To the annoyance of many who take him for an evil buffoon, American President Donald Trump put a stop to the war in Gaza by getting the Hamas jihadists to release the twenty Jewish hostages who had survived two years of captivity in the tunnels of the enclave. It was a remarkable feat, but this does not mean that, thanks exclusively to his efforts, “the golden era of Israel and the Middle East” has already begun, as he was pleased to proclaim last Monday before the Israeli parliament.
The bright future envisioned by the “great peacemaker” Trump would be feasible if almost all the inhabitants of the region were sincerely willing to coexist peacefully with the State of Israel, but it happens that many resist doing so for a very simple reason: Jews are not Muslims. Rather, as many Quranic verses remind them, they are their most evil enemies because their ancestors disdained Muhammad. Therefore, they cannot tolerate Jews ruling territories that for centuries belonged to one caliphate or another. For them they are intruders who, like the crusaders, will sooner or later be expelled.
Westerners find it difficult to take seriously the theological dimensions of the conflicts that are causing so much pain not only in the Middle East but also in Africa and parts of Central Asia where Islamist holy war is far from an exotic concept of interest only to historians. Few days go by without groups related to Hamas, such as the Islamic State, Hezbollah, Boko Haram, Al-Qaeda and many others, carrying out bloody massacres of those reluctant to submit to their “fundamentalist” version of what for them is the only true faith.
With few exceptions, Europeans and North Americans prefer not to talk about the atrocities committed by such fanatics for fear of offending the increasingly Muslims who have settled in their own countries and who would not hesitate to accuse them of “Islamophobia.” When the then Pope Benedict XVI – Joseph Ratzinger – alluded elliptically to Islamic aggressiveness in the famous speech he gave in September 2006 in Regensburg, he was virulently denounced by the right-thinking people of Europe and North America.
The desire of so many Westerners to believe that Islam is a peaceful creed greatly benefited Hamas in the war it began just over two years ago when it invaded Israel to rape, mutilate and kill more than a thousand men, women, children and babies, capturing 251 to use as hostages. What at first glance could have been taken for a propaganda error by the jihadists – almost all the adults were pacifists who believed themselves to be friends of the Palestinian Arabs – turned out to be a brilliant tactical coup that will surely be repeated by other terrorist groups in the coming months and years. By doing so, Hamas, which from the outset had the sympathy of the bulk of Western progress that assumed it was fighting for an independent Palestinian state, forced the Israelis to militarily confront an enemy that was more than willing to see members of the local population become “martyrs,” which in an era of ubiquitous visual electronic communications was guaranteed to provoke widespread outrage. sectors in the rest of the world.
Faced with the alternative of limiting themselves to asking the UN to condemn the barbarity of the jihadists and trying to annihilate them by any means possible, the Israelis, aware that in their part of the planet it is suicidal to give an impression of weakness, chose to counterattack.
Although many say they believe that it would have been better for Israel to take a less bellicose stance in the face of what happened on October 7, 2023, since according to them the only thing it has achieved is to deserve the disapproval of alleged European allies such as Emmanuel Macron and Keir Starmer by isolating itself from the “international community”, if it had sought to ingratiate itself with such an entelechy by adopting a passive attitude, the consequences would have been incomparably worse since, convinced that it was vulnerable, those determined to put an end to the existence of the Jewish State would have redoubled their efforts to annihilate it. Happily for Israelis, few neighboring governments today believe it would be worth the risk of sharing the fate of Hamas, Hezbollah and the Iranian theocratic regime as they clashed with Jewish military forces that are among the deadliest in the entire world.
Although representatives of the Arab governments of the region and other predominantly Muslim countries added their voices to the chorus condemning Israel for what it was doing in Gaza, they did nothing to intervene; They understood that the threat posed by militant Islam was decidedly more dangerous to them than that posed by the much-maligned Israeli “right,” which is why they did not hesitate to collaborate with Trump when he offered them a decent way out.
Will “pax Americana” work? Only if the superpower agrees to play the thankless role of armed guardian of a tumultuous and divided region in which the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs is far from the only one that could at any moment assume alarming proportions. Yet time and time again Trump has made it clear that he does not want the United States to resume the role of planetary gendarme that it had reluctantly sought to fulfill for several decades.
In the opinion of Trump and his advisors, it is necessary that troops from Muslim countries such as Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia be in charge of disarming Hamas fighters and other jihadist organizations that swarm in the region. So there is a risk that Trump will soon lose interest in the Middle East to focus on other issues. In that case, the stability of the region would depend on Israel and those neighbors who put economic development before the traditional aspirations of Islam, a faith that is so genetically conquering that believers find it very difficult to coexist peacefully with those, such as Jews, Christians, Hindus and freethinkers, who refuse to kneel.
Although Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the most prominent Arab leaders agree that Hamas will not be able to be part of an eventual government of the enclave, as soon as Israeli forces retreated to the agreed lines, the jihadists came out of their hiding places to murder Gazans whom they accused of collaborating with the enemy. They also insisted that they would not allow themselves to disarm and that they would have to participate in the government of an eventual Palestinian state. Thus, the future of the American president’s “peace plan” will depend on the willingness of the Arab leaders to do whatever is necessary to eliminate once and for all a totalitarian organization, which is indeed genocidal in mentality, which has the support not only of many Palestinians but also of Western sympathizers who, if they lived in the Middle East, would soon become scapegoats of Islamist terror.
Netanyahu and other Israelis have frequently warned Europeans and Americans that while they themselves top the list of mortal enemies of extreme Islam, Christians, atheists and agnostics come next. For better or worse, despite the drastic reduction in the number of Christians and others in various Muslim countries, very few Westerners paid attention to what has been happening in recent years. Rather, in Europe and North America many, especially the so-called progressives, continue to cling to the hope that, as long as they make some concessions that they believe would be merely symbolic, the Islamists will stop harassing others with attacks and, from time to time, with massacres of young people who attend musical shows such as the one that, in Israel, was the scene of an orgy of brutality carried out by Hamas.
Judging by what continues to happen on the streets of their cities, the United Kingdom, France, Sweden and Germany, where “Islamophobia” is growing in intensity, increasingly resemble the countries of the Middle East. Anti-Semitism, or rather, anti-Judaism, is also gaining intensity, which in many cases can be taken as a defensive mental mechanism, due to the desire to believe that if one distances oneself from supposedly problematic people one will be safe. Be that as it may, throughout the world, this ancient hatred is resurfacing and, somewhat paradoxically, benefits Israel by persuading many talented Jews that it is the only place on the face of the Earth where they can feel safe.
In other words, Israel is one of the few developed countries – perhaps the only one – whose inhabitants are reproducing at a sufficient rate to avoid the demographic disasters that so many others are experiencing, including Argentina. The vigorous collective “élan vital” thus expressed suggests that the existential crises that Israel has faced since its rebirth 77 years ago, of which the one unleashed by Hamas and the “axis of resistance” formed by Iran is the most recent, have only served to strengthen it.
