The silence is unsettling. It’s 12 hours since President Trump announced that Israel and Hamas have assented to the first phase of his peace plan, paving the way for a ceasefire. And yet the ‘Ceasefire now’ lobby is eerily schtum. The people who’ve been noisily clamouring for an end to the war in Gaza are either mute or they’re moaning. Don’t trust that snake Benjamin Netanyahu, some say. If I thought a genocide was being executed in Gaza, a crime as cataclysmic as anything the Nazis did, I’d be on the streets celebrating this morning. Yet these people can barely be arsed to put a thumbs-up on Instagram.
We know why: it’s because Trump has called their bluff. In fact, this could prove to be one of the most consequential bluff-callings of modern times. Trump hasn’t only managed to get two mortal enemies to sign on the dotted line of a deal. He has also, as a side effect, torn off the veil of pacifism worn by Israel’s legion loathers in the West and compelled them to come clean. He has created a situation where the true aim of this army of Israel haters – the dismantling of the Jewish State – will have nowhere left to hide. It might be a peace plan but it delivers a possibly fatal blow to the cult of Israelophobia.
There are many reasons for normal people – those of us who have not fashioned an entire personality from a frothing contempt for the Jewish nation – to feel hopeful about the events of the past day. The first phase of the deal compels Hamas to release all the Israeli hostages. That could happen as soon as Monday. In return, Israel will set free hundreds of Palestinian prisoners – a risky move, for sure, given many of them are Islamist terrorists with much blood on their hands. Israeli troops will then withdraw to an agreed line and more aid will go into Gaza. The fighting would stop.
It’s a little early to sing ‘Kumbayah’. This is only the first phase. The latter phases – especially the essential demand that Hamas lay down its arms and surrender itself into non-existence – remain a sticking point for the Islamist tyrants of Gaza and their craven apologists in the West. But what sweet relief it would be, for the grief-stricken people of Israel and the war-weary civilians of Gaza, to see the fighting stop. To see the return of the Jews so violently seized on 7 October 2023. To see something approximating peace somewhere on the horizon.
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