Camp David Accords and possibly since the founding of Israel.
The long, seemingly interminable, intractability of the problem is one reason that success is possible now. The Palestinians’ Arab neighbors are sick of it. They want to end the pretense that war after war has been fought for Palestinian statehood and self-determination, when everyone knows they’ve really been about fanatical genocidal Islamism that is a problem for Arab nations, not just their Jewish neighbors. Arab nations want normal relations with Israel. They don’t want to continue the definitional madness of repeated failure. They want economic growth, which would calm their restive peoples.
Pressure from Arabs and military defeat by Israel utterly isolated Hamas terrorists and left them this choice: surrender or death. They claim to love death, but their leaders enjoy their billions of dollars and chose survival.
This peace deal makes many things starkly clear, but three stand out.
First, whereas once-serious nations Britain, France, Canada, and Australia gave away Palestinian statehood, which they cannot deliver, in exchange for precisely nothing, Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu got a ceasefire without giving away statehood.
Second, the United Nations has proved irrelevant at best and at worst a grotesque impediment to peace. The U.N. was set up to achieve precisely the kind of international agreement that Trump now appears to have delivered, and all the gabfest on the East River did was help Hamas teach Jew-hatred to generations of Palestinian children.
Third, although Israelis and Gazans are jubilantly celebrating the prospect of peace, there is no similar joy among the phalanxes of Western lefties who’ve been demanding a ceasefire and an end to the nonexistent genocide of Palestinians from the moment Israel started fighting back two years ago. These schmucks didn’t really want peace or care about Palestinian civilians. All they really wanted was for the terrorists to be able to murder, torture, rape, and kidnap Jews without being punished for it.
The lack of good faith in these supporters is apt, given the total absence of good faith among the people they support. Hamas cannot be trusted, and we should assume that it and others will return to anti-Israel, anti-Western terrorism. But right now, it is time to celebrate the return of hostages and a glimmer of light in this dark, benighted region.