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[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]
On October 13, 2025, Israel erupted in collective relief and jubilation as the final 20 living Israeli hostages, seized by Hamas during the barbaric October 7, 2023 assault, crossed back into the homeland after over two grueling years of captivity. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hailed it as “a moral victory for the State of Israel.”
Tel Aviv’s Hostages Square, a vigil site, swelled with 65,000 tear-streaked faces glued to massive screens. Emotional footage captured heart-wrenching reunions: Omri Miran, 48, embraced by his two little daughters after over 730 days in darkness; twin brothers Gali and Ziv Berman wearing the Maccabi Tel Aviv jerseys they had asked for upon being released; and soldier Nimrod Cohen, 20, greeted by his rejoicing family. Medical teams were ready to begin tending to the survivors’ physical and psychological scars—malnutrition, infections, and tunnel-induced trauma.
This triumphant moment crowns the historic Trump Peace Accord, a 20-point plan unveiled by President Donald Trump last month, which orchestrated the end of the war in Gaza and is potentially redefining Middle East diplomacy. Brokered through tireless shuttle diplomacy in Egypt, Qatar, and Washington, D.C.—bolstered by Trump envoy Steve Witkoff and advisor Jared Kushner—the accord’s first phase mandates a phased ceasefire, Israeli troop withdrawals from most of Gaza, Hamas disarmament, and international aid influxes to rebuild the devastated enclave.
Trump, arriving in Israel to a thunderous standing ovation in the Knesset, declared the Holy Land “at peace.” Echoing his Abraham Accords legacy, this deal aims to avert regional escalation—sidestepping Iranian proxies—and paves the way for Gaza’s redevelopment, potentially drawing billions of dollars from Gulf allies. Speaking beside Netanyahu, Trump declared, “As far as I’m concerned, the war is over.”
The peace plan didn’t earn The Art of the Deal author a Nobel Peace Prize, but we all know that even if Trump had built a time machine and undid World War II and the Holocaust by traveling back to kill Hitler in 1939, the militantly Progressive Nobel judges would still deny him the honor. No loss, though – the Prize was long ago devalued anyway when it was awarded to Palestinian proto-terrorist Yassar Arafat, and its worthlessness was confirmed when it was given to Barack Obama for literally no reason at all.
But the euphoria over the deal in Israel and the rest of the civilized world is tempered with profound sorrow. Of the roughly 250 souls abducted in the 2023 bloodbath—including civilians from kibbutzim and the Nova music festival—168 eventually returned alive through prior ceasefires, rescues, and releases. At least 75 did not survive their brutal ordeal, whether executed, perishing from starvation, untreated wounds, or friendly fire. Families of the fallen mourned amid the cheers, their grief underscoring Hamas’ savage abuse of the hostages chained in tunnels, denied medicine, and psychologically as well as physically tortured.
Furthermore, in exchange for the 20 remaining living hostages, Israel consented to free nearly 2,000 Palestinians from its prisons: about 250 serving life sentences for terrorism convictions and roughly 1,700 administrative detainees held since the war’s outbreak. Buses ferried them to Ramallah amid jubilant Palestinian crowds.
As Israel celebrated, Trump jetted to an Egypt summit of world leaders for a signing ceremony regarding the first phase of the peace agreement. He declared,
Everybody’s happy about it like I’ve never seen before, actually. I’ve done other deals, and people don’t care as much. Big deals, I think they’re big deals. But this is something that’s taken off like a rocket ship, and it did from the beginning.
But a focus on big deals is short-sighted. Trump believes every world conflict can be solved by bringing people to the table and hammering out, or being pressured to accept, a compromise, for which he gets the credit. This can be effective for some conflicts but not where deeper passions like ideological fervor are at stake. Before the Knesset today, he declared confidently that “the forces of chaos, terror, and ruin that have plagued the region for decades” are now “totally defeated.” This is dishearteningly naïve. He cannot seem to grasp that what may be a peace plan for one side is simply a stalling and regrouping tactic for the other. Israel simply wants to live in peace, but her neighbors will never ultimately accept anything less than a “Palestine” that is freed “from the river to the sea” through the genocidal erasure of Israel and Jews.
How many of the nearly 2000 freed Palestinian prisoners will be exalted among their people, and the worldwide ummah, as soldiers of Allah, and resume their murderous Jew-hatred? How many future Yahya Sinwars are among them, plotting more “Al-Aqsa Flood” slaughters?
It is a blessing that the remaining Israeli hostages of Hamas are thankfully reunited with their families. Make no mistake, however – the war in Gaza may be over as far as President Trump is concerned, but it will never be over for Israel as long as the Jew-hating ideology that “plagued the region,” as he put it, continues to flourish.
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The return of the hostages is worthy of great celebration. The rest of the ‘deal’ is to be dreaded and mourned for all that love Israel. Trump’s rhetoric about thousands of years of hostility coming to an end, makes me wonder if he is naive, pompous, or delusional.
Or simply unaware of history – if there was Muslim/Jewish conflict in the Holy Land prior to 1917, it would have taken the form of the Jews being treated as dhimmis by their Ottoman overlords, and having no option on resisting such oppression. Most Palestinians are descended from 20th century migrants, but any ancestors who might have been there in Ottoman times would have been Ottoman subjects, just with more privileges than the Jews, due to being fellow Muslims.
1300 years of civilizational destruction and dominance as an over riding goal within a homicidal death cult created by Satan isn’t going away with the scratches on parchment. Europe is being undermined from within as a result of obtuse immigration policies. The Middle East may be in a pause but total victory over Islam is not yet within reach. Not even close. The world is still in great danger. God bless Trump for his efforts but the battle has just begun, of that we must have no doubt.
Monkeys can’r stop being monkeys. The sand monkeys will keep dying for their prophet pretender child molester.
Thus far, history has shown that whenever Israel gives of itself for peace all it receives in return is more rockets, more suicide bombings, more terror and more world condemnation for protecting itself from the murderous religion of peace. This is but another pause in the Islamist forever war against Israel, how long it lasts we shall see.
Trump’s statement “the forces of chaos, terror, and ruin that have plagued the region for decades” are now “totally defeated.” Is the most naive phrase uttered since Chamberlain’s peace of our time. Israel must begin immediately shifting to total self reliance. Self defense must be mandatory in every Hebrew School worldwide. The next 10/7 will be far worse because of Israel’s unwillingness to win largely because of the permission they need from America to defend themself.
Trump can be bombastic, but I can assure you Trump is not naive.
Self reliance? Now who’s being naive? Israel wouldn’t survive without the US. Israel receives 3 billion in aid from us, plus our sophisticated military equipment and intelligence. Israel is a country that has a population of 9 million people. The US is a population of 340 million people. Yet, you think Israel can go it alone? Israel is a country with scarce natural resources, while the US is rich with an abundance of natural resources.
There would be no Israel if it weren’t for the US.
“The next 10/7 will be far worse because of Israel’s unwillingness to win largely because of the permission they need from America to defend themself.”
Here’s a newsflash: when a country rely’s on the US for military equipment, billions in aid, intelligence, resources, etc, your damn right you need our permission. If Israel, or any country, doesn’t like it by all means go it alone, but that would be without the help of the US. That’s how it works, Mr. Naive.
It’s a raw deal.
It only encourages more terrorism and hostage taking.
Nothing else has changed.
Going on 7 hrs and my comment isn’t posted. Really?
That “peace deal” is indeed a “raw deal”. To explain it this way, there’s an old saying which is “It’s wise to have no dialogue with the Devil” that saying is based on the Bible’s story of Eve having conversion with Satan who was talking through a serpent . which ended in disaster.
Likewise, those negotiations for “peace a agreement “ with the jihadist chiefs of Hamas who are the sons of Satan will only end up treachery ,more Islamic terrorism disaster and death.
That so called “peace agreement” with those jihadist chiefs of the murderous jihad entity Hamas would agree for would be a hoax. Meaning nothing but a false and fake truce.
The reason why this is so is because such a “ceasefire” would really be agreed to in order to allow Hamas to restore its loses by using that for Iran to resupply it with deadly weapons provided to it by Iran.
Those jihadists would only keep the terms of a ceasefire only as long as it would site them and no longer .Then those Muslim terrorists of Hamas will then break the “truce” and then launch more jihad missile attacks murdering the peaceful civilians of the State of Israel.
Such false hopes for peace which are based on the foundation of lies are nothing new when it comes to Israel. For example, the Bible in Psalm 55:20, 21. Reads “Such men do violence to those at peace with them and break their promised word; their speech is smoother the butter but their thoughts are of war.” [N.E.B.]
With that, Hamas will not honor “peace deal agreement”. The Muslim terrorists of Hamas have no honor. The Muslim terrorists of Hamas will continue sneak into Israel from Gaza, and inflect murderous jihad attacks upon the Jewish people of Israel.
It will be up to their own to reign them in. Once the region gets a taste of real peace, many will not tolerate those trying to sabotage it.
That prisoner exchange is absurdly, it’s too lopsided the large number of Arab terrorists released compared to the number of Israeli’s peaceful Israeli citizens who Hamas had kidnapped October 7, 2023 was invasion is out of proportion. There is no balance; it’s unequal, in favor of the Muslim terrorists.
Furthermore, ridiculous and wrong that so many dangerous unrepentant Muslim terrorists will be freed, to engage is further engage in actions of murderous and destructive Islamic terrorism.