Peace Through Strength — or, The Art of the Ceasefire
If the ceasefire holds, it is not the art of the deal, it is the strength of the IDF.
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Peace Through Strength (and Self-Promotion): Trump, Gaza, and the Theatre of the Absurd
By a twist of political theatre so absurd it could only belong to the twenty-first century, Donald J. Trump has apparently helped midwife what’s being hailed as a new “ceasefire agreement” between Israel and Hamas. Within hours, the former president had christened it “the greatest peace deal since the Garden of Eden” — a triumph of branding, divine genius, and, naturally, Trump himself.
One could almost hear the ghostwritten memoir already in draft: The Art of the Ceasefire — How I Made the Middle East Great Again.
It is the kind of hyperbole that could make angels groan. The Garden of Eden, one recalls, was not a peace accord but an eviction. Yet Trump, that eternal salesman of self, has confused exile with diplomacy and taken credit for a reconciliation between God and the snake. His theology, like his syntax, is improvised but heartfelt.
Still, beneath the comedy lies something older and far more serious — a truth as ancient as war and as inconvenient as reason. This ceasefire, like every one before it, was not midwifed by empathy, negotiation, or moral persuasion. It was conceived in terror and born in exhaustion. It did not emerge from the airless conference rooms of diplomacy but was carved into the firmament by Israeli drones, whose punctuation marks are explosions rather than signatures. The “peace” now being toasted in marble halls is not the progeny of clever diplomats; it is the reluctant child of deterrence.
The aggressor, as always, did not stop because he was moved — he stopped because he was terrified. In that sense, this agreement bears far more of Netanyahu’s grim realism than Trump’s bloviated self-regard. Yet Bibi, ever the pragmatist, seems perfectly content to let Trump strut before the cameras, mistaking the smoke for incense, and to let the peacock preen while the hawk quietly reloads. For the moment, it costs nothing to indulge a man whose vanity could hydrate the Negev.
And speaking of absurdities, one can’t help noticing that this supposed “genocide” doesn’t seem to be going very well for the alleged genocidaires.
Good genocides — if one may use that oxymoron in the spirit of gallows irony — tend not to have ceasefires halfway through. They don’t pause for prisoner exchanges, aid convoys, and UN selfies. What, one wonders, are the professional genocide enthusiasts going to do now? The NGOs that issue genocide press releases like weather bulletins must be in crisis: their apocalypse was rudely interrupted by diplomacy.
And what of poor Greta Thunberg? One imagines her now searching for a fresh war zone to haunt — a new moral inferno in which to pose for the cameras, sipping ethically sourced espresso while accusing governments of war crimes because the coffee came without oat milk. She’ll find one; there’s always another cause to hyperventilate over. Her outrage is carbon-neutral and indefinitely renewable.
Then there are the professional mourners of the Western press. The pain at The Toronto Star will be exquisite. The editorial board of Al Jazeera is probably convening an emergency meeting to rename the ceasefire “a colonial pause.”
The faculty lounges of the University of Guelph will be buzzing with despair: how dare warmonger Trump negotiate what their peace-studies departments have prayed for since the Carter administration? What will they do with all that surplus hate now that the object of it has gone and brokered peace?
Never fear — they’ll find a new way to hate the Jews. They always do. Antisemitism, unlike solar energy, never runs out; it is the one perpetual motion machine that actually works. The justifications change, the jargon evolves, the hashtags are refreshed — but the melody remains infernally the same.
So yes, let Trump claim credit for the celestial peace of Eden reborn. Let the bien-pensant press choke on its adjectives. The truth, as ever, is that civilisation still depends on force, not feeling — and the only thing that truly terrifies those who worship death is the prospect of joining their own congregation.
Trump may brand it as deal-making, but history will call it what it is: the rediscovery of an ancient truth. Peace has never been negotiated; it has always been enforced. The moment the rockets ceased was not when reason prevailed, but when power did. One might call it the art of survival.
The Nobel Peace Prize Auditions
Trump has now entered his favourite talent show — “Nobel Idol.” The man is auditioning, again, for the Nobel Peace Prize, his most coveted participation ribbon. On several occasions, he’s reportedly phoned Norwegian officials directly, demanding updates with the urgency of a man tracking lost luggage.
“So what’s happening with my nomination?” he once asked a startled minister — as if Oslo were simply another licensing partner of the Trump brand, sandwiched between Trump Steaks and Trump University.
It’s classic Trump: he doesn’t so much campaign for peace as negotiate with it for naming rights. If he could have managed it, the award would already be called The Trump Nobel Peace, with a capital T.
“They gave one to Obama for doing nothing,” he barked, “I made peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia — they should give me ten.”
If there were a Nobel Prize for subtlety, Trump would not win it. When he was a child, one imagines him asking what he was getting for Christmas by mid-November, then issuing a press release about it. The world could be on fire, the Dow could be in freefall, but somewhere in Mar-a-Lago, the 45th President of the United States is still wondering whether the Norwegians have checked their spam folder for his Nobel notification.
At a Michigan rally, he mused, “If I were a Democrat, they’d have given me five Nobels already — maybe six.” Later, to Newsweek, he added a flourish that would make even Kissinger blush: “They don’t give you a Nobel Peace Prize for stopping World War III — only for starting it politely.”
It would be funny if it weren’t so perfectly sincere.
Trump doesn’t do impulse control or subtlety; his self-regard is volcanic, his id unfiltered by even the thinnest crust of decorum. He cannot whisper — only broadcast. His idea of humility is reading his own name in a smaller font.
“The Garden of Eden,” one imagines him declaring, “was a great deal, folks, really tremendous — they just had bad negotiators.”
One can almost picture the Scandinavian Nobel Committee, polite to the point of paralysis, staring down a transatlantic phone line as Trump extols his “historic ceasefire” and pauses only to ask about delivery options for the medal.
If irony had an afterlife, Alfred Nobel would be spinning fast enough to generate clean energy for half of Europe.
The C-Spire and the Mirage
The document itself — grandly titled The C-Spire Agreement — reads like The Art of the Deal translated into diplomatic Esperanto. Its twenty clauses promise Gaza’s rebirth under a technocratic, terror-free utopia overseen by an international “Board of Peace” chaired, inevitably, by Trump himself, with Tony Blair as his moral valet.
Gaza will be rebuilt, deradicalised, and re-branded — a kind of Middle-Eastern Mar-a-Lago, minus the golf carts.
Hamas militants who renounce violence are promised amnesty and, one imagines, an internship in “conflict resolution.” Infrastructure will be restored, bakeries reopened, and aid convoys sent in under banners of “mutual respect.” A new International Stabilisation Force will police the ruins; a Special Economic Zone will invite investors; an “Interfaith Dialogue Initiative” will attempt to convince men who quote the Quran about annihilation that they really just need tolerance training.
If anything goes well, there should be lots of work in construction, if they can build amongst all the unexploded munitions.
In theory, it sounds almost sensible. In practice, it’s a casino brochure for Armageddon. “Come to New Gaza,” one imagines the ads: tax breaks, palm trees, and no jihad before noon.
And yet the grim fact remains: the only reason such fantasies are even possible is because Israel, for all the world’s moral theatrics, proved once again that civilisation survives only when barbarism remembers to be afraid. This ceasefire is not the fruit of enlightenment but the offspring of exhaustion.
The Old Law, the Old Lies
For decades, the catechism has been the same: end the occupation, lift the blockade, recognise our dignity. Fine slogans — until one notices that every ceasefire is followed by another tunnel, every truce by another massacre, and every “Day of Rage” by a funeral for someone who thought martyrdom a résumé.
The truth, as ever, is unimpressed by sentiment: peace, if it comes at all, comes when the aggressor is too frightened to continue.
But the world, ever eager for illusions, seeks comfort in the idea of moderation. Enter Fatah, the Palestinian Authority’s silk-tied twin of Hamas’s masked fanatic.
The international class breathes a sigh of relief: Ah, the adults in the room. Adults, perhaps, in the sense that they have mastered cynicism. Mahmoud Abbas, the eternal president of this bureaucratic farce, is hailed as the reasonable man in Ramallah — reasonable enough to cancel elections indefinitely, reasonable enough to build himself a mansion worth millions while his people rot in the refugee camps he romanticises, reasonable enough to educate his children in Switzerland while teaching everyone else’s to hate.
And what a moderate he is. His doctoral thesis flirted openly with Holocaust denial — an academic speciality that makes him, in the eyes of the European Union, a philosopher-king of nuance.
On a modest official salary of roughly $120,000 a year, Abbas has managed to amass a personal fortune worth millions, an achievement so impressive it ought to be studied in business schools. It is only topped by Canadian ex-prime minister Trudeau, who managed to grow $1.2 million into $92 million in about 12 years—all on a salary of $350K.
Hedge fund managers are lining up to figure out their magic. One can only assume his broker is divine. Wall Street should be so lucky.
If Hamas wages jihad with shrapnel, Fatah wages it with stipends. Between seven and ten percent of its entire budget goes to what might be politely termed the martyrdom pension fund — lifetime payments to the families of those who die killing Jews.
It is social welfare as a death cult: blow up a bus and your mother receives a salary; stab a rabbi and your brother gets a promotion. The bureaucrats of Ramallah, ever meticulous, have codified this depravity into law. The spreadsheets of martyrdom are kept in triplicate.
And yet the policy’s most grotesque expression can be seen not in ministries but in nurseries. Some Gazan parents — themselves trapped in the propaganda loop of clerics and commissars — now parade their children in miniature fatigues, boasting to journalists that little Ahmed dreams of stabbing Jews when he grows up.
It is not parenting so much as portfolio management: a grisly investment strategy in which the child’s death becomes a deferred-benefit plan. The stipend, after all, does not go to the boy; he will be dead. It goes to the survivors, whose grief has been nationalised and monetised.
This is what happens when fanaticism acquires a finance department. The love that should have been spent on the living is securitised against the next atrocity. In any sane moral universe, this would be recognised as child abuse on a theological scale — but in the inverted moral economy of Gaza, it is called “sacrifice.”
It is not faith; it is futures trading in flesh.
Western donors know it. They all know it. Yet the same governments that lecture Israel on restraint still wire the money — laundering moral cowardice one transfer at a time. Fatah’s embassies are filled with fluent English, expensive suits, and the faint odour of blood under cologne.
The European Waltz and the Endless Blame
The spectacle would make Marie Antoinette blush. Her infamous “Let them eat cake” has been reborn in Ramallah and Brussels. When Gazans starve, their leaders order new fleets of German sedans; when their children die, their presidents commission more marble for their villas. They call it resistance; it is decadence with a grievance.
Meanwhile, the bien-pensants of London, Toronto, and Berkeley hold candlelit panels about “dialogue,” mistaking moral equivalence for virtue. “Violence never solves anything,” they chant — a sentiment that could only survive in societies kept safe by men who solved everything with violence. Actually, violence seemed to have worked quite well.
They hold seminars on nuance while Israel holds the line.
The world has always found new reasons to hate Jews, and it always will. Yesterday it was usury, then nationalism, then colonialism, and now Zionism. The form changes, the melody does not. The one people who learned, through agony, that survival depends on strength are still condemned for practising it.
The Montevideo Mirage and the Militia Reality
And what of the fabled “State of Palestine” that diplomats fantasise about? Under the Montevideo Convention, a state must have a defined territory, a permanent population, a government, and the capacity to enter relations with other states.
By that measure, “Palestine” exists only on the stationery of its apologists. It has two governments, each claiming the other’s legitimacy; two sets of armed gangs calling themselves security forces; and not one institution that could survive a week without foreign subsidy. To recognise it as a state is not diplomacy — it is necromancy. It rewards terrorism and baptises chaos with sovereignty.
And even that description flatters the reality. Gaza today is not merely divided between Hamas and Fatah; it is a patchwork of clans, fiefdoms, and freelance militias — armed entrepreneurs of misery who answer to whichever patron pays best this week. Some warlords call themselves “community defenders,” gangsters who call themselves “brigades,” and smugglers who pose as social workers. Every bombed-out district now boasts its own micro-sovereignty, each with its own checkpoint, flag, and grievance. It is not governance but gangland — the political equivalent of an electrical grid run entirely on car batteries.
To call this chaos a state is to confuse anarchy with agency. The diplomats who speak reverently of “Palestinian institutions” might as well hold summits on the internal coherence of the Mafia. What passes for leadership is a carousel of thugs and theologians, sustained not by vision but by foreign funding and the dependable Western habit of mistaking dysfunction for authenticity.
Even if some “technocratic authority” were installed tomorrow — complete with résumés, spreadsheets, and the usual parade of international advisors wearing the haunted look of people who still believe in process — what possible evidence is there that corruption, fanaticism, or the martyr-fund bureaucracy would simply evaporate? These are not aberrations in Palestinian governance; they are its organising principles.
Fatah and Hamas are not opposite poles of a political spectrum — they are the same pole, wrapped in different flags. One wears a tie, the other a balaclava. Both are animated by the same sacred addiction to grievance and the same sacred exemption from accountability.
The war, let’s be clear, has been a financial windfall for the billionaires of Doha — the grinning quartermasters of piety. Every bombardment, every corpse, every Western reconstruction fund is another line item on their balance sheets. The marble palaces rise, the bank accounts swell, and the condolence tweets pour in. The death of their people is not a tragedy to them; it is a dividend.
These men have turned suffering into an investment portfolio — grief as an asset class, pity as an export commodity. They will not give it up for peace because peace, to them, is simply bad business. Their concern for the Palestinian people extends exactly as far as the camera lens and no further. Their bellies bulge, their pockets jingle, and their rhetoric soars — a hymn to resistance conducted by men who haven’t risked a bullet since their last visit to their Gazan tailor.
And if Hamas remains in power — as it very likely will, since cowards rarely fire themselves — we know precisely what they are committed to: not coexistence, but conquest. Their charter is unambiguous: an Islamic state “from the river to the sea,” a phrase that is less geography than theology, less map than death wish. They play with house money — Palestinian lives are their casino chips — and the only force that ever interrupts their game is the credible threat of their own extinction.
Perhaps exhaustion will do what decency never could. Perhaps some vestigial animal instinct for survival will outweigh the narcotic allure of martyrdom. Perhaps, just once, the men of Gaza might long for a quiet house, a full fridge, and a night’s sleep unbroken by the noise of God’s accountants tallying the dead.
But let us not flatter ourselves: no one has been converted to peace. This is not the dawn of a new moral order — it is the hangover after a prolonged binge of blood and rhetoric. The IDF’s unrelenting campaign, and the wider pressure radiating through Yemen, Syria, Qatar, and Iran, have reminded even those who claim to love death that dying still hurts.
That, in the end, is the only sermon that has ever reached them.
No — the Palestinian tragedy is not born of statelessness but of leadership: leadership that treats death as currency, pity as policy, and survival as a negotiable embarrassment. Civilisation, in such a neighbourhood, endures not because it persuades, but because it terrifies.
Peace, Through Grit and Gunpowder
So yes, let us see if this ceasefire leads to peace. But for those who refused the hostage deal months ago — how many additional deaths were necessary? Hamas chose this war and prolonged it, hiding in tunnels, wiring apartment blocks as traps, faking photos of starving children and bloody body bags from which the “dead” sometimes rose when the camera blinked. They even shot their own civilians for trying to flee, because Hamas’s favourite Palestinian has always been a dead one — preferably with a press vest and a sympathetic caption.
So let the diplomats toast themselves and let Trump polish his imaginary Nobel. The rest of us can afford the truth: this ceasefire was not won by persuasion, empathy, or enlightenment. It was won by the steady, terrible, necessary pressure of Israeli arms — the one force left in the region that still believes civilisation is worth defending.
If peace comes, it will not be because the world suddenly grew wise but because Hamas finally ran out of places to hide. Peace through strength is not warm or noble or even fair. It is simply the peace that lasts. And history, that cruel and unsentimental editor, will again record the only line that matters: that barbarism was frightened into silence, and civilisation, weary but unrepentant, endured.
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