Glimpses of Light
A half-dozen mammoth applecarts are suddenly overturned. In the Middle East, this is as good as it gets.
I’m back from Americaland. A big thanks to Real Story subscribers for their patience.
There’s a lot I’ve had my eye on in the near distance and on the far horizon. I’ll start with some backstory to a rather hefty piece of mine in the National Post this weekend that’s intended to serve as a bird’s eye view of upheavals in the human terrain between the Red Sea and Central Asia. Post headline: October 7 — the day that forever changed the Middle East.
The Post piece more or less follows on the September 23 edition of this newsletter (Everything has changed. Again.) Do read the Post essay when you’re done here, but I thought I’d focus this newsletter on the elements in that bigger story that are either overlooked in the mainstream coverage or just don’t get near enough attention.
My basic take on events, if it matters to you: Let’s not make the perfect the enemy of the good.
It’s coming together splendidly and it could all fall apart
The main attraction: U.S. president Donald Trump’s “20 point peace plan” is functionally indistinguishable from the historic consensus forged between the European Union and the Arab League States at a July 28-30 gathering at the United Nations in New York. The one that Trump and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu boycotted.
It’s odd how this has gone almost entirely unnoticed, but you can count on it that it has not escaped the attention of all those presidents and prime ministers, including our own Mark Carney, who are falling all over themselves to congratulate Trump for what amounts to a complete about-face from that ridiculous American Gaza Rivieria notion he’d been championing with Netanyahu back in February.
The universe is unfolding as it should in Lebanon and in Syria, too, and it’s also begun to unfold the same way, after a fashion, in Iran and Yemen.
By all means, yes, let’s allow Trump to own the Gaza peace plan. Let him call it his big idea. I’d be happy to own it too because its main element is what the National Post (and yours truly) argued for immediately after the atrocities of October 7, 2023, here:
The Palestinian problem is not Israel’s to solve alone. The international community needs to shoulder responsibility for the nightmare Israelis and Palestinians have been expected to endure.
The primary element is the establishment of a “temporary international stabilization mission” to replace Israeli troops in Gaza and remove the burden of policing the Middle East’s jihadist savagery from Israeli shoulders. That aspect of the arrangement is accompanied by a global determination to crush Hamas and end the 77-year Arab-Israeli conflict for good.
The deal even anticipates the heretofore unthinkable: dissassembling the United Nations Relief Works Agency and its debilitating fictions about Palestinian “refugees.” All the Arab States have signed on to it, the Americans have signed on to it and even Benjamin Natanyahu is on side. All the pieces are in place now.
It’s a testament to cunning statecraft that what really came together in July in the New York Declaration has been more or less reformulated into Trump’s 20-point peace plan. Stroke of genius, that. Flattery sometimes gets you everywhere.
Lots more background and resources below. . .