OPINION:
They say there are no atheists in foxholes. When it comes to Hamas, that’s not reassuring.
Hamas members proclaim themselves jihadis dedicated to the proposition, clearly stated in the Hamas charter, that “Islam” will “obliterate” Israel.
Right now, the terrorists in the tunnels under Gaza City may be asking themselves: “Should we release the hostages we kidnapped from Israel and have been torturing for the past two years? If we do, under Trump’s plan, the Israelis will guarantee us safe passage to a country of our choosing. That would be a nice break.
“If we don’t release the hostages, Trump will let the Israelis hunt us down. We’ll die as martyrs. Isn’t that our religious obligation? And don’t we want to be celebrated by Islamist revolutionaries and their leftist buddies around the world?”
Whatever happens, President Trump deserves praise for his 20-point plan. Most significantly, he managed to get the backing of the Saudis, Jordanians, Egyptians and even the Turks and Qataris, the last two long-standing and fervent Hamas supporters.
What’s not apparent is how forcefully the rulers of these countries are pressing the Hamasniks entrenched in the Gaza Strip, along with those sleeping in Qatar’s finest hotels, to finally end the conflict that began on Oct. 7, 2023, when Islamist terrorists invaded Israel and carried out the worst pogrom against Jews since the Holocaust.
The Trump plan offers Hamas a second get-out-of-jail-free card, literally: the release from Israeli prison of roughly 250 convicted killers and about 1,700 Hamas terrorists detained since the start of the current conflict. Members of both groups can be expected to rejoin the jihad.
That’s a price Israelis are willing to pay in exchange for Hamas releasing the approximately 20 hostages believed to still be alive, along with the bodies of 28 who have been murdered.
Negotiations on the Trump plan are now underway in Egypt. While they proceed, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, at Mr. Trump’s behest, is reining in the Israel Defense Forces in Gaza City, Hamas’ last major stronghold.
Meanwhile, podcaster/commentator Dan Senor is smartly asking: Why isn’t the “Stop the Genocide!” crowd pushing for the deal that would “stop the genocide”?
If United Nations officials and their friends in Hollywood, academia and media really believed a genocide was taking place, wouldn’t they demand that Hamas release the hostages immediately to end the suffering of Gaza civilians?
We’ll leave that question aside for now, so I have space to provide a little context.
The seed that grew into the current war was planted back in 2005 when Israel withdrew from Gaza — every farmer, soldier, synagogue and cemetery. This was a test of the proposition, and then widely believed, that there was a “land-for-peace” solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
Two years later, Hamas violently ousted the Palestinian Authority from Gaza and established its totalitarian rule.
Thereafter, Gaza residents were generously funded by the “international donor community” with health, education and other social services provided by U.N. agencies that adhered without complaint to whatever rules Hamas laid down.
Nevertheless, a “two-state solution” could have evolved had Hamas gradually normalized relations with Israel.
Israeli leaders attempted to encourage that outcome by supplying Gaza residents with electricity, water and fuel and permitting thousands of Gaza residents to commute to well-paying jobs in Israel.
Meanwhile, Hamas was constructing an astonishingly expensive and extensive subterranean fortress in preparation for the war it was planning.
Once that conflict was underway, Hamas terrorists popped out of these tunnels to shoot Israeli soldiers. Then they retreated underground for protection, leaving ordinary Gaza civilians vulnerable on the streets above and in hospitals and schools that had been laced with explosives.
Israeli forces have gone to extraordinary lengths to keep the ratio of combatant-to-civilian deaths low. They have succeeded to an extent unprecedented in the history of urban warfare.
Most of the international media have dutifully regurgitated whatever casualty statistics were fed to them by Hamas members calling themselves the “Gaza Health Ministry.”
This has revealed and ignited a worldwide wildfire of Jew hatred, a prejudice that in other periods of history was rooted in religion, race, nationalism, ethnicity and scapegoating.
However, if you read or listen to what Hamas and other Islamists tell one another, you will find they are remarkably candid about what they see as the source of the conflict.
In the seventh century, Muslim armies sprang out of Arabia and conquered many ethnic and religious groups. Those who survived — e.g., Coptic Christians, Arabian Christians, Berber Christians, Mandaeans, Zoroastrians and Nestorians — have remained dominated and demeaned ever since.
Only the Jews of the territory the Roman imperialists renamed Palestine refused to follow the script. In 1948, they reestablished self-rule in part of the ancient Jewish homeland, a tiny island within a vast Muslim Sea.
One war after another has been waged against Israel ever since. The current conflict, the longest, featured a made-in-Tehran strategy: surrounding Israel with a “ring of fire” of Hamas, Hezbollah, the Assad regime in Syria, Shiite militias in Iraq, the Houthis in Yemen, and various terrorist groups in Judea and Samaria (renamed “the West Bank” after Jordan’s conquest of the territories in 1948).
That strategy failed. None of Israel’s enemies is stronger today than it was two years ago this week.
As a result, it’s now possible that Mr. Trump’s plan will bring a durable and long-term cessation of hostilities in Gaza — good for Gaza residents who do not aspire to be jihadis or martyrs, and good for their Israeli neighbors.
That’s not synonymous with everlasting peace. Lions are not lying down with lambs, but it’s more than anyone else has accomplished since … well, since Mr. Trump brokered the Abraham Accords five years ago last month.
• Clifford D. May is founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a columnist for The Washington Times and host of the “Foreign Podicy” podcast.
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