Perhaps this is going to sound strange to you, but I must admit to being a little torn by the news of the Israel-Hamas peace deal.
No, I’m not a war monger, sad that the war will be no more. Indeed, I congratulate President Donald Trump and the negotiating team members for what has obviously been a hard-fought negotiation. (An ironic turn of a phrase, I grant.) Their efforts are praiseworthy, and I offer that praise here.
Fox News is reporting:
Trump took to Truth Social Wednesday to make the announcement: “I am very proud to announce that Israel and Hamas have both signed off on the first Phase of our Peace Plan. This means that ALL of the Hostages will be released very soon, and Israel will withdraw their Troops to an agreed upon line as the first steps toward a Strong, Durable, and Everlasting Peace. All Parties will be treated fairly! This is a GREAT Day for the Arab and Muslim World, Israel, all surrounding Nations, and the United States of America, and we thank the mediators from Qatar, Egypt, and Turkey, who worked with us to make this Historic and Unprecedented Event happen. BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS!”
Speaking to Sean Hannity, Trump said he expects the hostages to be released on Monday. He did not elaborate on whether he would be going to the region, although Netanyahu invited him to address the Israeli parliament on Sunday.
Moments before the president’s announcement, photos emerged from the negotiation room in Sharm el-Sheikh showing senior officials embracing and shaking hands as reports indicated significant progress toward a hostage release deal. Retired General Nitzan Alon was seen shaking hands with Qatar’s Prime Minister Al-Thani, with special envoy Steve Witkoff in the background.
That said, I cannot ignore the long history of the region in general and Palestine in particular. It has rejected, at least five times in the past, offers of its own statehood, with that record extending back to the end of the Ottoman Empire. For some nicely done background on that, I’ll suggest looking at Law and Society’s website.
In fact, I will note with some further irony, my very first posting at BitsBlog, some 24 years ago. This would be from Sept. 13, 2001, and the main subject was obviously the attack two days before. But it also involved a passage I recorded from a piece I wrote on the old GT BBS network about six months before that attack. (Sorry, I don’t have any link; GT was not an internet-based net.) That piece was focused on, as discussions about the Middle East usually are, the Palestinians. I’m going to give you a bit of a deep dive into that older piece here:
At Clinton’s insistence, Barak offered Arafat the keys to the kingdom; just about all of the West Bank and Gaza, plus East Jerusalem and even Palestinian sovereignty over the Temple Mount. How do the peace loving Palestinians respond? Yasser Arafat turned it all down, and gave us another few nights of headlines, filled with kids in the street throwing stones, and being shot, occasionally. He also sent his armed forces, (You recall, they’re supposed to be policemen?) to fire at the Israelis, apparently hoping for an excuse to tell the rest of the world how Israel is a war-mongering nation.
Of course that should have been a signal to about anyone with a brain that he didn’t give a damn about peace. All he and his followers are interested in is the destruction of Israel. It should have also been a signal that Clinton’s attempt at a legacy backfired, big time, and more, that it didn’t have a chance to start with…. something that Clinton should have known, did he have any understanding of the situation at all. You will recall, perhaps that back in 1992, Clinton more or less bragged he had no understanding of matters of foreign policy. This was never quite so clear as during this monstrosity Mr. Clinton unleashed on the world.
For Israel’s part, all of this has been laid at the feet of Ehud Barak, perhaps unfairly. No, I don’t think he was the man for the job, and clearly was only in the PM’s position because Clinton’s people worked so hard to get him there, apparently hoping to set up Clinton’s brokering a of peace deal. Easy to do when you have the PM of Israel owing you his election. But Barak apparently was under pressures he had no control of, having nothing to do with politics at home, or the Palestinians… both of which were quite out of his control to begin with, in any event. He was concerned with Israel continuing to get support from the US. In this concern, he saw Israel as being on the controlled end of the puppet’s string… and knowing that if he did not capitulate to Clinton’s demands, that vital US support would wither as quickly as Benjamin Netenyau’s prime ministership did, when it became clear he wasn’t going to buckle to Clinton’s concession demands.
And Barak wasn’t alone, nor was the left in Israel, in this perception of US control versus Israel’s survival. Yitzhak Rabin, hardly a liberal even by American standards and certainly not under Bill Clinton’s extortion based control to the extent that Barak was, saw the same problems. His longtime friends, according reports I’ve seen, tell us he was deeply troubled over the prospect of losing US support… and therefore bought into the ‘land for peace’ deals being brokered by the liberals in the US. This was something I predicted he wouldn’t have done.
Israeli voters, seeing this happening, and clearly annoyed with the US control over Israel’s dealings with the Palestinians, trounced Barak in the polls. Unless one considers this anger, the election of Ariel Sharon, his replacement, is hard to fathom, since he has never been overly popular, as best I can tell. But perhaps the people of Israel are finally figuring out what the real story is.. that in truth, there is no dealing with the Palestinians, and Arifat.
So, as a follow-up to the quote of that older piece, I made the charge in that first post that the 9/11 attacks were as much a payback for Clinton’s “peace” deal as it was anything else.
Clinton, far from being firm with the Arabs, was giving them just what they wanted, following the World Trade Canter bombing in 1993; legitimacy, to use as a tool against us. Ironic; he’s supposed to be representing US. And to boot, we were ripping Israel apart for them.
I have stated several times, that Clinton’s sole purpose here was to save his legacy. But how to achieve his goal? By bowing to Arab terrorists, and bullying Israel into giving in. So, while that’s going on, everything is sweetness and light. America decides to elect George W Bush, who will (rightly) support Israel and the some aren’t too happy.
Boom.
Boom.
Boom.
And, splat.
Admittedly, I was writing that morning in anger. I was, in fact, livid. I will also admit that the situation was more nuanced (I hate that word) than I calculated at the time. Still, and to this day, some 24 years later, I consider that anger justified. I also consider it an example of why any celebrations of this peace deal today should be viewed with caution. It is a bleak warning that when dealing with Palestine, we are dealing with a group that has a long history of using olive branches as they would any other weapon against people they consider their enemies: Israel and the U.S. The long-term implications are a huge question mark, I think.
Let’s not kid ourselves: The source of the problems is not one country or another. It is the multi-national Islamic Hatred of the Jews, and whoever supports them. That driving force has not been changed, as evidenced by the rather non-conciliatory announcement from the terrorists of Hamas, as contained in the above-linked Fox report:
After responsible and serious negotiations conducted by the movement and the Palestinian resistance factions regarding President Trump’s proposal in Sharm el-Sheikh, with the aim of ending the war of extermination against our Palestinian people and the withdrawal of the occupation from the Gaza Strip, Hamas announces the reaching of an agreement that ends the war on Gaza, provides for the withdrawal of the occupation, allows the entry of aid and implements a prisoner exchange.
Despite the rhetoric from the terrorists of Hamas, I find myself somewhat more hopeful in this instance because of the qualities of the people involved. For example, the current PM in Israel is Benjamin Netanyahu, the guy Clinton didn’t want to deal with. On that factor alone, I see the peace deal of today on somewhat firmer ground than the one back in ‘92.
Then, too, Trump is no Clinton. So there too, we have a positive indicator. A POTUS who believes in a strong Israel is a large plus for peace in the region. My fear, however, is that it has the possibility of changing in as little as three years, as Trump’s current term ends. That means we must choose carefully in ‘28.
For his part, Netanyahu may be replaced sooner than that, given his age (he’s 75) and the rather volatile nature of Israeli parliamentary politics. And what the Palestinians will do long term is anyone’s guess. But as I’ve already pointed out, their long history does not give us confidence in a different long-term outcome this time around.
Finally, I do note with interest but no surprise, the lack of involvement from the United Nations.
Similarly, we’re not seeing much in the way of cheers coming from the American left. There is always very loud support for the UN from the American left. Has it occurred to any of you that perhaps the most important thing the United Nations has ever done was to set up the country of Israel? So it is that the American leftists who support the United Nations do not support the only really important action the UN has ever taken. Go figure. And now we’re hopeful on a peace deal with has no involvement from the UN at all. One wonders just what they’re supporting it for.
Celebrate, my friends, but do so with caution.
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