Europe Has Never Looked More Pathetic

With Trump’s announcement of a peace plan backed by both Israel and Arab leaders, Europe, with its alternative toothless proposal to reward terror, has never looked more pathetic or weaker on the global stage, says Jake Wallis Simons in the Telegraph. Here’s an excerpt.

The European plan was impotent from the start. It began with recognising a state of Palestine without preconditions, a measure that was announced with the notable absence of the Israeli delegation in the General Assembly.

Those familiar with the corridors of international diplomacy tell me that even the Arab states were hardly enthusiastic, knowing it was dead on arrival.

In the Middle East, your public stance, your private stance and your true feelings are often three different affairs. The Macron plan may have won superficial support from Arab leaders, but as he gazed down the length of his nose, the French Jupiter failed to spot the way they were shaking their heads as they smiled.

In omitting Israel and Hamas, this was a proposal with the audacity of an empire yet none of the power to back it up. It focused purely on showering the corrupt, authoritarian and anti-Semitic Palestinian Authority with goodies, followed by polite requests for reform. …

Of course, any plan emanating from Western leaders who have proven unable to distinguish between a democracy battling for survival and a jihadi regime using human sacrifice for propaganda would be rejected out of hand by Israel.

The fact that it was supposed to be enforced by the United Nations – which, with its ‘famine’ and ‘genocide’ hoaxes, has turned itself into a branch of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign – raised nothing but mockery in Jerusalem.

These are people who have spent the last two years trying to enable an Israeli defeat. And these are people who have spent the last two years suffering the deaths of their sons on the front lines of the battle against jihadism. From her perch at the UN, Yvette Cooper warned Israel “not to retaliate”. How can these people even expect to be taken seriously?

Trump, by contrast, cut an altogether more convincing figure (things have come to a pretty pass when such sentences as those are required).

His proposal was not an example of neocolonial preening, designed for domestic audiences rather than the real world. For a start, both Arab leaders and the Israeli Prime Minister were on board, which catapulted it instantly into the realms of sanity.

Secondly, it placed the blame where the blame was due. If Hamas refused to accept the plan or abide by its terms, the Israeli army had Trump’s full backing to finish what the jiahdis had started. “This can be done the easy way or it can be done the hard way, but it will be done,” Benjamin Netanyahu vowed.

Unlike the cretinous European proposals, which relegated the release of the hostages to wishful thinking, it placed their plight in its rightful place at the centre. All of them – no ifs, no buts – must be released within 72 hours if a ceasefire was to ensue. Or else.

In addition, it made no commitment to the Palestinian Authority as the future governing body of the Strip. With good reason. The PA is run by a man who is currently enjoying the 21st year of his supposedly four-year term in office, and who has made apologies for Hitler as recently as 2023.

Worth reading in full.

Of course, we’re yet to hear if Hamas will accept the plan, and then it remains to be seen if both sides will go on to implement it. But even for Trump to get to this point shows that he and his administration have a seriousness in handling complex world affairs that evades the simple-minded Europeans, who increasingly more resemble student activists railing against the ‘fascists’ they see everywhere than statesmen in charge of actual countries.