Israel was sold victory, and got surrender.
U.S. President Donald Trump, with the help of Hamas' backers, is turning the Jewish state's surrender into his "Peace Prize."
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This is a guest essay by Yonatan Daon-Stern, a student of philosophy and art history.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
Last week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stood at the White House, next to U.S. President Donald Trump, and declared:
“I support your plan to end the war in Gaza, which achieves our war aims. It will bring back to Israel all our hostages, dismantle Hamas’s military capabilities, end its political rule, and ensure that Gaza never again poses a threat to Israel.”
He told us this plan would “achieve all our war objectives without any further bloodshed.”
This was supposed to be the turning point. The victory speech. Netanyahu told us this was the path to victory. Trump crowned it Netanyahu’s “crowning achievement.”
And then came the switch.
Trump didn’t present this plan as cautious diplomacy. He dressed it up as if it were biblical prophecy fulfilled. His own words:
“This is a big, big day, a beautiful day, potentially one of the great days ever in civilization… after 2,000, 3,000 years, whatever it is.”
This isn’t leadership; it’s narcissistic lunacy. To call a temporary ceasefire and hostage deal “the greatest day in thousands of years” is insane. It shows this was never about Israel’s victory; it was about Trump’s own myth-making.
And the myth-making isn’t for free. Trump wants the Nobel Peace Prize. That is what this is all about: personal glory. He is prepared to sacrifice Israel itself for his prize, his “eternal peace,” and his legacy.
By the way, this is the same “Peace Prize” that was once seriously proposed for Hitler himself and has already been awarded to a rogues’ gallery of dishonourable men, including Yasser Arafat, for the Oslo Accords that began the very chain of appeasement and illusion that led us straight to October 7th.
Perhaps this dishonourable prize is indeed fitting for such a dishonourable man.
At the United Nations just days earlier, Netanyahu had promised to “finish the job.” He told the world Hamas would be destroyed. The Israel Defense Forces even broadcast his speech into Gaza by loudspeaker, telling the people they had a last chance to rid themselves of Hamas.
But standing in Washington, he gave it all away. He endorsed a plan cooked not just in the White House, but in Doha, Ankara, Islamabad, and Cairo. Trump bragged about it: Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, Pakistan, Indonesia, Egypt, every one of them backing the plan.
Why would these states, which cheer on Palestinian terror and many of which actively support it, suddenly support a “peace plan” that dismantles Hamas? This is not because it dismantles Hamas, but rather because it dismantles Israel, freezes its momentum, and places Israel’s fate in the Arabs’ hands.
Within days, Trump declared the oxymoron of our time: “Hamas is ready for peace.” He demanded that Israel stop bombing. What Netanyahu sold as victory turned into restraint, delay, and international supervision.
This reminds me of the earlier Trump demand during the Israel-Iran truce: He explicitly told Israel, “do not drop those bombs,” after Iran had already launched missiles that struck Be’er Sheva and killed Israeli civilians. Jets were turned back. As retaliation planes soared, Trump forced Israel’s hand, making us stand down. It is baffling that Netanyahu did not see that coming.
This isn’t victory. This is being played. This is being set up.
And Hamas? They accepted what suited them. They promised hostages “according to the exchange formula … with the necessary field conditions.” They praised Trump’s leadership. They smiled at Qatar and Turkey. Hamas spokesman Musa Abu Marzouk said openly on Al Jazeera: “We will hand over the weapons to the Palestinian state, whoever rules Gaza will hold the weapons.” In other words: Gaza will not be disarmed. Hamas’ guns remain in Gaza until a Palestinian state exists, which means never on Israel’s terms.
Osama Hamdan spelt it out further: “Attempts to remove Hamas from the political scene will not succeed.” “We will not accept foreign forces in Gaza.” “When a Palestinian state is established, the weapons will be at its disposal.”
He even invoked the hostages as leverage, saying corpses are buried in areas where Israeli forces are present, implying that Israeli withdrawals are required just so Hamas can access the bodies. This is not demilitarisation. This is not disarmament. This is a declaration that Hamas remains in power, with weapons intact, until Israel itself is destroyed.
And somehow, we accepted this. Netanyahu told us Hamas would be disarmed under this plan, when Hamas itself told the world it would not. In other words, they will not give up their guns. Not to Trump, not to Netanyahu, not even to Tony Blair. They will only give up their weapons when Israel itself is destroyed and replaced by “Palestine.” And somehow, we accepted this. Netanyahu told us Hamas would be disarmed under this plan, when Hamas itself told the world it would not.
What, then, has been achieved? Not the war aims Netanyahu promised. Not the destruction of Hamas. Not the disarmament of Gaza. What has been achieved is the victory of the hostage movement. This is what the world is celebrating: that the hostages will be freed. And let me say clearly, no war in history has ever been won because hostages were freed. Not one.
We had the hostages on October 6th. Victory is not bringing them back. Victory is making sure the ideology that kidnaps Jews goes extinct. Victory is destroying the idea that kidnapping pays.
But what have we done instead? We have rewarded it. We have proven that kidnapping Israelis works: It brings ceasefires and prestige, and it even brings them back their murderers. We have taken the deepest humiliation of October 7th and enshrined it as the definition of “peace.”
This is the result of Israel making the return of the hostages the most important issue. This is not a victory. It is defeat, surrender, sacrifice.
Where is the justice for all those who died needlessly on October 7th? What about the soldiers who gave their lives and who have spent almost two years now fighting? What about the Israelis who put their lives, their bodies, their livelihoods, and their economic futures at risk to defend their homeland?
Think of every parent who buried a child after October 7th. Think of the soldiers who marched into tunnels, the ones who never came home, the ones who came home mangled and broken. Are their deaths being paid for with the cheap currency of a photo op, a “hostage deal,” and the promise of someone else’s peace prize? This isn’t just impractical. It is profoundly immoral. It is a betrayal of every life spent defending this country.
We have been down this rabbit hole before, the Oslo Accords and the illusions of “recognition” used as moral cover, the appeasement dressed as diplomacy. Each step emboldened the enemy; each concession normalised the abnormal. Each time we surrendered moral clarity for the promise of normalisation, the price rose. We rewarded terror with legitimacy, and now the process that began decades ago has delivered us to this carnage.
The only way out is to stop the loop of suicide. We must stop rewarding the kidnapping of our children. We must stop pretending that normalisation with regimes that bankroll or excuse terror is a fair trade for our survival. We must stop sacrificing our boys so that others can write themselves into history books and collect prizes. Our first allegiance must be to our people, our dead, our soldiers, our children. We must stand for justice first, not spectacles. We must demand accountability for every life lost, not deals that let the perpetrators go home with their guns and their prestige.
This is one of the most important reasons Israel was founded: to be a refuge, to defend a people who could not otherwise survive. We seem to have forgotten that. We are paying the price now, in blood and dignity. If we do not reclaim justice as our policy, there will be nothing left of Zionism but a museum exhibit and a burnt blue and white flag.
This is the result of all these delegations to Qatar and all the “mediations” that have kept our enemies in business. This is the result of all those “Surrender Now” protests every week, the emotional spectacles, and the vice-signalling. This is the result of surrendering the moral high ground to emotionalists who’d rather spill out their feelings on camera than use their brains. This is the result of this nation’s emotional state. We end up sacrificing tomorrow for the present; we choose optics over outcomes.
Wars are not won with exchange deals. They are won with the enemy’s unconditional surrender. Don’t forget it. If they are setting the terms and conditions, we are not the winners. Anyone who tries to sell this as a victory is a liar.
We must challenge this with all our power. We must talk to ministers, to Knesset members, to anyone who will listen. We must go on the streets if we must. We must use the internet, write, call, and organise. Show your voice. If we do not act now, maybe we will never be able to in the future. Fight with words, with votes, with presence, with everything legally possible.
This is relevant for the entire world. The response from the Muslim Brotherhood makes the global consequence explicit. They celebrate this as a model and a school for future action. In their message, translated below, they say:
“Hamas has mastered the art of military combat and the art of international political combat. … This is a qualitative leap for Hamas and a new school of struggle that will be studied by future generations. We are with the resistance. … They were right when they fired the first shot.”
This is not a fringe reaction. This is instruction and propaganda. It shows that our enemies see this not as a setback but as a template: combine terror, kidnappings, and relentless lobbying until the world rewrites the rules for you. They will teach this to recruits, to movements, to confused allies and to a sympathetic media.
If our deal becomes their curriculum, then the consequences are horrific and immediate: more attacks, more kidnappings, and more global celebration of our humiliation. This is not an unintended side effect; it is the foreseeable reaction of a movement that reads victory differently than we do. They do not see the return of hostages as a cost; they see it as proof that the method works.
This deal effectively sanctions the kidnapping of every Jew all over the world!
Tragically, Israel is a nation on the brink of suicide.
It has become a nation that begs its enemies for surrender — a nation that, by definition, cannot win. It is a nation whose leaders broadcast targets in advance and tell its enemies where to go to avoid being hurt. It is a nation that cannot even name its own enemy. It is a nation that confuses defeat with victory, self-sacrifice with morality. It is a nation so morally inverted that it feeds its own enemy while starving its own people of the justice they deserve; it calls itself “the most moral army in the world,” the “virtue” of sacrificing its heroic soldiers for the appeasement of the BBC.
It is a nation whose leader surrenders its independence to the whims of foreign powers.
And worst of all, it is a nation whose people cheer as this happens, mistaking submission for salvation. This is not merely a mistake. This is a path to suicide. And the time bomb, from the moment this deal is inked, will begin ticking until the next October 7th. I don’t know how many will die, whether I will survive this, whether you will survive this, or how many people will be taken hostage.
This is fundamentally the responsibility of our prime minister, whose leadership has failed to prevent this from happening. Look at what is going on around the world: the massacre at a synagogue in Manchester just a few days ago and the celebratory protests that followed in England. Jews everywhere are in greater danger than at any time since World War II. This is not an accident. This global rot is connected to the erosion of our moral clarity.
The Palestinians got a state. They got international recognition. All over the world, people support them and cheer for them. And we, we sign our own death warrant. That is what is happening now, not just in Gaza but globally.
This is where we have come; this is how far we have fallen.
They get their murderers back from our prisons. They keep their weapons. They keep their ideology. As Abu Marzouk said plainly: “Whoever rules Gaza will hold the weapons.”
And what do we get? We get back our own people, half alive, severely traumatised, while they get everything. We gain nothing. We reward terror. We prove to the world that October 7th works.
It is truly beyond belief. And yet here we are.
We are being set up. We are baited by promises and myth-making. We are accepting a framework that turns justice into theatre and hands the initiative to the very people who attacked us. This is not a mistake. It is a choice, a choice made by leadership that values optics and prizes over the survival of our people.
If you want to change this, do not walk away. Do not whisper in the comments and go home. Do something. Talk to your friends, your family, and the Knesset members. Take to the street, write, broadcast, and organise. If not now, when? If not us, who?
Before it’s too late (it’s not), fight. Fight for whatever is left of Zionism. Fight for victory defined on our terms, not on the altar of someone else’s prize.
If you will it, it is no dream.
Israel seems to like the deal:
https://www.jns.org/tel-aviv-stocks-soar-to-new-highs-on-optimism-over-gaza-plan/
I say, give it chance to work. If the hostages are not released, Trump has said the war is back on. If the hostages are released, and Hamas pulls a fast one, the war is back on.
Once the hostages are released, Hamas has no leverage left.
Let this play out.
By the way if Trump wanted a Nobel Peace Prize he would never have sent B-2 Bombers to wipe out Iran's nuclear program. He would not have told the US Navy to blow up the Venezuelan drug boats. That Iran bombing may have rightly won many friends in Israel as it should, but not with the Norwegian Nobel Peace Prize voters.
I don’t agree at all. Trump and Netanyahu have both said that the deal is off if Hamas does not disarm. Let’s get our hostages back and see what Hamas does. If they hem and haw and play for more time, Israel will turn Gaza into glass and kill every last Hamas terrorist, no matter the civilian cost.