I’ve been chewing over the Trump peace deal between Israel and Gaza and have concluded that it’s probably as good as anything is going to be in today’s climate. Israel could have achieved a complete military victory, but doing so would cause three problems that the Israeli people will not accept: the death of the remaining hostages, more military deaths, and world opprobrium at a potentially unsurvivable level. Given that, the deal is as good an offramp as Israel can get.
To understand the deal, one must understand the war. For Muslims and their leftist allies in the West, the war didn’t start on October 7, 2023. Instead, it started on May 14, 1948, when the modern State of Israel officially emerged from the ashes of the Israeli War of Independence. The Muslims have been seeking Israel’s destruction since then.
The left originally supported Israel, which was founded on socialist principles. However, when Israel moved into America’s orbit, the left turned on it, with a narrative that the Jews, who had occupied the land continuously for around 3,800 years, were the colonizers, while the Muslims, who conquered the land in the 7th century and only populated it beginning in the early 19th century, were the “indigenous” people.
For Israel and the world’s civilized and moral people, however, the current war started on October 7, 2023, when thousands of Gazan men poured across the border, slaughtered over 1,200 men, women, and children, wounded over 3,000 more, and seized more than 200 hostages. From that perspective, Israel’s only logical response was to do what any nation under attack would do: Bring the war home to the attackers.
As noted often, Israel has waged this war in extraordinary fashion, warning about imminent attacks to spare civilians, and keeping its enemy supplied with energy, food, and water throughout the war. Israel’s sole stated goals have been to bring the hostages home, whether dead or alive (preferably the latter), and to ensure that Hamas can never attack it again. Hamas’s openly stated goals, by contrast, have been Israel’s eradication, the death of world Jewry, and conquering the West. Leftists across America, Europe, and the Anglosphere have enthusiastically supported these goals.
Strange as it may seem, Hamas actually thought it could win the war. Its leaders concluded that its backing from Hezbollah, Iran, and other actors in the Middle East meant that, militarily, it had the upper hand. With a devastating opening strike, it thought it had the momentum to destroy Israel’s military.
Hamas was wrong. Israel wiped out Hezbollah with Operation Grim Beeper; destroyed Iran’s military infrastructure, from its officers to its traditional weapons to (with America’s help) its potential nuclear weapons; and decimated the Houthis, who joined in the fighting with Iran’s backing. On the ground in Gaza, Israel has systematically destroyed Hamas’s fighters, its leaders (including its leaders in Qatar and Iran), and its weapons. The militarized parts of Gaza look like Hiroshima—and, again, Israel did this while feeding and fueling the enemy and doing its best to protect enemy civilians.
However, Hamas had two weapons that Israel could not defeat: The first was the hostages, for Israel’s love for its people surpassed its willingness to flatten Gaza and Hamas completely. The hostages are Israel’s Achilles Heel, and Hamas knew it and exploited it. The other weapon was propaganda.
For decades, the Islamists have been seeding Western institutions with hatred for Israel. They do this by lying about Israel’s origins and about the Arab’s non-existent historical ties to the land.
Their lies fell on fertile soil, because Muslims and leftists have a common enemy: Western civilization, with its Biblical roots. Israel, the home of both the Jewish and Christian Bibles, must be eradicated so that the very idea of the Bible dies with it.
Hamas, therefore, was able to convince the world that Israel, which survived almost 30,000 rocket attacks because it had invested in a protective infrastructure and which fed and protected enemy civilians, was engaged in a ruthless genocide. The result wasn’t just hostility to Israel but also raging antisemitism across the West, with a virulence last seen in Nazi-controlled Europe.
It's against this backdrop that the Trump peace plan unfolded. On its face, the plan looks mostly like a win for Hamas, as I detailed here. Hamas gets its people back from Israel’s prisons, just as it got Yahya Sinwar back in the last massive prisoner-for-hostage exchange, and its leadership gets amnesty. What I perceive as an untrustworthy international force controls the area, and there will continue to be talk of a Palestinian state. For Hamas, it’s a face-saving deal and one, moreover, from which it can recover—and that will serve as a springboard for another war.
However, Israelis see it differently, and I’m inclined to honor their take. Israel has been under constant rocket attack for two years, and the people are deeply traumatized. Thousands of troops and other security forces have been killed, and many thousands more wounded. The psychic wound of the hostages has been deeper than we Americans can grasp. Now, they’ll get their hostages back, the rockets will stop, and their soldiers will come home.
More than that, while Hamas survives on paper, the fact is that there’s almost nothing left of it. Israel systematically wiped out the leadership and huge numbers of troops. The weapons are gone. And, most importantly, the support from the Arab and Muslim world is gone. Iran and Hezbollah are broken, Qatar learned that it’s not safe from Israeli reprisals, and the rest of the Middle East wants the war over. It was the Arab nations that forced this settlement.
What’s very telling is that the same people in America who were screaming about a genocide are not happy about this deal. The Democrats obviously hate that it was Trump who achieved it. In addition, they always knew there was no genocide. What they really wanted (and still want) was a second Hitlerian genocide, in the form of the eradication of the Jewish state and the Jewish people. That’s now been denied to them.
I’ll leave the last word to Israelis who are happy with this outcome:
????Signs in Tel Aviv now pic.twitter.com/Xjh8tBkmKY
— Raylan Givens (@JewishWarrior13) October 9, 2025
As we wait for the official announcement of the end to the war in Gaza and the return of the hostages, a few reminders are in order.
— Hillel Fuld (@HilzFuld) October 8, 2025
Two years and two days ago, Hamas invaded Israel and did what they did. I don’t need to remind you of the details.
But I do need to remind you… pic.twitter.com/BM4NYqNbUh
This one may be subscriber-only, in which case I apologize.SOME THOUGHTS FROM ME
— Open Source Intel (@Osint613) October 9, 2025
Israel may have lost the PR war, but on the ground it destroyed the ring of fire that once surrounded it.
1. Lebanon: Israel crushed Hezbollah, paged and eliminated thousands of fighters, and took out Nasrallah along with his entire senior command.
2.…
— Inside_Israel_Intel (@inside_IL_intel) October 9, 2025
Trump deserves that Nobel Peace Prize.