For peace to last, Hamas must admit defeat
Enough of fathers mourning the deaths of their daughters, enough of mothers waiting at home for their missing sons.
Enough of homes reduced to rubble and hopes turned to ashes. Enough of hearses and hostages. Enough.
Among his collection of Nazi artefacts, my grandfather, the archivist of the anti-Nazi movement, possessed a child’s board game.
It was called Juden Raus!
The players each had a white piece and had to collect as many hook-nosed pieces as they could. The winner was the child who gathered up all the Jews and took them to the “collection point”.
By this finishing line, there was a picture of a family of stereotypical Jews and the words “Off to Palestine”.
The Germans hadn’t thought up the gas chambers yet, and even when they did they didn’t talk about them. So off to Palestine it was.
The great Israeli writer Amos Oz explained that when his father was a young man, the slogan “Jews go to Palestine” could be found on walls all over Europe. Nowadays, he wrote, you can find the slogan “Jews get out of Palestine”.
My grandfather spent much of the 1920s in Berlin, before disaster engulfed him, in a political argument with Zionists. He worried that if Jews created a state in Palestine there would never be peace there.
The Zionists replied that if Jews stayed in Europe they would all be killed.
All my life this thought has haunted me – what if they were both right?
So Donald Trump’s ceasefire, as fragile as it is, as temporary as it may prove, is a tiny moment of hope.
Haven’t we wept enough?
And I can’t wish for anything more fervently than that this moment should last. I live in Pinner, I’m British, I’ve never felt part-Israeli but I think, given the history of Jews, I am entitled to believe that my own security is at least partly at stake.
Even if it were not, we are all human and haven’t we wept enough?
To see Palestinians returning to their wrecked homes, many with wrecked families, left to pick up the pieces of lives that will never be the same again is a sorrow hard to bear. I will never be contemptuous of someone shedding a tear over so much misery. Or even feeling anger. I feel anger, too.
In his short book How Wars End, AJP Taylor reviewed a series of conflicts beginning with Napoleon’s “last great war”. His purpose was to show how bumpy the path to peace is once the fighting first comes to an end. I am sure we are about to discover how right he was. The road ahead looks hazardous indeed. But something else about Taylor’s accounts of past conflicts struck me. The beginning of the end came with at least one side realising it could not continue with war. That it had, essentially, lost.
The long series of Napoleon’s battles began to come to an end when, after nine hours of unyielding negotiation in the summer of 1813, the Austrian statesman Prince Metternich said to him, very simply, “Sire, you are a ruined man.”
This observation, expressing Austria’s view that Napoleon could not prevail, was very obviously correct.
There wasn’t peace immediately, Napoleon struggled against the obvious for two years. But it came in the end.
At the heart of the temporary deal Trump has brokered is the fact that Hamas are ruined men. Just as at the heart of the Northern Ireland peace accord was the IRA’s appreciation that it had been so badly infiltrated by the security services it could no longer win.
When, after October 7, people said Hamas could not be defeated because it was an idea, I did not agree.
Of course it could be defeated. Nazism was an idea, and that was defeated.
The length of time it takes for peace to arise out of this ceasefire, and the robustness of any settlement, depends overwhelmingly on Hamas appreciating that it has lost and seeing there is no more it can gain from killing.
Violence will continue and Palestine will never be free until Hamas, and any allies, stop struggling against the obvious.
Anybody who does not appreciate why the Palestinian Arabs resisted the creation of the state of Israel with arms in 1948 lacks imagination.
Palestinians had their own national ambitions, their own experience of oppression and being governed by strangers.
I understand completely their desire to assert their own nationhood and their resentment that the international community was asking them to share what they saw as their own land.
I see, also, why they felt that their chance of driving out the Jews from Palestine was large enough to be a realistic ambition.
Orgy of pointless death
They had enough local support from neighbouring states and they thought they could win.
But the moment for this has long passed. It has been clear for decades that such victory was impossible.
For decades now, launching war against Israel has just been an organised orgy of pointless death. I said earlier that I was angry, and this is why. It is not simply that October 7 was an outburst of monstrous, callous, nauseating terrorism. It is that it was bound to lead to Israeli resistance and retaliation.
Was even designed, because of its hideous provocative nature, to lead to it. All to carry on fighting a war that began in 1948 and was long since lost.
It was conducted by Hamas in pursuit of their own interests with little thought of the consequences for their fellow Palestinians.
They thought of the deaths of their brothers and sisters as little more than useful propaganda. And yes, there rose in Israel a coalition, including vengeful and obnoxious individuals, seeking the eradication of neighbours they saw as enemies. Hamas knew that would happen. They wanted it to happen.
And in the streets their friends marched, urging them on.
Carrying their bits of performative cardboard and chanting about putting “zios in the ground”.
They pretended they wanted a ceasefire but watch them now as they continue marching, sloganising now against the ceasefire they lied about wanting.
Do you know when there last was a ceasefire?
On October 6, 2023, before Hamas launched their attack.
The protesters didn’t want a ceasefire then and they don’t want a ceasefire now.
Their chants are for more war. Their lack of silence is complicity.
For Israelis now, for all of us now, there is a golden opportunity.
Seize this moment. Show that as ferociously as you resist violence, so magnanimously do you seek peace. Show that there is a reward for laying down arms. Share the land with your neighbours. Zionists settled in the land of Israel so there could be security and self-determination for the Jews. There cannot be such security while all around there is war.
Peace is near enough to touch. Reach for it now.
— The Times
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Enough, now, of dying. Enough of rape, and murder, and kidnap, and bombs.