Trump praised Israel for winning the war but told those assembled it was time to embrace peace. The former, of course, could never have happened without the latter.
Israel decisively won the war following Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attacks because Trump allowed it to do so. Anyone who has followed the Gaza conflict for more than a few minutes understands it’s a small miracle that Trump convinced jihadists to release all the living hostages in return for a ceasefire. That accomplishment should not be overlooked.
But Gaza was merely one prong of a multifront struggle with Iran. The Islamist regime had spent decades constructing an armed ring around the small Jewish state. Israel spent two years methodically, and brutally, dismantling it. The mullahs’ ally in Lebanon, Hezbollah, was severely wounded. This led to the collapse of the Syrian dictatorship.
After Israel’s assassination attempt on the terrorist group’s leaders in Doha, Qatar realized there could be steep consequences accompanying the propping up and legitimizing of what was essentially an army of the Muslim Brotherhood. Hamas had run out of friends.
After moving civilians out of Gaza City, Israel finally had Hamas’s remnants cornered. This was no small task, considering Gaza perhaps houses the only army in the world that takes its uniforms off during war and puts them back on afterward. But the days of deliberately sacrificing Palestinians to create martyrs for Western propagandists were coming to an end.
Trump’s imperviousness to the demands of the elite consensus on foreign policy or “international community” has benefited him. As world leaders such as British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron rewarded the barbarity of October 7 with the recognition of a fictitious Palestinian state, Trump was doubling down on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, warning Hamas that its destruction was inevitable if it didn’t surrender the hostages.
If Trump had followed the lead of European leaders, placating leftist and Islamic constituents, the stalemate would have continued.
It should be said that there are no guarantees that Palestinians will abide by any agreement. For Hamas, ceasefires are a time to retrench, never to reconsider. In 2005, Israel expelled all non-Arabs from the Strip. Affluent American Jews purchased millions in advanced agricultural systems to help the Palestinians become self-sufficient. The first thing the Palestinians in Gaza did was destroy the farming equipment. The second thing they did was defenestrate any moderate voices.
Palestinians, a hodgepodge of clans without any coherent ethnic identity (save the trauma over a “catastrophe” of their own making), have another chance. Deradicalizing their society, the first step in Trump’s proposed 20-point plan for peace, will be a heavy lift. Hamas is already executing scores of alleged “collaborators” in the streets.
Even so, Hamas is no longer armed with an arsenal of Iranian missiles. Israel will try to seal Gaza hermetically and create a buffer zone around the Strip to ensure that October 7 is never repeated. Gaza’s formerly sieve-like border with Egypt, where most of the weaponry was smuggled, no longer exists.
Now, Palestinians in Gaza can choose to be Somalia or a prosperous entity. After all, no place has been showered with as much attention and aid.
But Trump’s accomplishment transcends the immediate Israel-Hamas conflict. All the nations that showed up at the peace summit in Sharm el Sheikh, including Muslim-majority nations like Pakistan, Turkey, and Indonesia, have now signed Trump’s vision for peace, which stipulates that Palestinians in Gaza must disarm and accept Israel’s existence before there is any talk of creating another Arab state.
This has always been the Israeli condition for peace. There is simply no way such a thing happens with President Kamala Harris or Joe Biden or Barack Obama, whose policies treated our antagonists as friends and allies as adversaries.
Recall that Hamas official Mousa Abu Marzouk admitted the goal of the October 7 attack was to undermine any Saudi-Israeli normalization deal. Once hostilities fade, there will be new avenues to expand the Abraham Accords.
Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto, leader of the most populous Muslim country in the world, was in front of the United Nations not long ago, arguing that “true peace requires recognizing Israel’s right to live in security.” This kind of rhetoric from Islamic nations was unprecedented only a few years ago.
During his Knesset speech, Trump again offered an opening for Iran to engage in talks. There’s no rational, geopolitical reason for Iran to be an enemy of the United States, or even Israel. Its theologically driven bellicosity has brought destruction and economic ruin upon itself.
Before the revolution, the Jewish and Persian people had a friendship dating back millennia. The foundations for a more peaceful region are all there.
One hopes that the end of the Gaza conflict also helps put to bed one of the laziest myths about the Middle East. Israel and the Arabs are not entangled in a centuries-long war. The modern Palestinian cause is, at best, a few decades old, a creation of the Soviets and Arab allies meant as a cudgel against Western influence.
Since then, Palestinians have been rejected by virtually every Arab state. Conversely, Israel is in an open or quiet peace with virtually the entire Sunni Arab world, a situation solidified by the Abraham Accords during Trump’s first term.
Indeed, the moldy conventional wisdom that has dominated Washington foreign policy thinking for decades has been battered into irrelevance by Trump.
The president’s son-in-law and Middle East envoy Jared Kushner has done more for the cause of peace in the Middle East over the past decade than the Brookings Institution has in its entire existence. (It hasn’t hurt the cause of nepotism, either.)
The counterproductive habit of previous administrations to place Palestinian grievances at the center of any deal only created a diplomatic quagmire. Meanwhile, decades of American appeasement of Iran, led by Obama’s State Department, allowed the mullahs to destabilize the Middle East.
Obama’s crew long wanted to lift Iran as a regional power to be a counterweight to Israel. This policy only compelled Israel to act and exert its dominance as the leading military and intelligence power in the Middle East.
Then again, the trendy isolationists and “realists,” who rose to prominence during the ideological overcorrection after democracy-building projects in Iraq and Afghanistan, have also been discredited. Their constant predictions of another Vietnam War or World War III breaking out every time the U.S. exerts any military power are cliché.
There is zero appetite for nation-building. There is still an appetite for judicious, targeted use of American might and prestige to advance interests and create a peaceful world. Let’s call it the “Trump Doctrine.”
And few such engagements have been more effective in the pursuit of peace than the bombing of the facilities in Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan which, for now, denied the extremist Twelvers in Iran nuclear weapons.
The end of the war has also exposed the Western, pro-Palestinian “ceasefire now” movement as little more than a front for the murderous terrorists of Hamas.
Those who spread the genocide hoax and looked at images coming out of Gaza claiming starvation were largely silent about the end of the war. Perfunctory statements about the hostage release were meant to soften an extremist position.
Those who spent years with banners reading, “From the river to the sea,” were back at it already. The purpose of the “Free Palestine” movement is the destruction of Israel, nothing less.
In some ways, Trump’s triumphant address before the Knesset was reminiscent of President John F. Kennedy’s Ich bin ein Berliner speech on the steps of Rathaus Schöneberg in 1963.
Kennedy had delivered an explicit condemnation of communism at the height of the Cold War but held out for the promise of peace. Kennedy, of course, wasn’t accused of being in the pocket of a foreign entity because he championed an ally in its struggle against the Soviets.
Unlike West Germany, Israel—an innovative and fearless ally—is willing to fight its own wars.
Israel may have suffered public relations setbacks in the U.S., as a torrent of propaganda was spread by legacy media and others, often backed by oil sheiks and China, but the alliance makes moral and geopolitical sense.
And the gratitude in Israel is overwhelming. Trump is almost certainly the most beloved gentile in Israeli history. Come to think of it, the president may well be the most popular political figure in the history of an infamously fractious Jewish state.
Of course, Israelis aren’t subjected to the entire Trump experience. But they see in him an ally who backs them in war and peace with a clarity that’s missing from most in the Western world. In turn, Trump seems to have a genuine affection for Israel.
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**Democrats Want the GOP to Destroy Norms**
In grand Trumpian style, the president claims to have ended eight wars. This isn’t quite right, though he certainly has an impressive record of mediating deals, mitigating conflicts, and setting the table for peace.
That includes conflicts between Armenia and Azerbaijan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda, Cambodia and Thailand, and even India and Pakistan.
Peace is hardly assured in the Middle East. The place is teeming with tribal allegiances, national aspirations, and religious and ethnic tensions. More than ever, though, the possibility exists.
Donald Trump deserves a big part of the credit.
*David Harsanyi is a senior writer for the Washington Examiner.*
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/premium/3853308/trump-triumph-middle-east-israel-hamas-gaza/