Matthew Continetti (freebeacon.com)
"Enough with the ceasefires. Put the plans back in the briefcase, Mr. Secretary. Let Israel win."
"Secretary of State Antony Blinken's eighth trip to the Middle East since the terrorist atrocities of October 7, 2023, has gone about as well as the previous seven. That is to say: Not well at all.
"Blinken went to the region to pressure Israel and Hamas into accepting President Biden's latest ceasefire proposal for the war in Gaza. Biden released the plan on May 31. It would proceed in three stages.
"First, there would be a six-week truce during which Hamas would release some hostages in exchange for terrorists held in Israel, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) would withdraw from Gaza's population centers, and Americans would supply more humanitarian aid for Gaza's Palestinians. The second phase would involve negotiations over full IDF withdrawal from Gaza and the release of the remaining captives. In the third phase, the "international community" would rebuild Gaza, a non-Hamas government would come to power, Saudi Arabia and Israel would make peace, and the oceans would turn into pink lemonade.
"I'm kidding about the lemonade.
"Still, there is something absurd about the offer in general. It rests on the assumption that Hamas is a legitimate negotiating partner with an interest in ending the war. Such an assumption is worse than false. It is insane. And Blinken knows it.
"Hamas isn't a state worthy of recognition. It's a terrorist entity governing a population through fear, terror, and zealotry. Which is why Americans deal not with Hamas but with Hamas's intermediaries in Egypt and Qatar. We still have some scruples, after all. And if a terror organization does not deserve our direct contact, then it does not deserve our rescue.
"Nor is Hamas interested in bringing the Gaza war to a close. As the secretary of state was engaged in another round of shuffle diplomacy, desultorily flying from capital to capital with nothing to show for it, the Wall Street Journal published a blockbuster story confirming what some of us already knew: Hamas's psychopathic terror leader, Yahya Sinwar, follows Vladimir Lenin's dictum of "the worse, the better." The greater the number of Palestinian casualties, the greater the devastation to Gaza's infrastructure, the further isolated the Jewish state becomes, and the more anti-Semitism intensifies around the globe." . . .
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