[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]
On October 13, 2025, Israel erupted in collective relief and jubilation as the final 20 living Israeli hostages, seized by Hamas during the barbaric October 7, 2023 assault, crossed back into the homeland after over two grueling years of captivity. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hailed it as “a moral victory for the State of Israel.”
Tel Aviv’s Hostages Square, a vigil site, swelled with 65,000 tear-streaked faces glued to massive screens. Emotional footage captured heart-wrenching reunions: Omri Miran, 48, embraced by his two little daughters after over 730 days in darkness; twin brothers Gali and Ziv Berman wearing the Maccabi Tel Aviv jerseys they had asked for upon being released; and soldier Nimrod Cohen, 20, greeted by his rejoicing family. Medical teams were ready to begin tending to the survivors’ physical and psychological scars—malnutrition, infections, and tunnel-induced trauma.
This triumphant moment crowns the historic Trump Peace Accord, a 20-point plan unveiled by President Donald Trump last month, which orchestrated the end of the war in Gaza and is potentially redefining Middle East diplomacy. Brokered through tireless shuttle diplomacy in Egypt, Qatar, and Washington, D.C.—bolstered by Trump envoy Steve Witkoff and advisor Jared Kushner—the accord’s first phase mandates a phased ceasefire, Israeli troop withdrawals from most of Gaza, Hamas disarmament, and international aid influxes to rebuild the devastated enclave.
Trump, arriving in Israel to a thunderous standing ovation in the Knesset, declared the Holy Land “at peace.” Echoing his Abraham Accords legacy, this deal aims to avert regional escalation—sidestepping Iranian proxies—and paves the way for Gaza’s redevelopment, potentially drawing billions of dollars from Gulf allies. Speaking beside Netanyahu, Trump declared, “As far as I’m concerned, the war is over.”
The peace plan didn’t earn The Art of the Deal author a Nobel Peace Prize, but we all know that even if Trump had built a time machine and undid World War II and the Holocaust by traveling back to kill Hitler in 1939, the militantly Progressive Nobel judges would still deny him the honor. No loss, though – the Prize was long ago devalued anyway when it was awarded to Palestinian proto-terrorist Yassar Arafat, and its worthlessness was confirmed when it was given to Barack Obama for literally no reason at all.
But the euphoria over the deal in Israel and the rest of the civilized world is tempered with profound sorrow. Of the roughly 250 souls abducted in the 2023 bloodbath—including civilians from kibbutzim and the Nova music festival—168 eventually returned alive through prior ceasefires, rescues, and releases. At least 75 did not survive their brutal ordeal, whether executed, perishing from starvation, untreated wounds, or friendly fire. Families of the fallen mourned amid the cheers, their grief underscoring Hamas’ savage abuse of the hostages chained in tunnels, denied medicine, and psychologically as well as physically tortured.
Furthermore, in exchange for the 20 remaining living hostages, Israel consented to free nearly 2,000 Palestinians from its prisons: about 250 serving life sentences for terrorism convictions and roughly 1,700 administrative detainees held since the war’s outbreak. Buses ferried them to Ramallah amid jubilant Palestinian crowds.
As Israel celebrated, Trump jetted to an Egypt summit of world leaders for a signing ceremony regarding the first phase of the peace agreement. He declared,
Everybody’s happy about it like I’ve never seen before, actually. I’ve done other deals, and people don’t care as much. Big deals, I think they’re big deals. But this is something that’s taken off like a rocket ship, and it did from the beginning.
But a focus on big deals is short-sighted. Trump believes every world conflict can be solved by bringing people to the table and hammering out, or being pressured to accept, a compromise, for which he gets the credit. This can be effective for some conflicts but not where deeper passions like ideological fervor are at stake. Before the Knesset today, he declared confidently that “the forces of chaos, terror, and ruin that have plagued the region for decades” are now “totally defeated.” This is dishearteningly naïve. He cannot seem to grasp that what may be a peace plan for one side is simply a stalling and regrouping tactic for the other. Israel simply wants to live in peace, but her neighbors will never ultimately accept anything less than a “Palestine” that is freed “from the river to the sea” through the genocidal erasure of Israel and Jews.
How many of the nearly 2000 freed Palestinian prisoners will be exalted among their people, and the worldwide ummah, as soldiers of Allah, and resume their murderous Jew-hatred? How many future Yahya Sinwars are among them, plotting more “Al-Aqsa Flood” slaughters?
It is a blessing that the remaining Israeli hostages of Hamas are thankfully reunited with their families. Make no mistake, however – the war in Gaza may be over as far as President Trump is concerned, but it will never be over for Israel as long as the Jew-hating ideology that “plagued the region,” as he put it, continues to flourish.
Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior