Not Trump’s War to End: Israel Will Finish What Hamas Started, On Its Own Terms

Few modern presidents have made foreign policy so theatrical or so transactional as the 47th U.S. President Donald Trump. From flirtations with autocrats to outlandish territorial gambits, his diplomacy has often resembled a business pitch than any strategic doctrine. In this series, we track the shadow of Trumpism abroad - from Beijing to the Baltics, Gaza to Greenland as Trump, in his second coming, is leaving behind not just disruption, but a trail of broken alliances, bruised institutions and a deepening mistrust of America’s word.

PART - 5

American ‘frustration’ with Gaza means little when Israel is fighting for survival, given that the latter cares little for applause from the White House or global liberals.

As the war in Gaza drags on, pressure is mounting on Israel from all directions after strikes by the latter have killed more than 80 persons, including women and children.

According to a recent Axios report, US President Donald Trump is “frustrated” with the seemingly never-ending strife, urging Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to “wrap it up.” Trump reportedly pressed Jerusalem to reopen aid crossings after images of starving Palestinian children reached the White House Situation Room.

Yet the moral calculus in Gaza has always been far more complicated than enraged headlines have suggested.

For Israel, the ongoing war against Hamas is one of necessity as it is the genocidal Islamist group that had first begun this round of bloodshed with its barbaric October 7, 2023 massacre that left 1,200 Israelis dead and 251 kidnapped. To conflate Hamas’s human shield tactics with Israel’s military self-defence, while undeniably ruthless, is misleading.

Trump’s growing exasperation stems from his inability to close the chapter decisively and diplomatically, especially after his boast in February this year that the US would acquire Gaza to develop it into “Riviera of the East.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has clearly said that he was “ready to end the war” but only “under clear conditions that will ensure the safety of Israel”.

The US’ Western allies like France, the UK and Canada, meanwhile have issued impotent condemnations of Israel’s continued blockade, warning of joint action if aid does not flow to the beleaguered Palestinians.

In fact, Netanyahu, in a rare admission, did recently state that Israel must prevent famine in Gaza “for practical and diplomatic reasons,” while acknowledging that even Israel’s closest allies “won’t tolerate images of mass starvation.”

That said, the broader Israeli strategy remains unchanged: decapitate Hamas, free the hostages and demilitarize the Strip.

For decades, critics within Israel like IlanPappé have accused their own country of ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ‘settler colonialism’ in a fit of righteous fury. However, their works and stances show scant regard for nuance or historical context. In contrast, historians like Howard Morley Sachar, in his monumental ‘A History of Israel: From the Rise of Zionism to Our Time’ (1976) tell the story of a Jewish state born not out of conquest, but of repeated existential struggle. Sachar, no apologist for war, chronicled how Israel’s wars were never of conquest, but of survival. That remains true today. Unlike Pappé’s polemical ‘The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine,’ Sachar’s works reflect a deeper, fairer reading of Jewish history and the constant threat to its sovereignty.

Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in 2005. It dismantled settlements and left infrastructure behind. Hamas turned that withdrawal into a launching pad for terror. More than 20,000 rockets have since been fired into Israeli towns while every ceasefire has been exploited by Hamas, who have met every Israeli concession met with blood.

And yet, on university campuses across the West (and their intellectual counterparts in India), a moral inversion has taken hold. Hamas is lionized as a resistance movement. Israel, cast as a villain. Political commentator and pro-Israel journalist Douglas Murray was right to call Hamas a “death cult” that glorifies martyrdom, hides weapons in schools and broadcasts triumph when its own civilians are killed by Israeli strikes. This is not resistance but jihadist performance art, staged for Western cameras and streamed on social media.

Indeed, as 58 hostages remain in Gaza (at least 35 presumed dead of these) Israel is not just defending itself militarily, but morally. It is demanding what any democracy ideally should: that its citizens be returned, its enemies be disarmed and its borders be permanently safe.

It is very easy for images of starving and bombed children in Gaza to spark Western media outrage and galvanize Hollywood celebrities and Ivy League varsity students to dust off their keffiyehs for another round of sanctimonious virtue-signalling. Hamas and its front outfits have managed to do this rather successfully in the propaganda war after October 7.

The harsher truth that remains ignored is that Hamas – the theocratic, jihadist death cult that would be the first to consign its ‘left liberal’ supporters to the flames it has lit – has turned the Gaza Strip into both a launchpad for terror and a graveyard for its own people.

In the hysterical calls for ceasefires and accusations of ethnic cleansing by Israel, there has always been a deafening silence about the brutal tactics of Hamas, that cynically uses hospitals, schools and civilian homes as human shields, then cries foul when the IDF strikes back with a vengeance.

Yet, in cities from Los Angeles to London to Lucknow, ‘progressive intellectuals’ and Hollywood liberals have taken up Hamas’s cause as though it were the Spanish Civil War all over again. In India, Opposition parties who have nurtured minorities as vote-banks, Bollywood personalities and left-leaning academics have echoed slogans that might as well have been drafted in Doha or Tehran.

Rarely do they mention Hamas’ summary executions of dissenters in Gaza, or the fact that it holds both Palestinians and Israelis hostage to its fanatical ideology.

Critics accuse Israel of laying siege. But what nation wouldn’t blockade a territory ruled by an enemy that pledges to exterminate it? Hamas’ strategy has always been to provoke Israel into retaliation, ensuring civilian suffering that can then be paraded before the cameras. It is a cynical calculus where Israel is damned if it does and damned if it doesn’t.

It is time for the world to grow up. Wars are not Instagram filters. Israel is not a comic-book villain. Hamas is not a resistance movement but a nihilistic terrorist regime. Peace will never come through hashtags, but through the hard work of defeating jihadist absolutism and standing by the only democracy in the Middle East that fights it.

Israel has never based its security decisions on the whims or sentiments of U.S. presidents, even those deemed ‘friendly nor does it fight wars - or end them - on cue from Washington.

The Jewish state has long charted its own course when national security was at stake, often in defiance of the very superpower that has armed and funded it.

When Menachem Begin ordered the 1981 airstrike on Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor, the Reagan administration was furious. But Begin stood firm, remarking that no American would ever decide the security of Israel. History vindicated him. The Osirak strike likely saved the region from a nuclear-armed Saddam Hussein.

Yitzhak Shamir, another unapologetic hawk, refused to halt settlement expansion in the West Bank during the George H.W. Bush years, despite immense pressure. He knew that the so-called ‘peace process’ being pushed by Washington was long on theory and short on accountability. He preferred reality to illusion, especially when that illusion involved trusting the PLO.

Even Ariel Sharon, who launched Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, did so not because of foreign pressure but as a cold calculation about demographics and security. That gamble, once hailed as a step toward peace, has today become a cautionary tale. In return for land, Israel received rocket fire.

So, when Donald Trump calls on Jerusalem to “wrap it up,” he ought to realize that Israel’s military doctrine is guided by one core imperative: survival.

If Trump wants the war in Gaza to end, he will have to do more to pressure Hamas rather than indulge in wishful Riviera fantasies.