Winston Churchill, in 1940, was said to have “mobilised the English language, and sent it into battle”. Well, a recent Financial Times editorial mobilised vapid cliches about ‘peace’ to attack Israel and obscure Hamas’s responsibility for the war.
The Dec. 26th piece (“FT View: The reshaping of the Middle East”, Dec. 26) was published prior to what appears to be, at the time of this writing, an imminent deal between Israel and Hamas which will return dozens of Israeli hostages in exchange for hundreds of Palestinian terrorists. In the second phase of the agreement, there is the potential for a long-term ceasefire.
So, much of what was written in the FT editorial about what they claim was the reluctance of Israeli leaders to agree to a hostage and ceasefire deal was both incorrect and no longer relevant.
However, the piece is quite instructive in illustrating how what passes for serious commentary, even at publications generally well-regarded for the quality of their journalism, often includes the kind of unserious platitudes about ‘peace in the Middle East’ you’d expect to read in a student newspaper.
The editorial begins reasonably enough, in noting that “the dynamics in the Middle East have unquestionably shifted in Israel favour” in recent months, citing Israel’s military offensive against Hezbollah which forced the terror group to accept a ceasefire agreement clearly in Jerusalem’s favor, as well as the broader fact that Iran and its entire ‘Axis of Resistance’ has been shown, after IDF activity against its proxies on multiple fronts, to be a “paper tiger“.
However, the editorial avers, the country risks forfeiting the diplomatic opportunities presented to it by virtue of its battlefield victories, writing that “After destroying Hamas’s military capacity and neutering regional threats to Israel” Israel’s premier “has no justification not to end the conflict“. The government, they add, “instead appear[s] bent on occupying more territory on various fronts and keeping Israel in a perpetual state of conflict“. “Ultimately“, the editorial ends, “Israel’s security can only be guaranteed with peace, and it has never been in a stronger position to achieve this — if only Netanyahu could see it.”
First, regarding the claim that Israel appears “bent on occupying more territory“: while extreme-right ministers have spoken about building settlements in Gaza, the prime minister has ruled that out.
Additionally, note how the FT editorial board – in an editorial, again, written before the current deal – completely erased Hamas’s role in ‘ending the conflict’, ignoring that the terror group could have, at any moment, ended it (and the suffering of Palestinian civilians) by surrendering and agreeing to release the hostages, an obfuscation driven by a broader media failure to assign Palestinians agency.
The fact that Hamas’s stated aim is to commit genocide against Israel, and that its leaders explicitly stated, in the aftermath of Oct. 7th, that, if they have the power to do so, they’ll perpetrate Oct. 7th-style massacres again, again and again, should, in itself, be sufficient evidence that Jerusalem can not, unilaterally, “end the conflict” at a time of its choosing.
Yet, while the FT’s disappearing of the group responsible for the worst antisemitic atrocity since the Holocaust is, sadly, a dynamic that’s all too common within the legacy media outlets we monitor, the editorial’s final platitude, asserting that “Israel’s security can only be guaranteed with peace“, is both condescending and ahistorical. It’s condescending because it suggests that Israelis, who withdrew from an overwhelming majority of the territory it captured after the Six Day War in order to secure regional peace, and which offered Palestinians statehood, designed to end the conflict, only to be rebuffed several times by PA leaders, need a lecture on the virtue of peacemaking.
It’s also ahistorical in that events both in the region and in the larger world have clearly shown that peace is typically achieved by effective deterrence. So, a more accurate rendering of the words used in the FT’s final rhetorical flourish would be something along the lines of ‘peace can only be guaranteed by effective security’, not the other way around.
This is why the the FT’s airbrushing of Hamas is so grossly misleading to readers: it omits the crucial fact that, just as the 2nd Intifada convinced most Israelis that Yasser Arafat’s insistence that he truly sought peace was a lethal lie, the decision by Hamas and their bloody pogromists to carry out the (trigger warning) indescribably savage attack 16 months ago has likely traumatised a generation of Israelis, rendering them less likely to support ceding territory or granting Palestinians greater autonomy.
It’s incredible that this even needs to be said, but there will only be true peace when Israelis are convinced that Palestinians and, especially, their leaders have made the decision – for either moral or mere practical reasons – to finally give up on their malign, antisemitic fantasy of destroying the Jewish state.
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BBC Jerusalem bureau framing of the ‘Gaza hostage deal’ story
When will they realise that the aim of Hamas and the other Iranian proxies is not a Palestinian State but the end of the Jewish one. Everything and everyone can be sacrificed to that aim. It’s as plain as could be.