Peace out: Hamas has always been a murderous death cult
As the Israel Defence Forces withdrew from some parts of Gaza, in accordance with Donald Trump’s peace plan, Hamas sent gunmen back on to the streets.
Their very first priority was not to confront any Israelis, nor to feed or assist their civilian population. It was instead to hunt down and kill Palestinians opposed to Hamas.
There was a good deal of killing in gunbattles, but Hamas also rounded up Palestinian men it didn’t like, tied them up, forced them to kneel, and shot them to death.
Will any of those protesters spewing anti-Semitic hatred these last two years in Western cities now demonstrate to demand that Hamas abide by the ceasefire?
Hamas has always been a murderous death cult.
However, while Trump certainly deserves credit for bringing about this ceasefire, it’s hard to know what on earth the President was talking about when he said a few days ago that Hamas was committed to a long-term peace.
Hamas is not remotely committed to any peace. It could have ended the vast, tragic suffering of the people of Gaza at any time in the last two years by releasing the Israeli hostages and ceding political power to other Palestinians in Gaza.
It came to this ceasefire only because of Israeli military pressure, combined with political and financial pressure from Qatar, which has funded Hamas in the past, and from Turkey and Egypt.
The behaviour of the remaining Hamas fighters in these first few days augurs very badly for the implementation of the rest of the Trump peace plan.
Trump’s threat that if Hamas doesn’t disarm “we’ll disarm them” is meaningless if it refers to American troops. No US president, least of all Trump, could send US troops into Gaza on a search-and-destroy mission for Hamas, or a more general counterinsurgency operation.
Instead, the threat could only be that Israel might resume military operations.
That would be the end of the Trump peace plan. What attitude, incidentally, would the Albanese government have towards that?
It’s also almost inconceivable that neighbouring Arab nations would send their troops in to quell Hamas, inevitably taking casualties and unintentionally killing Palestinian civilians.
The best realistic hope for Gaza, which still has some chance, is that Hamas at least takes a breather for a few weeks, so as not to humiliate the Arab nations and Turkey, which have backed its commitment to a ceasefire.
This would allow an interim Palestinian committee to take administrative control of most of Gaza.
The Albanese government, like other Western governments, says Hamas can have no role in the future governance of Gaza, yet has never addressed how this might be achieved.
Although Gazans surely want this fighting to finish, whoever campaigns among them on the basis of hating Israel will surely find plenty of support.
The hope of would-be peacemakers is that a new Palestinian governing committee, with the backing of Arab neighbours and the US, could develop a civil society in Gaza that is strong enough ultimately to marginalise Hamas.
On the basis of all the available facts, it’s pretty unlikely, though such a development would obviously be necessary long before any prospect of a two-state solution could realistically come back into consideration.
None of this is to downplay Trump’s achievement in securing the release of hostages and the military ceasefire. But this achievement was never really likely to yield lasting peace. But it’s worth the effort to keep trying.
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It didn’t take Hamas long to prove that their new found commitment to peace, much less to disarming themselves, was, like almost everything else they say, a lie.