A Cold and a Broken Hallelujah

How the West's "anti-war" movement came to oppose peace in Gaza, and how the wider war goes on.

The war is not over. We should celebrate anyway.

In the National Post today, under the headline Trump puts the Israel haters in a corner - The Hamas supporters in the West can’t stand the thought of peace, I try to make myself useful in shedding some light on the staggering and fast-paced developments in what we have come to call the war.

The full fruition of the “first phase” of the broad global consensus that has been reduced to the euphemism “U.S. president Donald Trump’s 20-point peace plan” is intended to come to pass by end of hours on Tuesday next week. This just happens to be Simchat Torah, which, if I’m not mistaken, is intended among our Hebrew comrades to be pretty much the happiest day in the Jewish calendar. It coincides in that older calendar with the horrors that began two years ago.

And so for the love of G-d let’s be happy. They have been singing and dancing in Gaza these past few hours, bless them, and last night as well in Hostages Square in Tel Aviv, and rightly so. Even if the war is not really over, because it isn’t. Even if what is unfolding at the moment is only the early innings of one part of the third point in this “20-point peace plan” that has justified a spring in our step in the cause of peace between Israelis and Palestinians like nothing in living memory.

The thing is I’ve been a bit of a wreck this week, I should say. I’ve no right to complain, but covering these agonies these past couple of years, and pretty intensely, will do that. This week I’ve been burdened by the weight of the memory of walking through the wreckage of Kfar Aza and other kibbutzim and moshavim in the “Gaza Envelope,” and talking to the shellshocked and broken people in those places about the unspeakable horrors that had befallen them.

And unspeakable horrors have befallen the people of Gaza in their tens of thousands. And it may be over, or this ugliest of chapters in “the conflict” may be over. Something brave and bright may even be beginning.

I do tend to be a bit “but on the bright side,” and I’ve tried my best to be cheery, as in L’shana tova tikateyvu and all that. Chin up. As in Glimpses of Light, from this newsletter just four days ago. As in A two-state solution is impossibly utopian. It’s still the only thing that will work.

It has been quite a hard slog this week. I am not especially hopeful for my country, which in just the context of the “Free Palestine” iteration of the Oldest Hatred is in a very bad way. A very bad way. As I pointed out in the Post today it’s not just the radical maximalists Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich who would stand in the way of the frail prospect of peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

Trump’s plan has also upset the vast “Free Palestine” constituency in the NATO capitals, which is now the last major redoubt of support for Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the rest. The complaint is that Trump’s plan, like its antecedent in the New York Declaration of July 29, anticipates Hamas surrendering its arms and relinquishing any role in the political life of Gaza and a future Palestinian state.

Trump’s plan explicitly stipulates that Hamas and its affiliated factions must agree to forego any direct or indirect role in Gaza’s governance, and that all military and “offensive infrastructure” including tunnels and weapon production facilities be destroyed. Gaza would be fully demilitarized, weapons would be permanently decommissioned, and a “New Gaza,” policed by troops from an International Stabilisation Force, must be fully committed to peace with Israel.

This is a bridge too far for Code Pink, former British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, the Electronic Intifada organization, United Nations special rapporteur on Palestine Francesca Albanese, the virulently anti-Israel Democratic Party congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, the Vancouver-based, terrorist-listed Samidoun Network, the New York “anti-Zionist” organization Within Our Lifetime, the Progressive International organization and the Sumud Flotilla that recently staged an elaborate high seas mischief-making exercise masquerading as a humanitarian mission.

This constituency now serves as the primary non-state belligerent arrayed against the prospects for peace between Israelis and Palestinians. In the streets and campuses of Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and Edmonton this week, its keffiyeh-clad activists were celebrating the October 7, 2023 massacres that led to the Gaza “genocide” they have been banging on about, but now they are dismayed that their so-called genocide may be coming to an end.

And then there’s the wider war within which the agonies of Gaza must be understood. China, Russia and Iran collaborate and connive to the detriment of global peace and security. It was Iran’s Lebanese proxy Hezbollah that launched hundreds of rockets at Israel to coincide with the 2023 Hamas invasion, and the Houthis’ Ansarullah wing of the “axis of resistance” in Yemen, in coordination with Russia and China, began its reign of terror in the Red Sea. More than 500 attacks on passing vessels produced a 90 percent reduction in container shipping through those waters, costing $1 trillion in disrupted trade.

Iran provides Russia with shahed drones in its war with Ukraine, China buys black-market oil from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, Russia provides Yemen’s Houthis with military hardware and satellite technology, and the Houthis provide Russia with recruits to fight on the front lines with Ukraine. Round and round it goes. Hardly anybody even notices.

One must live in hope though, and I confess that this week I have failed in that necessity. I fear I may do something rash, like attend Mass.

I do have in the hopper what I hope subscribers will find to be a very interesting and even happy newsletter this Thanksgiving Day weekend for you (for American subscribers, yes, this weekend, it’s how we roll). Not just about mass media malpractice this time, but developments in the journalism racket that I find very encouraging.

The more astute and sophisticated among subscribers will have noticed that I swiped the headline for this edition of the Real Story from Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah. I did my best, it wasn’t much, I couldn’t feel so I tried to touch, I’ve told the truth. I didn’t come to fool you.

Jeff Buckley’s sublime rendition captures my mood this week perfectly and precisely. So here you go:

All for now. Shalom everybody.