Chuck Stephens: The goalposts have moved

Key topics:Middle East peace shifts as Hamas defeated, Trump leads deradicalisation.Muslim states pivot to prosperity; Arab-Israeli cooperation rises.Left criticised for ideological inflexibility and ignoring new realities..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Chuck Stephens.The world and especially the media are so gridlocked in polarisation that they just don’t get it.The Left is still beating their favourite drums – Israel is just a Zionist project, a Western colony set up to solve Europe’s Jewish problem, the way Liberia was set up to give freed slaves a doorway back into Africa.The UN is without blemish, goes its way of thinking, so there has been a genocide during the past two years in Gaza and the phoenix of Hamas will rise from the ashes to fight another day. Thus they despise genuine efforts now underway to bring an end the hostilities and to find a new way forward.Ideologists are inflexible by nature, so they are still clinging to the fading hopes of a Two-state Solution. The truth is they cannot see the forest because they are focusing on the trees.Times have changed. Iran is a spent force and its eliminationist ideology is a goner. The Muslim world has pivoted to choose peace and prosperity over confrontation and terrorism, which is really grounded in Nihilism. The Abraham Accords have survived, and are being championed by the man from intrepid, Donald Trump.Not all Muslim states are Arab – there is a distinction. For example, Iran is Persian, not Arab. But the Muslim world from Indonesia and Pakistan to Egypt and Morocco has opted for a new path.The Left has not accepted that the Muslim and Arab states surrounding Israel do not want Hamas to survive. They want it to go the way of ISIS and Al Quaeda. Why? Because it moves the goalposts away from confrontation and elimination of the State of Israel, to constructive engagement..Read more:.Shedding light on Israel's decision to annex Gaza: Chuck Stephens.Can you imagine what the Middle East would look like without a functioning Democracy? What would the world look like? Israel has saved western civilization from the onslaught of Muslim intolerance.The fact is that the IDF was only weeks away from totally obliterating Hamas, when Donald Trump intervened. He called off Netanyahu and offered a face-saving peace for Hamas, based on demilitarisation and deradicalisation of the Gaza strip. These are the steps that were taken with the Germans after World War II, although in that war, the Nazis were not saved from military obliteration.The future of Gaza cannot include Hamas in any way, shape or form. The future of Israel cannot include an independent Palestinian state. They have to find one another and agree to become a Rainbow Nation. That is only going to happen in the context of security, peace and prosperity.For this to happen, we have to be honest and frank. Hamas has been defeated on the battlefield. Its reprieve is based on the release of the remaining hostages – its erstwhile collateral. But it ends there, and what emerges, as its tunnel network is destroyed and as a new and democratic governance emerges, can never include Hamas. It is going the way of ISIS and Al Queda.Bye-bye elimination ideology, hello jobs in the Levant’s riviera.The peace dividends in the USA and Europe will be significant. There will be a knock-on effect. Trump solved the run-away immigration problem and Europe has taken note. Trump is busy hunting down and deporting illegal aliens, especially those who are criminals. He is engaging in his own deradicalisation project in the “sanctuary cities”. Law and order are returning, just as peace is breaking out in the Middle East.Can Europe be saved? Trump is already challenging NATO to expel Spain for not paying its dues. Macron’s scrambled socialist coalition seems to be floundering. In Britain, the Reform Party is booming.The Left’s ideological inflexibility has degenerated into a kind of low-intensity warfare. Including hit-and-run incidents killing innocents, ICE detainees (by mistake) and even Charlie Kirk. The surge of pro-Palestinian rallies on university campus will diminish as reality sets in. Do you see anyone marching for ISIS or Al Queda?Of course there is a distinction between Hamas (defeated) and Palestine (perpetual), which goes all the way back to the Philistines of the Old Testament and the Peleshet sea invaders that Egypt’s pharaoh Ramses III thumped at the battle of the Nile Delta, as recorded in the inscriptions of his temple at Medinet Habu. He then resettled the Peleshet in what we now call the Gaza strip, which was still part of Egypt when Israel conquered it during the 6-day war in 1967..Read more:.Trump's Middle East triumph: Israel, Hamas reach hostage deal in Gaza breakthrough.The original Palestinians were Aegean (Minoan?) or European, not indigenous to the Middle East. They were intruders, possibly climate refugees. But of course they were later Arabized during the colonization of Palestine by the Arabs in the early centuries of Islam. Back when the Levant (a k a Israel) was a colonial project of the Arabs. It is the pot calling the kettle black for Arabs to complain about Europe or America colonizing the Levant. They did it themselves.In the previous Byzantine period, Caesarea Maritima was a great coastal city. A famous philosopher of note called Origen was born and raised there. He lived in a very cosmopolitan and peaceful place, where Palestinians, Jews, Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Syrians and Armenians all lived in a Rainbow Nation. It is back to the future with Donald Trump’s 20-point peace plan. It has moved the goalposts.

Chuck Stephens: The goalposts have moved

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