Barbarism didn’t win.
For more than two years, Hamas clung to the people it had taken hostage and brutalized as leverage over Israel in the war that the terror group initiated on October 7, 2023 — men, women, and children, Israelis and foreign nationals, Jews and non-Jews alike.
Through ephemeral deals and in daring raids, some were liberated. Too many, though, were killed or languished in Gaza’s dungeons during the war that followed. Throughout the conflict, the Israeli government maintained that the war would end when the hostages were released. Today, the hostages who were not murdered in Hamas’s captivity are home, and the war for their freedom is over.
Those in the West who raged at the sight of posters featuring the captives’ faces didn’t want to believe it. They told themselves that Israel invited the atrocities to which its civilians were subjected and that its government sought to engineer a genocide of the Palestinian people. They tore up and defaced the images that confronted them with the gravity of their moral inversion. Their credulity and cowardice stand in stark relief against the moral clarity that undergirded today’s triumph.
Israeli military and intelligence services displayed incredible acumen throughout the war against the terrorist groups that surround Israel and the rogue states that sponsor them. And President Trump and his deputies contributed mightily to this civilizational achievement. Their clear-sightedness and diplomatic creativity delivered a result that means Trump certainly deserves the Nobel Peace Prize, whether he ever gets it or not.
Their elementary theory of the case — defeat Israel’s enemies first and make peace with them second — eluded far too many over the course of the war that Hamas started on 10/7. But it did not elude the president. “When others were weak, you were strong,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Trump in a historic and raucous speech before the Israeli Knesset. “When others were fearful, you were bold. When others abandoned us, you stood by our side.”
Far too many can count themselves among the fearful, weak, and vacillating. Governments in London, Paris, Madrid, Ottawa, Canberra, and elsewhere lent credence to the lies promulgated by Israel’s pathological opponents. They convinced themselves they could supplicate their way to a resolution of the ancient enmities that sparked this conflict. As they applaud a victory to which they did not contribute, perhaps they might feel a fleeting sense of shame for their conduct? If the past is any guide, they will persist in their errors beginning tomorrow.
It would be foolish to presume that Israel’s troubles are behind it. Fanatics in the region and in the West will never accept the Jewish state’s existence. And Israel fell short of some of its war aims. Hamas, while defeated, was not destroyed. Phase 2 of the Gaza deal will, of course, be much harder to implement. The terror group will presumably rebrand as it attempts to rearm and mete out terrible violence against the Gazan people in the effort to cling to power. Already, dozens are reported dead amid clashes between Hamas and its rivals in Gaza City.
It and its terrorist allies in the region could one day again threaten the Israeli people. The Islamic Republic of Iran, too, is battered and bruised, but it persists. Tehran is ideologically wedded to its existential war with Zionism. There will not be peace in the region until that commitment and the regime dedicated to it are gone.
But there are vistas of hope, too. The process of diplomatic normalization between Israel and its Muslim neighbors that Hamas hoped to end is set to continue. Indeed, we now know that Israel’s Arab counterparts deepened their security cooperation with Jerusalem even as they criticized its defensive war. As Israel emerges from the longest war in its history as the dominant military and intelligence power in the region, it’s possible for that covert coordination to become overt, for military relations to become commercial ties, and for, one hopes, a prosperous covenant to emerge.
None of that would be possible in the absence of Israel’s military victory. The force that it brought to bear in this conflict — and Trump’s strike on Iran — changed the facts on the ground in ways that rudderless diplomatic processes never could. There is hope today for a brighter future in the Middle East as a direct result of Jerusalem’s refusal to accept the logic of terrorism and hostage-taking and Donald Trump’s unwavering support for that endeavor. The civilized world owes them both a profound debt.