The President of Peace

“When your best is the whole wide world, from Ukraine to Syria to Taiwan to India, the news is almost never as good as it is today.” Jim Geraghty at NRO suggests we savor today’s images of the Israeli hostages finally reunited with their families, for there is much to be thankful for. As Geraghty notes, “The Israeli hostages were held 296 days longer than the Iranian regime held the American hostages in 1979-1981.”

Hostages Come Home

There were some who thought this spectacular breakthrough might never happen

Jessica Hornik reports in NRO,

There are some two dozen hostages who are deceased. Among them are two American Israelis, Itay Chen and Omer Neutra. Some of the dead were murdered by Hamas on October 7, their bodies taken into Gaza. Others were murdered in captivity. As part of the agreement, Hamas must return all their remains. The Chen and Neutra families, and all the families of the dead, may finally be able to bury their loved ones.

This is a great day for Trump and for America. Israelis are effusively singing the President’s praises. Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid praised the American leader for saving “millions from the horrors of war.” President Trump, he stated, has “done the unimaginable.” Donald Trump has kept his word about being the president of peace.

A Credible Demand

Khaled Elgindy, a visiting scholar at Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, reported to the New Yorker that Hamas was willing to release the hostages in exchange for a declaration that Israel’s war against them was over: If Hamas were going to give up its one piece of leverage, it needed reasonable assurance that the war would end. At that point, Netanyahu’s word and President Trump’s word did not amount to much.

Calculations changed, however, when Hamas realized that the group was much weaker. Even the Arab states were irked and wanted the conflict to end. Trump’s lopsided plan was accepted, not because Hamas loved his plan but because they wanted the conflict to end.

Terms of the Surrender

The lopsided plan put Hamas in a difficult position:

If (it) were to accept the plan as laid out, it was basically the terms of surrender. Hamas would hand over (its) weapons. Gaza would be controlled indefinitely by the Israeli Army, and Gaza would be overseen by some international trusteeship headed by Trump. No Palestinian would welcome that. 

Placed in a Bind 

Somehow, Hamas managed to find a way to say “yes, but,” really the only possible answer it could have given, explains Elgindy.

(Hamas) couldn’t say no. (It) couldn’t say no to the President of the United States, especially when the Arab states were saying yes.

… also, (Hamas) couldn’t say no to the people in Gaza who were so desperate for this to end and who were basically demanding that Hamas just accept the terms as they were.

The Israeli airstrike against Hamas leaders in Doha, Qatar, on 9 September was a major blunder, believes Elgindy.

Jim Gerahagty thinks otherwise about that assessment. What especially alerted Garaghty was how agreeable Hamas was after 15 Israeli Air Force fighter jets dropped 10 bombs on their luxury villas, 1,110 miles away from Israel.

For Hamas’s top officials, the war and Israeli wrath were suddenly not just “over there.” For those officials, the conflict, concludes Geraghty, was “over here.”