Hamas, Netanyahu and Trump

The sight of emaciated, hollow-eyed hostages being steered across a platform by gun-toting barbarians in some sort of triumphalist display calls to mind memories of starving figures being liberated from Nazi concentration camps. The difference is that in 1945 the perpetrators had either been apprehended or were being hunted down, whereas in the current scenario Hamas exults in what it sees, incredibly, as a victory.

This, of course, is a delusion. Talk of victory and defeat in meaningless when two communities which have constructed their identities around the same piece of land are pitted against each other in bloody warfare. Hamas is nothing more than an agent of terror. It has no credible political agenda and exists only to carry out its criminal intention to murder Jews. It controls the Arab community in Gaza with an iron fist and sees itself as the spearhead of the Palestinian people. No other Palestinian voice dares to make itself heard, so there is no one with whom to negotiate in a spirit of compromise or cooperation.

Unfortunately, Netanyahu has fallen into the trap of seeing victory as a military objective. He is too shortsighted to imagine what this ‘victory’ would entail for future relations with the Palestinians. For him, the answer lies in tightening the ring of steel surrounding Israel and increasing security within the country, even if this means living indefinitely within a culture of oppression.

We then see Trump entering, stage right. Now president of the most powerful country in the world, he does not hesitate to impose his inhuman and unrealistic solution on the war – to clear Gaza of Palestinians, to move the inhabitants like cattle into other countries and to redesign the country as a fantasy playground in his own narcissistic image.

Having lobbed his grenade into the arena he then takes a step back, and like a delinquent child who has lost interest in a recently acquired toy, turns his attention elsewhere.

Hamas, with its genocidal preoccupation, Netanyahu, stuck in a time warp and Trump, reveling in his omnipotence, constitute a malignant trio. But history is against them. Civilization has advanced too far to entertain these pantomime figures for very long. The landscape is undoubtedly changing, and these spectres from the past will themselves soon be thrown into the past, to be replaced by more enlightened figures.