Trump’s peace plan is the Western left’s worst nightmare

Has the prospect of peace ever been greeted with such gloom? No sooner had President Trump unveiled his peace plan for Israel-Gaza than the opinion-forming classes were frantically sowing cynicism. The possibility that the ghastly war in Gaza will be brought to a close gave rise not to optimism but to sarcasm, suspicion, even an eerie grumpiness unbecoming of a deal that might save thousands of lives. From the BBC to Sky News to the Israelophobic swamp of social media, the cry went up: ‘It’ll never work.’

I’m sure some of this haughty scepticism springs from the faint strains of Trump Derangement Syndrome that linger in elite circles. Hence, the BBC’s focus was less on the lives that might be preserved in Gaza than on Trump’s ‘hyperbole’ and his ‘exotic overstatement’. The Beeb preferred to rip the piss out of Trump for probably thinking this was ‘one of the greatest days in the history of civilisation’ than to ponder on a better future for Gaza. Nice moral priorities you have there.

Sky’s analysis positively dripped with derision. What happens when the ‘applause dwindles’, it wondered, and either Hamas or the Israeli ‘far right’, with all its ‘spitting fury’, rejects the plan? You would think a media empire that has convinced itself the war in Gaza is a ‘genocide’ would be more sanguine about a deal that might bring the ‘genocidal’ horrors to an end. You would be wrong.

A strange melancholy likewise descended on the digital haters of the Jewish State. They noisily gnashed their teeth over the ‘problematic’ small print in the deal, which is a weird way to respond to something that might bring to an end what they claim (insanely) to be an Auschwitz-level calamity. ‘The Palestinians must reject this surrender deal’, said Roshan M Salih of the Islamic website 5Pillars. So let the ‘genocide’ continue? It’s an original rallying cry, I’ll give him that.

But there is more to this orgy of sniffiness than TDS, than that juvenile reluctance to give Trump credit for anything. More deeply, our cultural establishment recognises, however instinctively, that this deal threatens to shatter its entire moral narrative about Israel. It threatens to expose that the true maker of war in Gaza, the true author of the sorrow in that tiny strip of land, is not the Jewish State but Hamas. By firmly hitting the ball into Hamas’s court, Trump’s deal represents an existential crisis not only for Hamas itself but also for the West’s opinion-shapers who have built their moral authority on the watery foundations of an obsessive, fact-lite Israelophobia.

The 20-point peace plan is comprehensive. It proposes an immediate end to the devastating war in Gaza. If both sides agree to certain conditions, all fighting will cease and within 72 hours all the Israeli hostages, both dead and alive, will be released. Once the hostages are free, Israel will release 250 life-sentence prisoners and 1,700 Gazans who were detained after 7 October 2023.

The conditions include making Gaza a ‘deradicalised terror-free zone’ in which Hamas and other Islamist factions will play no role, ‘in any form’. Hamas must disarm. Generously – in my view – the deal offers amnesty to Hamas members who willingly decommission their arms. Other Hamas members will be ‘provided safe passage to receiving countries’. (Not Britain, please.) Israel will agree to withdraw its troops to an agreed line and will permit the governance of Gaza by a ‘transitional authority’ that is ‘technocratic [and] apolitical’. ‘No one’, the deal says, ‘will be forced to leave Gaza’. Liberated both from Hamas’s theocratic tyranny and the war of the past two years, the people will be offered ‘the opportunity to build a better Gaza’.

This strikes me as a realistic and positive deal. It would achieve the two things some of us have been crying out for: the release of the Jews so savagely stolen on 7 October and the removal from the picture of the army of anti-Semites that started this infernal war. It would also grant Gazans the right to create a better, freer state. So much for the libellous wails of our Israelophobic elites, who insisted in the absence of anything resembling evidence that Israel and Trump wanted to drive every Palestinian from Gaza. Now that, BBC, was ‘exotic overstatement’.

Benjamin Netanyahu accepts the deal. So that’s another untruth propagated by the anti-Israel mob that lies in tatters – namely that Bibi is hell-bent on continuing the war in order to save his own ass from corruption charges. Only one question remains: will Hamas accept? If it doesn’t, we’ll know beyond a sliver of doubt that it prizes its own twisted dreams of a Caliphate more highly than the lives of Palestinians. We will also know that the morality tale spun by our own cultural rulers, in which Israel is always the demon and Gaza always the victim, owes more to bigotry than reality. So this is a crunch moment, both for the medieval gunmen of Hamas and for the high-status opinion-havers of the West.

If Hamas rejects the deal, as well it might, then the entire moral edifice of ‘left’ and ‘liberal’ thinking will collapse. We will know it is Hamas that wants war, not Israel. We will know this so-called genocide is the accomplishment of Islamist barbarism, not Israeli evil. We will know that Palestinians are suffering because they are ruled by religious extremists who long ago prioritised their anti-Semitic bloodlust over the good governance of Gaza. Every single anti-Israel march and thinkpiece that comes now, in the wake of this unveiled plan, will be a sham. It will be a lie. It will falsely blame the Jewish nation for a calamity of Hamas’s making, and everyone will know.

Courtesy of Trump’s plan, Hamas has run out of road, and so have our cultural elites. They’re uneasy about this deal because, to speak frankly, they will miss this war from whose horrors they have stitched together a thin sense of moral purpose in confusing times. And if Hamas accepts the deal? Well, then they’ll have to admit that Trump – the New Hitler, the populist loon, the bad man that haunts their dreams – did infinitely more to ‘Save Gaza’ than their Israelophobic caterwauling ever did. It’s lose-lose for Israel’s haters.

I want this deal to work because I want the hostages home, I want the war to end, I want Israel to be secure and I want Gazans to have peace. If you can’t say likewise, maybe you’re not actually on ‘the right side of history’?

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy