Trump’s Middle East Deal Has Exposed the Truth About Europe’s Islamo-Left

President Trump’s remarkable Middle East deal has led to the release of the last 20 surviving hostages of the 251 seized by Hamas terrorists during the October 7th  pogrom in Israel. The end of their suffering, after two years of hell, should be a cause for celebration not only for Israelis but for anybody who wants to see an end to terrorism and war in the Middle East.

Yet strangely, some in Europe and the West seem less than enthused about the first stage of Trump’s peace deal. The pro-Palestinian protestors who have long demanded Israel submit to a “Ceasefire now” have sworn to continue fighting, despite an actual ceasefire coming into force. 

Much remains uncertain about what will happen next in the Middle East. But Trump’s deal has already made some things very clear about what’s been happening in Europe and the West.

It should now be clear that the protestors are not interested in peace or primarily concerned with saving Palestinian lives. Instead, they are motivated above all by hatred of the Jewish state of Israel. 

If you seriously believed that Israel has been committing genocide in Gaza, wouldn’t you be pleased to see the allegedly genocidal war come to an end? So why do so many who have cried “genocide” over the past two years seem unhappy about Trump’s deal?

Because, as various Palestinian solidarity groups made clear in response to the announcement of Trump’s deal, their war is “not over until Zionism is completely eradicated”; it is “not over until the Zionist entity ceases to exist.”

What the Islamists and their Islamo-left allies in the West want is the complete defeat and destruction of Israel. No peace deal could be enough for them unless the Israeli state agreed to sign its own death warrant. 

This, after all, is the real meaning, as we have argued from the start, of the slogan “From the River to the Sea” that has resounded through the streets of European capitals: a demand to wipe the state of Israel off the map and drive the Jews into the Mediterranean. 

Recent events have also made clear that their “anti-Zionism” is an increasingly thin veil for outright antisemitism. How did UK pro-Palestinian activists respond to the murderous attack on a synagogue in Manchester? By holding protests promoting the demand to “Globalise the Intifada.” As a banner held by counter-protestors in London on Saturday made clear, that sounds very much like “a call to murder Jews.”

Of course anybody should be free to criticise the Israeli or any other government. But there is an increasingly obvious double standard at work here, ignoring bloodier conflicts elsewhere and singling out Israel for condemnation—even when it is trying to make a peace deal. Such political discrimination is otherwise known as antisemitism, or plain old Jew hatred.

We should now be able to recognise these anti-Israel crusaders, not as the allies of peace in the Middle East, but as the West’s enemies within. They have drunk the toxic cocktail of Islamism, Western self-loathing and leftist identity politics that declares white Jews are always oppressors, whatever is done to them, and non-white Palestinians must always be the victims, whatever they do.  

While they are in retreat on other issues across the West, hating Israel has become the woke left’s last stand. That is why they still cannot recognise the truth, that the death cult of Hamas started the war on October 7th, is responsible for all the suffering that has followed, now refuses to disarm, and remains committed to repeating those atrocities “again and again”. Israel must be supported when it inevitably has to deal with Hamas again.

Rather than facing up to that harsh reality, too many European governments have instead given succour and support to Hamas by recognising the fantasy state of Palestine. 

Time we all recognised the fact that President Trump’s breakthrough was made possible by the outstanding military successes of the Israeli Defence Forces, which finally forced the Arab states to come to the table and press Hamas to give up the hostages. We should recognise, too, the fortitude of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israeli government, in the face of mounting odds and multiplying enemies.

Whether the European elites like it or not (and they don’t), Trump and Netanyahu have proved to be the real agents of Western democracy and civilisation in the Middle East. 

By contrast, Trump’s deal has exposed the impotence and irrelevance of those European elites on the world stage. For all their posturing at summits, Europe’s pro-Palestine leaders made no meaningful contribution to events. 

As the American ambassador to Israel said, when a minister in the Labour government claimed the UK had played an important part behind the scenes, these people are “delusional.” Only the national sovereigntist European leaders who have stood with Israel against Hamas can claim to have done any good at all.

Let us celebrate the fact that the first stage of President Trump’s deal has freed the remaining hostages. Let us also take the opportunity to free the Western imagination from all of the fashionable delusions about Israel, Hamas, Islamism and “anti-Zionism.”

To turn the pro-Hamas protestors’ words back on them: our fight for democracy, sovereignty and civilisation in the West will not be over until those poisonous political prejudices are “completely eradicated.”