RUTHFULLY YOURS

Here’s a pretty good rule for international affairs: if a deal pleases neo-fascists, it’s probably a bad deal. If an agreement gets an army of anti-Semites dancing in the streets, it’s likely a poor agreement. That was my first thought upon seeing the Jew-killers of Hamas emerge from their tunnels in Gaza last night to celebrate the ceasefire deal struck with Israel: if they like it, then those of us who side with civilisation over the regressive tyranny of such merciless Islamists probably will not.

Of course there’s a thinness to Hamas’s bravado. Its crowing disguises the profound losses it has suffered in this war it started with its pogrom of 7 October 2023. Thousands of its militants are dead. Its leaders are too. Its allies in Hezbollah have been pummelled into insignificance. All Hamas has to show for its fascistic onslaught against the Jewish nation a year-and-a-half ago is the depletion of its racist army and the ruination of vast swathes of Gaza.

And yet its instinct to laud the deal is not wholly wrong. For it does seem to benefit Israel’s foes more than Israel. The Associated Press has seen a draft. It will be enacted in three phases. In the first phase, which will last for 42 days, hostilities will cease and Hamas will release just 33 of the 94 hostages it still holds. In return, Israel will set free around a thousand Palestinian prisoners, including hundreds of terrorists. As AP says, Israel is required to release ‘30 Palestinian prisoners for each civilian hostage and 50 for each female soldier’. Anyone who thinks it is a fair deal to swap 30 detainees, many of whom will be terrorists, for one child stolen from his home almost 470 days ago is in urgent need of a moral compass.

Israel will also commit to removing its troops from ‘populated areas’ and staying on the ‘edges of the Gaza Strip’. It is in those populated areas, of course, that Hamas militants are gathered. The overnight withdrawal of the opposing army will benefit them enormously. In Phase 2, which will also last 42 days, Hamas will release the remaining hostages in return for a ‘yet to be negotiated number of Palestinian prisoners’ and the IDF will initiate a ‘full withdrawal’ from Gaza. In Phase 3, the final act of the deal will take place: the bodies of deceased Israeli hostages will be returned to their grieving families.

We have to be honest: for those of us who support the Jewish nation against the medieval militants that wish to destroy it, this is a bad deal. It is hard to see it as anything other than a boon for Hamas and a blow to Israel. Over the next month, Israel will secure the return of 33 hostages, but Hamas will secure immeasurably more from the deal. Alongside the release of dangerous prisoners, Hamas will watch the IDF withdraw from Gaza’s fighting zones. It will win the breathing space to regroup, rearm and refortify after 15 months of war. Is this peace or appeasement?

Of course, we should not belittle the joy of the Israeli families who will finally have their loved ones returned. Or the sweet relief Gazans will enjoy once the hostilities that Hamas ignited are brought to a halt. These are good, human developments. Yet it is undeniable that the war aim of eliminating Hamas, a noble goal, has not only been temporarily halted but reversed. It seems that Israel must, after all, suffer a genocidal terror army on its doorstep. Can you think of any other nation that would be told to leave be a neighbouring army of racists that slaughtered its civilians and longs to slaughter more?

For a sense of how risky this deal is, consider that in 2011 Israel likewise agreed to the release of 1,027 Palestinian prisoners in return for one IDF soldier abducted by Hamas. And among the released was Yahya Sinwar. He went on to become leader of Hamas in Gaza and a chief architect of the butchery of 7 October. Who is Israel releasing this time? What might they go on to do? The moral dilemma faced by the Jewish nation is almost unimaginable. Should it secure the return of its citizens even if that means releasing men who will plot the future slaughter of its citizens? That the Jewish State, alone among the nations, must make such a tragic calculation is nothing to celebrate.

The deal is being chalked up to Donald Trump’s foreign-policy ‘realism’. For all Joe Biden’s sad efforts to take credit for the ceasefire, it’s clear it was pressure from the incoming president that made it happen. The Trumpists have essentially rapped Israel’s knuckles – and severely. Trump’s Middle East envoy, the ‘aggressive businessman’, Steven Witkoff, was reportedly ‘salty’ with Benjamin Netanyahu, heaping pressure on him to concede to the deal. Trump and his allies clearly did not want their fresh administration to be sullied by this sad war. So they left Israel with ‘an acute sense of isolation’, as the Atlantic says: sign up or else.

For me, this raises red flags about Trump’s approach to international affairs. To elevate the peace of mind of America’s incoming rulers over the right of the Jewish State to defeat the anti-Semites that threaten its very existence seems disastrously short-termist. Do Trump’s advisers not appreciate what is at stake in the Middle East? Do they not understand that civilisation itself is on the line when an army of Islamist fanatics declares war on the world’s only Jewish nation, and by extension on the Western world that backs it? Trump will say he ‘won the peace’, but the price of this ‘peace’ is high indeed: the halting of Israel’s just war on modern-day pogromists who loathe America as much as they do Israel.

Many are cheering Trump’s manoeuvres as realpolitik in action, following decades of moralistic military crusades by an out-of-control foreign-policy establishment. Yet a key feature of realpolitik is cool, calm analysis of one’s own national self-interest. In what way does it serve America’s interests to ‘acutely isolate’ Israel and witlessly boost the fortunes of Islamist fanatics who despise the West? Could it be that both the old interventionist zeal of Hillary Clinton types and the new ‘realism’ of the Trump set undermine America by elevating political self-regard over national self-interest? Might this Trumpist ‘realism’ we hear so much about really be defeatism with better PR?

There is not ‘peace’ in the Middle East. For the vast moral challenges raised by 7 October remain unresolved. Should the Jewish nation really have to live cheek-by-jowl with Jew killers? Wouldn’t the destruction of Hamas be good for both Israelis and Palestinians? Why did so many in the West side with the pogromists over the pogrom’s victims following that orgy of barbarism? And shouldn’t we now stand with civilisation, proudly, against Islamism? Trump can gloat, but unless we give answers to these questions, the crisis both there and here will continue.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy