The only people who should be surprised that U.S. President Donald Trump was able to broker a peace deal in Gaza are the ones who continue to underestimate this man.
The fact is, his language is far more deliberate and far more calculating than what often appears to be "top of the mind" or extemporaneous. So when he told Hamas that if they did not come to the peace table, he would give Israel a free hand to "finish the job," the remaining leaders of that terrorist organization had to consider that Trump was telling them the game was up.
It was diplomacy with a baseball bat. In this world, filled with despots, dictators and destructive leaders, as you will find in Iran, this tactic may be the only one that brings desired results.
Here is another lesson being learned by world leaders.
If you elect a terrorist organization to be your government, as the Palestinians in Gaza did by electing Hamas, and your elected government then conducts atrocities by raping Israeli women, slaughtering children, murdering 1,200 people, and kidnapping 251 others as hostages, Israel will descend on you with a righteous might that destroys your world.
Hamas sent thousands of their murderers across the border with the specific intent of upending the rapprochement beginning to take place between Israel and the Arab world. What they did not count on was an Israeli response that recognized this attack for what it was – war – and war is ugly and violent. Those Hamas voters who danced in the streets of Gaza during and after the October 7th attack discovered that their elected government had just committed suicide.
Those campus protests by Hamas collaborators in the US and the West? The chants of "by any means necessary"? The diplomatic recognition of a "Palestinian State" by some nations? One supposes they would have preferred an Israeli response of conducting mass funerals and collective grieving. Sorry, guys. You must be thinking of some other ethnicity.
Embedded in the DNA of every Jew is the recognition that they are – essentially – on their own. As Nazi Germany launched its machinery for the Holocaust, contemporary media reports and agents on the ground were quite clear about what was taking place. Nations were either studiously indifferent or else clasped their hands in feigned anguish... "Oh the humanity..." as the gas chambers and dedicated death squads worked overtime.
Now the world is on notice. Gaza will serve as a reminder that if anyone seeks to defile or destroy the people of Israel, the response will be unrelenting. They will find you wherever you are and inflict on you and your land pain of Biblical proportions, the same as you had been planning to inflict on them.
Lawrence Kadish serves on the Board of Governors of Gatestone Institute.
