So let’s get this straight. For months and months, legions of pro-Palestinian demonstrators have filled Western capitals with megaphones and moral outrage, demanding, shrieking, ululating for one thing above all else: a ceasefire.
The sacred mantra, the magic cure-all that was meant to banish every horror of war… “Ceasefire now!” they bellowed.
And yet, lo and behold, when the deal finally lands on the table, a ceasefire of the kind they’ve been demanding (and then some), the very same campaigners recoil like cats at the sight of a cucumber. Suddenly, they’re not so keen. Suddenly, the placards are less about peace and more about pique.
Isn’t that interesting? Isn’t that revealing?
Because what’s on offer here, thanks to a President Trump-brokered arrangement (the words alone enough to make Guardian columnists choke on their oat milk lattes), is not some vague kumbaya fantasy but a real, tangible peace package: end of the war, Hamas out of power, Gaza rebuilt with Arab money, and the Palestinian people finally able to live without the jackboot of an Islamist death cult on their necks.
If you actually cared about Palestinians, you’d be dancing in the streets at the prospect. But if what you really cared about all along was hating Israel (and yes, hating Trump too), then of course this deal is intolerable. Better the “genocide” narrative than an inconvenient peace.
And here’s the thing: it’s not just Israel and Washington saying so. Much of the Muslim world, yes, it seems even Pakistan, that bastion of anti-Israel orthodoxy, has come around. Why? Because the penny has dropped. Because Hamas’s mask has slipped. Because the strike on Qatar rattled the gilded palaces and made the Gulf elites realise that clinging to Hamas is a liability, not an asset. Money talks louder than slogans.
Meanwhile, the antisemites in the West, so puffed up with their righteousness, find themselves isolated, their chants sounding hollower by the day.
And what of our so-called Western leaders? Starmer, Macron, Albanese… (the great moral pygmies of our age), they have exposed themselves as creatures of mush and cowardice, clinging to fashionable outrage while the tectonic plates of geopolitics shift under their feet. History is not kind to weak, fence-sitters, and the fence is exactly where these men are roosting, trembling like sparrows in a gale.
So yes: it does make you think. The peace plan is the test, and the mask is slipping. Those who shouted loudest for a ceasefire now reveal what they really wanted was not peace but perpetual conflict, not justice but grievance, not freedom for Palestinians but the fantasy of a world without Israel.
And that, I’m afraid, is the one ceasefire they will never call for.
By Jack Lions
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