The Deal: On/Off, On/Off, On…

Last night at this time the deal was off. Hamas reneged, insisting that the deal could not happen without them pre-approving their dream list of serial killers and rapists to be released from Israeli prisons in an exchange for the remaining hostages in Gaza. Imagine that Kfir Bibas, now two-years-old, is considered by the Western media to be part of a “prisoner exchange”. What crime did Kfir Bibas commit when he was a nine-month-old kidnapped baby on October 7? Anyway, we went to bed with no deal last night. Let me remind you why. Hamas is a terrorist organization and you don’t do deals with terrorists. Their business is warfare, torture and abuse.

Never mind that this was the case, last night parades of celebrations burst out all over Gaza, with children in terrorist garb, bearing arms, dancing maniacally over their perceived victory in a sea of rubble while Western leftist women “cried tears of joy” for them. What a sickness. The children of Palestine are being exploited not just by Jihadists who are training them from the youngest of ages to be future terrorists, but by the virtue-signalling champagne socialists of Instagram.

They claimed to have survived a genocide in victory, while chanting for more violence, and presumably another retaliative “genocide”. It’s a head-scratcher, alright. I don’t think any of the liberated prisoners from Bergen Belsen felt that their freedom was a mark of defeat of those who murdered six million of their family and friends, nor did they dance in the streets after they were released.

Not pictured below – everyone cold, starving and dehydrated in Gaza last night:

Here’s a guy who got a perm and makeup done before he did his album cover shoot in the concetration camp that is Gaza, complete with Adidas shoes… I don’t recall images like this from 1945. Do you?

For the last time; it was never about a Free Palestine, but a world free of Jews. Anyway, all this predictable and sickening nonsense aside from the world’s leading professional victims (aka THE PALESTINIANS), now the deal is actually back on, as of this morning in Israel.

Now we all joke about how terrible Israel is at PR, but to me one of the biggest - if not the biggest - PR mistakes of the entire war was the slogan for the hostages: Bring Them Home. The slogan was created by the families in a move to put the onus on Netanyahu, which in effect made life a hell of a lot harder for everyone because all that really did was legitimize the terrorists holding their families hostage as serious negotiators for any and all mediation efforts to free them. It should never have been “Bring Them Home”. It should have been Give Them Back Or Else. And together with Israel, Biden’s Administration should have put pressure on every Middle East actor connected to Hamas in the manner Trump has done before he even enters office to force their hands. It seems Biden was too personally conflicted to manipulate America’s leverage in the Middle East.

So Phase One of the deal will begin this Sunday, and on Monday the first three hostages could be released. Prepare yourselves. We have no idea what kind of rollercoaster we will experience in these comings days. To witness body bags come out to some families, and living loved ones whose trauma from the last 470 days will be hard to mask to others. The last we saw of a hostage was 20-year-old Liri Albag two weeks ago, with a dog collar around her neck. What state will the young women be in? Let’s not speculate further for now, because it is unhelpful.

How far can we be pushed as a people in these coming days and weeks? The displays from Gazans, and the narratives of Western media will be provocative to say the least. Five minutes ago, they hysterically cried lies of genocide, weaponising myths to garner a suicidal empathy from the weak sheep of Western societies. How will this not fill us with an uncontrollable rage? To witness the return of the hostages in whatever states they are in; how will that not compound this anger, even if the joy of their families provides moments of ecstasy? Many of us have PTSD. I certainly do after a year and a half of never-ending advocacy, fear, sorrow, pain and isolation. To remain a beacon of light is the demand upon my shoulders, as my body begs that some relief will come soon. With every new twist and turn, I can feel my bones on the cusp of a crack, my eyes so desperate for rest, my skin dying for someone else’s touch. For over 15 months, there have been nothing but claps of thunder in my heart and deathly lightning above my head. Without any sense of justice for what we have endured, I don’t know how we… how I will ever be the same in the world again. How do you keep your softness when you’ve had to become as hard as a rock to withstand the tyranny? Where is the brink to which we will all be pushed? How are we not past it yet?

The war is not ending here, and it cannot end here. Whether phases two and three of this deal ever go through is doubtful, in my opinion. Israel will minimize our presence in Gaza but there is no total retreat. There is not and cannot be any version of this war ending with Hamas returning to rule Gaza and rebuild for more repeats of the same horrors in years to come. There must be a total de-Nazification of Gaza so that children don’t pick up Kalashnikovs instead of an Abacus at the age of four.

As for Trump, he must adhere to his promise of “peace through strength”, ensure that Iran never gains nuclear capacity, and threaten/isolate the living shit out of the enemies of the West: Qatar, Turkey and Iran. The pressure is on President Trump to be the leader of the free world he claims to be. Not for Israel, but for the whole of the West, which is failing under the lacklustre steerage of failed leaders. See Australia tonight: not October 7 in Southern Israel, but Melbourne.

Did I ever want to bank on having to put my faith in a man like Donald Trump? Never. But I never thought I’d have to live through the last fifteen months either.

For all of our sakes, there can be no version of this ending where the world doesn’t understand that Israel succeeded in securing its promise to be the home of the Jewish people; safe and prosperous, and able to deal with its most bloodthirsty enemies. It’s not an ego thing, it’s a survival thing.