Trump arranged a ceasefire that got the Israelis twentyu hostages and the end to a war they weren’t winning and allowed Hamas to remain in charge just to suit Trump’s own vanity.
The Trump arranged deal for a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas War is a bad deal for the Israelis, despite the fact that everyone, Israelis and Arab and world leaders, will already have applauded the deal because getting accolades is all Trump cares about anyway. The Israeli view of the war was to achieve the unconditional surrender of Hamas, which was the goal of Israel when it retaliated against Oct, 7th, but in two years it has not been able to do the job .Hamas survives as a coherent military entity. The points about Hamas Trump insisted had to be done immediately when he announced his plan have already fallen to the wayside. Demilitarizing Hamas and turning Gaza over to a technocratic administration led by Trump and Tony Blair is now put off to further negotiations that could amount to nothing. The only immediate results of the agreement is the return of twenty live hostages, which was necessary to the Israelis because people are sentimental about people in danger rather than about the disproportionate number of Gazan civilians who have died in the two year war and should make the hostages small potatoes. In exchange, Israel gives up two hundred and fifty highly dangerous security prisoners primed to become the next generation of Hamas militants. Trump says the war is over and the ceasefire and aid and reconstruction, should that happen, are good things, but all that means is that it is over until Trump is past and Hamas recovers and starts fighting again. You can see Hamas as a principled group out to kill Jews at all costs or as a fanatical and irrational group, or as freedom fighters who also violate the Geneva Conventions concerning hostages and targeting the killing of civilians. but Hamas has survived the Israeli best.and we might as well recognize that.
But mostly everyone applauds the ceasefire as a great victory for the Israelis even by foreign policy experts like Dennis Ross and Richard Haass and both just adding as an aside that we will see whether Hamas is disarmed and a technocratic government replaces it. The signs are already otherwise. Hamas has executed Palestinians thought to be Israeli collaborators and so Hamas remains as Gaza’s government, Hamas has been in gum battles with opposing militias, and so it is hardly disarming. But the reticence of experts to emphasize what they think just shows how much opinion has shifted away from declaring a Trump activity as absurd, as a contradiction of what Trump was thought to believe about Israel, which was not to sell them pout. The Israeli people are more concerned with the hostages than anything else and claiming a victory in the war is just a way to end it even on bad terms, just as a Vermont Senator George Akin said was how to end the Vietnam War at the time: declare victory and leave.
Also see how the ceasefire arrangements have debased the level of foreign policy in American government by turning it into a matter of personal aggrandizement, whether giving Jared Kushner for two billion dollars to arrange the Abraham Accords when Dean Acheson and George Marshall only got their salaries and Sherman Adams only got for his wife some vicuna coats, or just working to get an award, like Trump wanting a Nobel Prize rather than because the ceasefire was just a good deal.
Recipients of major awards should be humble and polite. Obama handled his Nobel Peace Prize well by accepting it but saying he hadn’t done anything worthy of the honor. Marlon Brando was off the mark in sending his native Indian girlfriend to accept the Academy Award and talk about the fate of indigenous peoples. Jean Paul Sartre was way off the mark for declining the Nobel Prize for Literature and urinating on some French writer. A bit cheesy and adolescent. Henry Kissinger accepted the Nobel Peace Prize for having negotiated the end of the United States-Vietnam War but his fellow negotiator, Le Duc Tho of North Vietnam demurred and both had a point, that something good had been accomplished by Kissinger’s efforts, and that it was also true that no one should celebrate even the end of such carnage. Now Trump is angling for a Nobel Peace Prize for ending the Hamas Israel War and that seems disreputable in that people should do such accomplishments and that he should have received the prize a few days ago even though the deadline for nominations was in February. He is a sore loser and always has been. Maybe he might deserve the Nobel Peace Prize should his plan pan out, given the uncertainties of the Trump peace plan, for themselves alone rather than praise, but that is the level on which Trump’s character resides. So far there is only a plan to return hostages for prisoners, people poignant about people in danger of dying, like Floyd Collins trapped in a cave and ot freed before he died as was immortalized by Billy Wilder’s totally cynical movie “Ace in the Hole” and so vastly disproportionate to the ciovi;lians dying Gaza, that comparison appropriate while dis[proportion doesn’t make sense in wars where people have always been starved out and killed so as to make that side surrender. The hard part will be disarming Hamas and setting up a technocratic government for Gaza, which Trump said should happen right away and is now regarded as a very long negotiation.. So give him the Prize should he ever accomplish anything real. A petty reward in a petty age in that the people in charge and their allies are interested in money and regard rather than accomplishment..
The cultural frame is changing so rapidly under Trump, debasing the political currency as when European and Arab leaders show up at Sharem El Sherik to serve as spearcarriers for Trump so he can gloat of his achievement as a peace maker rather than there being anything serious for the leaders to negotiate and settle.Maybe they think the world will survive Trump but his imprimatur on culture is lasting. I have recently seen “Mad Max: Fury Road” recently and it seems very dated despite having its original release in 2017. There the dystopia was typically Fascist with a proletariat working in chains to a dear leader and willing to be sacrificed to that leader. That dystopia is a descendent of Lang’s “Metropolis” and makes use of some of its images, such as workers lined up in single file facing the camera. But America has come a long way since that. The prey are Hispanics and universities and federal workers and journalists who are supposed to promise not to pry information from interviews. The provisions in law and in the constitution are not so much answered as disregarded and the majority of the population to suffer and applaud what is being done to make America great again including the idea that the ceasefire was a good deal. That isn’t brainwashing. It is just turning off judgment by Senators and citizens just to please the Poobah who has found his way by disregarding laws and so eliminating programs and personnel without repealing laws.
Therre is a way, maybe, to burst the cultural bubble. When Republican Senators and Representatives show up for interviews, ask them the golden oldies. Were Haitians eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio? Is Portland now burning> Was Obama born in Kenya? Were Social Security checks going to people over 125 years old? The response that this is an old hat is lame. A chronic liar is still a liar, even if an aspiration like a ceasefire is an aspiration rather than a completed accomplishment. If you swear to Trump lies or evade them, why should people believe anything you say? Let legislators decide if they want to swear to the lies and so say whatever pleases Trump. Put them on the line for their evasions and make discourse a bit more honest, contentious about issues not whims.
But calling facts to account is likely an expression of frustration. Trump now says he will still get Hamas to disarm. That is aspirational when the idea a week ago was that the disarming of Hamas was part of the deal and had to be accomplished pronto. The gods of culture have moved on so that it is a quibble to make disarming Hamas a part of the deal rather than a future negotiation just as it is a quibble to decide whether Portland was burning now or earlier. Trump’s fuzziness on facts has infected discourse.