So Donald Trump won’t be getting the Nobel Peace Prize after all. And when I say “all”, I mean achieving, yet again, the absolutely unthinkable on the world stage. The ceasefire and peace plan between Israel and the murderous anti-Semites that constitute Hamas is Trump’s greatest feat in the Middle East. His first were the Abraham Accords of his first term, which normalised relations between the world’s only Jewish state and several Arab nations. It went against the conventional wisdom that relations between Arabs and Israelis would never be relaxed until Palestinian statehood was realised.
The Donald, along with his son-in-law Jared Kushner, dared to think differently and pulled it off despite having also recognised Jerusalem as the Israeli capital and placing the US embassy in the contested city. Now the pair have somehow managed to broker a deal that will see rapacious anti-Semites free Jewish hostages from their grip and, as long as both parties stick to it, secure an end to a bloody war that began with the biggest single-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.
This is monumentally impressive on a scale that rightly deserves to be called historic. Here we have a President known for his crass outbursts, bizarre tanning regimen and uncouth eating habits who’s managed something more spectacular that any of his polished predecessors in a region that has become an infamous hotbed of violence that America’s supposedly best and brightest have never been able to fix.
If this continues to go well, Donald Trump will go down in history not for being the fascist some of the Left fantasise him to be, but as a colossal peacemaker.
Do you know who won’t? President Barack Obama. The 44th commander in chief who publicly ridiculed the idea of Trump even becoming president as the Donald sat in the very same room seething.
And yet Obama was handed the Nobel Peace Prize. Not for achieving any peace, you understand, but for “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples”. He basically got an A for effort.
It’ll no doubt grate on Trump that he’s been denied the prize, be it because he pulled this off too late in the panel’s decision-making process or because they, like so many others, harbour an obsessive hatred of the man.
In this denial of the Nobel Peace Prize, we see something like what’s been happening with pro-Palestinian activists. They too claim to value peace, yet are conspicuously quiet the closer it gets. Could it be that their peace-loving credentials aren’t quite as nailed-on as we were led to believe and that their vitriolic calls to globalise the intifada tell us more about them than calls for a ceasefire?
They should have been dancing in the streets of London last night, celebrating the fact that the genocide they falsely claim to be happening has been halted. And yet their protests continue. There is absolutely no recognition of something that should give us all hope.
Trump shouldn’t want the approval of people who fail to recognise this achievement. He should console himself with the fact that the world has watched this deal happen. It’s impossible to look away. It won’t be forgotten if it truly does end hostilities between Israel and Gaza.
That is a far greater prize and legacy than any bauble. Especially one handed out so frivolously.