Lo and behold, Hamas remains Hamas. What a surprise.
Hamas presently has two trump cards: hostages that it took two years ago and its weapons. It has kept both, with some hostage releases as well as a loss of lots of its weaponry. Apparently, world pressure—meaning Qatar—is so great that Hamas is willing to part with the long-suffering, emaciated hostages. I personally do not believe that they will give up their weapons, as their value to Palestinian society would go to zero. It is important to note that Gazans celebrating the apparent deal being formed between Israel and Hamas through the leadership of Donald Trump screamed, as usual, about the Khyber massacre of the Jews. Not only will Hamas not give up its weapons, but Palestinian society will not be reformed.
Everyone should be rooting for the Trump peace plan to succeed. Everyone should want the hostages home, including those who need proper burial for their families to mourn and move on in their lives as best they can. Everyone should support a future without violence and one of true peace. Why do I have to write such obvious trivialities? Because they are no longer trivial. Go back and watch the response to the initial announcement of the Trump 20 Point Plan. In the West, anti-Israel protests only grew; the lefty-Muslim nexus did not like the idea of Hamas being disarmed and disbanded. They want continual war on Israel until she is gone. They don’t want the hostages home; they want the rest of the Jews dead. And in Israel, the reaction of the left was similar. One has to be a genius sometimes to be really dumb, but the official stance of the paid protesters in Tel Aviv was as follows: since Trump’s proposed deal asks so much from Hamas, they will not agree, and thus the release of the captives will be even further away. Did you catch all of that? Instead of rejoicing in some hope in the 20 living hostages once again living with their families, they had to do 7 dimensional chess so as to hate Bibi Netanyahu and try to bring down his government.
Apparently, with Donald Trump set to come to Israel, Hamas has figured that they have run the hostage well dry. So, they’ll give back the hostages and get back some but not all of their favorite murderers. With the release of the hostages, the IDF will move from reduced action to a defensive posture further away from Palestinian rubble, I mean population centers. The IDF is supposed to go from 70 percent to 57 percent control, with all of the border and Philadelphi corridor in Israeli hands. Now, here is where the whole thing breaks down. Hamas will not give up its weapons. Just as Hezbollah refuses to part with its Kalashnikovs, so too Hamas realizes that without weapons, it has no power and actually may be under threat of liquidation from other armed groups that have no obligation to disarm at this stage. When Hamas refuses to disarm or give up total control of the Gaza Strip, then the deal will be over. Maybe that was Trump’s plan from the get-go: let’s get the hostages and if the deal does not go forward, Israel can do what it wants. But if the plan is kumbaya on steroids, then I have to say that however much I would like to visit Damascus and spend a weekend in Riyadh, the deal will die before its full implementation.
The Qataris, Turks, and Egyptians apparently have enough sway over Hamas to cause them to claim to accept the Trump deal. As soon as they accepted it, they began to demand changes, as is their custom. They wanted the IDF fully out and thousands of aid trucks coming in prior to releasing any hostages. Apparently, that did not sell in Peoria, and they will have to release hostages for terrorists, with the IDF in place and only moving nominally when the tradeoff is complete. Then will come the next stages of Hamas disarming, some technocratic government, and the official plan on how to rebuild Gaza. I don’t think that the world will ever reach those stages. Hamas may appear somewhat flexible, but it has no mandate from Iran or its religious extremism to commit suicide.
Why would Hamas want Marwan Barghouti out of jail? The point with Barghouti is that he has never renounced violence as a legitimate means in the Palestinian program. And he can’t. If he did, the Palestinians would kick him to the curb as a useless pacifist. They want killers, murderers, kidnappers, rapists, baby burners. That’s what they want and Hamas does not want to disappoint. Were it to disarm, its members would be beaten for all of the years of Gazan suffering, and their role in Palestinian “society” would vanish.
So, how does this work? President Trump comes to Israel. Driving around town will become impossible. He speaks at the Knesset. He is present on the Gazan border as the live and dead hostages are returned to Israel. Israel moves its troops back, as per the Trump Plan. And then, after the president is back home, the deal simply dies. The world will blame Israel: you were supposed to move back behind that piece of rubble, not the one you are currently standing next to. But the blame, as always, will be with the Palestinians and Hamas. Even Bill Clinton, Mr. Evenhanded, said that it was Arafat who prevented a peace deal. Hamas and its apologists will invent reasons not to disarm. The only open question is whether Israel will be so stupid as to play along as in Oslo so as not to be blamed for the delays. The deal will either die or pretend to move along, the weapons still in Hamas hands, and the risks to Israelis near the border not reduced. Israel must not budge until Hamas is disarmed and disbanded.
If one wants Hamas disarmed, he will have to fight them until they are dead or finally decide to give up. The hostages are a red line for Trump: release them or be “obliterated.” The weapons issue is more opaque—they could give up 10 percent of their old rifles and say that they’re out. They’ll do just the minimum so as not to allow Israel to destroy them. But this is only half of the problem.
The other half is the completely recalcitrant Palestinian population. There is no way to reform them. Westerners mistakenly think that if they are offered a life of dignity and comfort without Jew hating versus living in rubble with Jew hating alive and well, they will choose the former. The reality is the opposite. Bin Laden was rich, yet he did his all to destroy the United States. Palestinians will not give up their Jew hatred. It is part of their identity, taught from a young age, and allows them to ignore how awful, rotten, backwards, and destructive their society is. They can spend 23 hours a day talking about their hatred of the Yehud so as not to have to deal with their nonexistent economy and their lack of development. The Palestinians would rather have an enemy than a good life.
So, President Trump, welcome back to Israel. It will be a great moment when he greets the released hostages. But after Air Force One has left, nothing will change. Hamas will cling to power and its weapons and nobody—not even the fat check, double-dealing Qataris—will make them commit military or political suicide. Peace is always around the corner. The problem is that they never say which corner it is.
Editor’s Note: The Schumer Shutdown is here. Rather than put the American people first, Chuck Schumer and the radical Democrats forced a government shutdown for healthcare for illegals. They own this.
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