I hate to be Johnny Raincloud here, but I hope you’ll excuse me if I’m not exactly turning cartwheels just yet at the ‘mid-East peace deal’. This is Hamas we’re dealing with here, remember. Besides, does anyone think releasing 2000 Palestinian prisoners, including 250 terrorists serving life sentences for murder, will work out well? Remember, Yahya Sinwar, the Oct 7 mastermind, was also released as part of a prisoner swap for Israeli hostages.
Still, maybe it’s just a sadly typical example of the ‘problem of dirty hands’ in politics – which is, after all, the art of the possible. And, yes, as Donald Trump emphasised in his own The Art of the Deal, the key to securing a deal is making both parties feel they’ve won something. Should Hamas have been offered anything, though? The Allies demanded unconditional surrender in WWII for good reason.
On the contrary, most Western nations, including Australia, have been too shamefully eager to offer Hamas everything, in exchange for nothing. Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong happily betrayed Israel and ‘recognised’ a ‘Palestinian state’ without making even releasing hostages a pre-condition. At least New Zealand’s Winston Peters was made of better stuff, even if he ridiculously castigated Israel for defending itself.
If nothing else, Trump has humiliated the technocratic elite who so arrogantly parade themselves as the ‘grownups’. Instead, while they’ve ineffectually wrung their hands at best, actively cheered on Hamas at worst: the Bad Orange Man is making fools of them all.
Donald Trump is on the cusp of one of the great feats of international diplomacy and his most significant achievement after securing the agreement of Israel and Hamas to end hostilities after two years of brutal, bloody conflict.
Everything will hinge on the execution of this agreement and whether the peace can hold together. This is only the opening move in a much larger chess game, but Trump appears to have emerged with a stunning diplomatic victory – a breakthrough to end the war in Gaza.
This is not yet a broader deal for peace in the Middle East. It is an agreement that covers only the first stage of Trump’s comprehensive plan, including the return of Israeli hostages, a prisoner exchange, the withdrawal of Israel to an agreed-upon line and the entry of aid into Gaza.
However, even if just these elements are delivered, it will be seen as a personal achievement of enormous strategic import and one deserving of international recognition regardless of whatever decision the Nobel Committee makes about its peace prize this week.
Well, Barack Obama got a Peace Prize for, let’s be honest, nothing more than being black and winning a presidential election. Making the Nobel Committee look the prize idiots that they are, the president they fawned over for ‘extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples’ went on to become the most assiduous warmonger in presidential history. Obama has the sorry distinction of spending the longest time at war of any US president, and the only president whose entire time in office was spent in war.
Ever since Trump’s return to the presidency, he has been widely portrayed as a buffoon, whose erratic approach to world affairs would condemn the United States to ridicule, isolation and ultimate irrelevance […]
As the US withdrew from the scene, it was the sensitive Europeans, and “progressive” governments such as our own, with their faith in the “international community” and the “rules-based international order”, that would lay the basis, in the Middle East as elsewhere, for peace. And the crucial step, of course, was to recognise the non-existent state of Palestine – a move that would, for reasons shrouded in mystery, supposedly advance peace instead of promoting the very terrorism it was so plainly rewarding.
Trapped in idea clots that barely rise to the level of cliches, it is the proponents of those views, and not Trump, who have proven entirely irrelevant at best, harmful at worst.
Indeed, far from taking the US to irrelevance, Trump showed that the US’s military might is still unparalleled – all it needed was a president willing to use it with the correct strategic nous. The flawlessly executed American bombing raid in Iran, which followed Israel’s similarly devastating attack, not only showed just how consequential the American military still is, but that Trump is fully prepared to follow through on threats when it counts.
When Trump threatened ‘fire and fury’ on North Korea, Kim believed him and acted accordingly. Will any hostile actor really believe the legacy media bleating about ‘TACO Trump’, seeing Iran and Hamas humiliated? Certainly not the other Arab states.
Hesitant until then about placing effective pressure on Hamas, they were brought to their senses by that sheer show of force, and by Trump’s subsequent threat that Hamas, unless it accepted an agreement, would face Armageddon. It wasn’t the snivelling Europeans, Canadians or Australians who could credibly provide the leaders of the Arab states with security or, alternatively, seriously endanger their hold on power; it was the US, and the US alone.
Of course, that isn’t to belittle Israel’s success on the battlefield. If they’d been inclined to believe Yahya Sinwar that ‘the Jew’ would never be able to ‘confront the Muslim face to face’ (thereby ignoring the result of every attack on Israel by Muslims since 1948), the sight of Sinwar, covered in ash, dust and blood and cowering from an Israeli drone before being summarily dispatched to Jahannum, surely sharpened their minds.
Israel, despite the most deplorable efforts of its grubby left-wingers to sow weakness and capitulation (like left-wingers everywhere), always had what Clausewitz called the “moral force” critical to combat successfully.
By contrast, the utter moral degradation of the globalist elite and the global left has been made plain for all to see. It was never about ‘peace’, it was only ever about hating Jews. Watch their actions over the coming weeks and months, as they almost certainly continue to protest and bellow Hamas slogans, even as the peace deal gets put into action.
It was never about ‘peace’ for them.
