Has the prospect of peace ever been greeted with such gloom? No sooner had President Trump unveiled his peace plan for Israel-Gaza than the opinion-forming classes were frantically sowing cynicism. The possibility that the ghastly war in Gaza will be brought to a close gave rise not to optimism but to sarcasm, suspicion, even an eerie grumpiness unbecoming of a deal that might save thousands of lives. From the BBC to Sky News to the Israelophobic swamp of social media, the cry went up: ‘It’ll never work.’
I’m sure some of this haughty scepticism springs from the faint strains of Trump Derangement Syndrome that linger in elite circles. Hence, the BBC’s focus was less on the lives that might be preserved in Gaza than on Trump’s ‘hyperbole’ and his ‘exotic overstatement’. The Beeb preferred to rip the piss out of Trump for probably thinking this was ‘one of the greatest days in the history of civilisation’ than to ponder on a better future for Gaza. Nice moral priorities you have there.
Sky’s analysis positively dripped with derision. What happens when the ‘applause dwindles’, it wondered, and either Hamas or the Israeli ‘far right’, with all its ‘spitting fury’, rejects the plan? You would think a media empire that has convinced itself the war in Gaza is a ‘genocide’ would be more sanguine about a deal that might bring the ‘genocidal’ horrors to an end. You would be wrong.
A strange melancholy likewise descended on the digital haters of the Jewish State. They noisily gnashed their teeth over the ‘problematic’ small print in the deal, which is a weird way to respond to something that might bring to an end what they claim (insanely) to be an Auschwitz-level calamity. ‘The Palestinians must reject this surrender deal’, said Roshan M Salih of the Islamic website 5Pillars. So let the ‘genocide’ continue? It’s an original rallying cry, I’ll give him that.
But there is more to this orgy of sniffiness than TDS, than that juvenile reluctance to give Trump credit for anything. More deeply, our cultural establishment recognises, however instinctively, that this deal threatens to shatter its entire moral narrative about Israel. It threatens to expose that the true maker of war in Gaza, the true author of the sorrow in that tiny strip of land, is not the Jewish State but Hamas. By firmly hitting the ball into Hamas’s court, Trump’s deal represents an existential crisis not only for Hamas itself but also for the West’s opinion-shapers who have built their moral authority on the watery foundations of an obsessive, fact-lite Israelophobia.
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