Trump has dealt a devastating blow to Israelophobia

The silence is unsettling. It’s 12 hours since President Trump announced that Israel and Hamas have assented to the first phase of his peace plan, paving the way for a ceasefire. And yet the ‘Ceasefire now’ lobby is eerily schtum. The people who’ve been noisily clamouring for an end to the war in Gaza are either mute or they’re moaning. Don’t trust that snake Benjamin Netanyahu, some say. If I thought a genocide was being executed in Gaza, a crime as cataclysmic as anything the Nazis did, I’d be on the streets celebrating this morning. Yet these people can barely be arsed to put a thumbs-up on Instagram.

We know why: it’s because Trump has called their bluff. In fact, this could prove to be one of the most consequential bluff-callings of modern times. Trump hasn’t only managed to get two mortal enemies to sign on the dotted line of a deal. He has also, as a side effect, torn off the veil of pacifism worn by Israel’s legion loathers in the West and compelled them to come clean. He has created a situation where the true aim of this army of Israel haters – the dismantling of the Jewish State – will have nowhere left to hide. It might be a peace plan but it delivers a possibly fatal blow to the cult of Israelophobia.

There are many reasons for normal people – those of us who have not fashioned an entire personality from a frothing contempt for the Jewish nation – to feel hopeful about the events of the past day. The first phase of the deal compels Hamas to release all the Israeli hostages. That could happen as soon as Monday. In return, Israel will set free hundreds of Palestinian prisoners – a risky move, for sure, given many of them are Islamist terrorists with much blood on their hands. Israeli troops will then withdraw to an agreed line and more aid will go into Gaza. The fighting would stop.

It’s a little early to sing ‘Kumbayah’. This is only the first phase. The latter phases – especially the essential demand that Hamas lay down its arms and surrender itself into non-existence – remain a sticking point for the Islamist tyrants of Gaza and their craven apologists in the West. But what sweet relief it would be, for the grief-stricken people of Israel and the war-weary civilians of Gaza, to see the fighting stop. To see the return of the Jews so violently seized on 7 October 2023. To see something approximating peace somewhere on the horizon.

And yet from the self-styled peaceniks, nothing. You’d think the people who are hoarse from yelling ‘Ceasefire!’ would be pleased at the prospect of a ceasefire. Seems not. At the time of writing, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign has said nowt. Which isn’t surprising, given it has already madly rejected Trump’s deal as a ‘continuation of Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people rather than a plan to end it’. The ‘ceasefire’ folk who have spoken over the past 12 hours seem oddly downbeat. It’s a ‘nightmare deal’, says one. What a weird thing to say about a deal that might bring to an end what you insist is a ‘genocide’. Meanwhile, actual Gazans are cheering Trump’s announcement.

That’s because where the exhausted civilians of Gaza really want a ceasefire, the privileged despisers of Israel who clog up our institutions here in the West want something quite different. They desire not peace, but destruction – the destruction of the Jewish State. They long not for the return of normalcy to Gaza but for the denormalisation of Israel. The shunning of it, the criminalisation of it, and at some point in the future, the deconstruction of it. In moving Israel-Gaza closer to a ceasefire, Trump has stolen that word from the faux-peace lobby and left them with the toughest of choices: either to fess up about their sick dream of Israel’s violent erasure or to shut up once and for all.

To some of us, it’s long been clear that the contagion of Israelophobia plaguing our cultural establishment had little to do with securing peace in the Middle East. But that became super clear over the past 10 days. Israel accepted Trump’s peace deal on 29 September and yet still its shrill haters beat the streets to say ‘Ceasefire now’. Why were they still haranguing the Jewish State after it had agreed to a ceasefire, and Hamas had not? Because they desire more than Israel’s laying down of arms. They want it to lay down its entire existence. Nothing less than Israel’s capitulation to its racist enemies in Hamas and its self-righteous haters in the West will satiate their unhinged animus for the Jewish homeland.

The protest in London on Saturday gave the game away. A vast banner hung in Trafalgar Square. ‘Disarm Israel’, it said. There it was, the true meaning of ‘Ceasefire now’ – not peace, not a deal, but the confiscation of all weapons from the Jews of the Holy Land. The seizing of their guns and rockets so that they might be more nakedly exposed to the ‘just’ punishments of the Palestinian people. The disarming of Israel is a feverish obsession of the activist class, for they understand that in order for Israel to be replaced ‘from the river to the sea’, in order for this sinning settler-colonial nation to be scrubbed from humanity’s records, first its Jews must be denuded of all means of self-defence.

They’re iffy about Trump’s plan for some one simple reason: it leaves the Jewish State intact and it demands the surrender of Hamas. It thwarts their dystopic dream of dragging the Middle East back to 1948, before the modern state of Israel existed. Everyone can now see that what falsely presented itself as a peace movement was in truth a ruthless campaign of delegitimation, demonisation and even destruction waged against the world’s only Jewish nation by our post-reason elites.

The failure of Hamas and its Western simps to erase Israel ‘from the river to the sea’ is a wonderful moment for humanity. We should celebrate both the possibility of peace in Gaza and the miracle of Israel’s survival. In the face of hostile Arab armies, Iranian plotting, neo-fascist militias and the obsessive defamations of our own cultural establishment, Israel stubbornly survives and thrives. That is a testament less to Trump’s ‘art of the deal’ than to the valour and self-belief of Israel’s people, in particular its young soldiers who took the fight to Hamas after 7 October. We cannot know what will happen next, but we know that Israel lives, in glorious defiance of the unholy alliance of murderous Islamists and woke nihilists who long for its annihilation. I’ll raise a glass to that today.

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