Trump’s Gaza deal is the ultimate humiliation for the West’s woke Left

Starmer rewarded Hamas terrorism, but the US president’s robustness is bringing peace to the Middle East

09 October 2025 Daily Telegraph 

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This Gaza ceasefire deal is a prodigious diplomatic achievement for Donald Trump. It is a win for Israel, which gets much more and has been forced to concede less than any of its critics thought possible. The surviving October 7 hostages are set to be released on Monday or Tuesday. If the next phases of Trump’s deal work out even in part, the art of Western diplomacy will have been revitalised, courtesy of Trump.

But the happy news is an awkward development for Leftist anti-Zionism, which finds itself on the wrong side of history. The Greta-loving, keffiyeh-wearing activists who denounce Israel as evil and defend Islamist terrorism in the same breath have never looked more out of touch.

The deal and release of the hostages is also an embarrassment for Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron and all of those who stated their unconditional, premature recognition of a Palestinian state, a move which exposed them as posturers out of their depth, only made the real negotiations more difficult and demonstrated the geopolitical irrelevance of the fading European powers, including Britain.

The return of the hostages is a reminder of this war’s origins. Hamas started this conflict when it committed the war crime of invading Israel, massacring civilians and taking others hostage. Their return is a vindication of Israel’s zero-tolerance attitude to terrorism, a stance that Western countries like to pay lip service to but are squeamish about in practice. Terrorism must never be allowed to triumph.

Trump’s ability to secure the release of the remaining Israeli hostages and broker a comprehensive ceasefire deal between two existential enemies is an achievement that cannot be denied even by his enemies. It proves the power of the president’s trademark “wrecking ball”, which treats diplomacy as a series of high-stakes commercial transactions. Trump’s ability to co-opt the support of many Arab and Muslim nations left Hamas with little option.

The president unilaterally declaring victory after Hamas submitted a response to his 20-point peace plan riddled with conditionalities and caveats was a stroke of genius. It is hard to understate what a personally instrumental role Trump has played in getting a deal, which would have likely eluded a more conventional American leader. His chances of securing the Nobel Peace Prize are now much higher, if not this year then next. If his peace deal is successful then it would mark a decisive shift from the conventions of multilateralism and soft persuasion towards transactional brinkmanship, and real(estate)politik.

Contrast this with the approach of Macron and Starmer. They simply rewarded terrorism. Trump’s robustness looks set to achieve peace.

There are big unresolved issues that could scupper hopes of lasting peace. While Israel will not sign a final deal unless Hamas disarms, the latter has managed to delay an agreement on this until the second phase of talks. It may in the end refuse to play ball.

Still, none of this should take away from the scale of the breakthrough.This ought to be a humbling moment for “anti-Zionist” Leftists – proponents of the omnicause – who have been opportunistically drawn to the tragic war. The Israel-Palestine conflict is to progressives what Vietnam was for the hippies – a convenient rack on which to hang their dizzying panoply of causes and hang-ups.

Still there is something particularly vacuous about today’s generation of activists. In this era when political views tend to be more an expression of identity than an articulation of a coherent position or principled belief, logic has become irrelevant. It’s how you end up with such absurdities as Queers for Palestine. Palestine has become a fashionable cause, with coffee-shop socialists lovingly pairing their keffiyeh scarves with their Vivienne Westwood Greenpeace T-shirts. The Palestine flag has come to serve the same function as a Birkin handbag or a Grind coffee cup – asserting one’s bourgeois status and affiliation to a tribe

In the era of “fast slacktivism”, causes, like clothes, are disposable. First, in wake of the financial crash, it was the bankers and “the evil corporations”. Then when dreaming of a unifying socialist world vision “beyond neoliberalism” became too intellectually taxing the hard Left moved onto portending the climate apocalypse.

Then they immersed themselves in the whirling carnival of minority causes, showing “solidarity” with BLM and railing against “systemic racism”. After they tired of listening to slavery podcasts and sharing viral TikTok videos of “racist Karens” they moved onto slapping gender neutral stickers on women’s bathrooms and tweeting bile at JK Rowling.

It is hard to see what activists have achieved, apart from fuelling anti-Semitism in Britain and the West. Weekend marches have become hotbeds for anti-Jewish hatred, with people making genocidal “from the river to the sea” chants and spreading conspiracy theories. The boundary between legitimate scrutiny of the Israeli leadership and open hostility towards Jewish people has collapsed.

The aggression and simple-minded worldview of radical pro-Palestinians has proved self-defeating. The fact that Hamas is genocidal does not absolve Israel of all criticism. As the late Israeli novelist Amos Oz pointed out, what distinguishes the 77-year Israel-Palestine conflict – and makes it so difficult to resolve – is not that it’s a battle between right and wrong, but rather right and right: an ancient, deep and tragic Jewish right and an ancient, deep and tragic Palestinian right. But radical Leftists have fomented such a confrontational – and brain-dead – atmosphere in the public square that it is impossible to have a balanced discussion.

At last, we can dare to hope that a wretched two-year war that has claimed tens of thousands of lives could be coming to a close. The Middle East deserves peace and the families of the hostages deserve an end to their ordeal. Let’s hope radical-Left opportunists will soon have to find another cause.