In today’s installment of Critical Conditions, Claire and I focused on the hostage release in the Middle East — obviously.
For the first time in two years, Israel exhaled — and the Palestinians in Gaza faced the prospect of a end to the war forced on them by their Hamas captors after the savage massacre of Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023. Yet even amid joy, it’s hard to escape the unease that what we’re witnessing is not an ending.
Trump declared the war “over.” He stood before the Knesset insisting that peace is at hand, and — as ever — lacing the claim with bravado and factual error. (For the record, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not 3,000 years old, despite his insistence.) But here’s the paradox: in his trademark vulgarity and showmanship, he may have stumbled into effectiveness.
We found ourselves reluctantly agreeing that Trump’s mafia-style diplomacy — leverage over Israel, Qatar, the Saudis, and Egypt alike — has produced what cooler, more idealistic leaders could not. It’s the cultural fit that’s so strange to watch. In the Middle East, where politics runs on patrimonial networks, personal loyalty, and coercion, Trump’s transactional bluster works. He declares the war finished and dares anyone to contradict him. It’s crude — but it’s also power.
Still, Hamas has yet to formally disarm, and if they emerge from their tunnels to reclaim Gaza’s ruins, Israel’s fragile acceptance of “peace” could collapse overnight. If Hamas ignores Trump’s plan and refuses to disarm, then it will be argued that the fundamental deal of the hostages for an end to the war has been available for over a year, and the latter half of the war will be looking like a waste.
And Trump will look like he prematurely declared victory, and dragged a huge proportion of the world’s leaders to Egypt for one of the weirdest of peace-signing ceremonies — without the presence of either of the combatants,
The cost to Gaza has been staggering — the strip lies in ruins, and many thousands are deal. Claire argued that there’s a grim “Old Testament wisdom” at play — the belief that an enemy must be broken utterly to abandon fanaticism. Either way, the foreign media’s re-entry into Gaza will ignite a war of narratives, and the moral bill for Israel may well come due.
Meanwhile, the Free Palestine crowd in the West looks pathetically peevish that peace itself might arrive without their permission. That irony, too, says something about the intellectual decay of the modern Left: a reflexive hatred of the West so deep that it romanticizes enemies like Hamas.
Claire and I tried to hold both truths at once: that Trump’s methods are indecent, and that they worked. That Gaza’s suffering is real, and that Hamas had to lose. That Netanyahu is a very real problem, but that Israel had to win. Now, soon enough, it will have to figure out a way of pacifying the Palestinians.
