[Salon] Haaretz editorial: "Israel Must Grab the Lifeline Thrown by Trump and End the War."

[Chas Freeman <cwfresidence@gmail.com>]

https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/editorial/2025-05-13/ty-article-opinion/israel-must-grab-the-lifeline-thrown-by-trump-and-end-the-war/00000196-c614-df59-abde-e63c60cd0000

Israel Must Grab the Lifeline Thrown by Trump and End the War - Haaretz Editorial - Haaretz.com

Haaretz EditorialMay 13, 2025

U.S. President Donald Trump's latest moves in the Middle East should not be seen as a slap in the face to Israel, but as a lifeline – a final call for Israel to stop its planned Operation Gideon's Chariots in the Gaza Strip before those chariots set out on a road that will lead it to disaster, under the auspices of a failed leader who no longer looks either right or left, Benjamin Netanyahu.

After 584 days, abducted soldier Edan Alexander, an Israeli-American dual citizen, was freed on Monday from Hamas captivity. This happened solely thanks to Trump's intervention, and contrary to the position of the Netanyahu government, which has torpedoed agreements time after time. It blatantly violated the latest agreement with Hamas, and thereby showed itself willing to abandon the 59 hostages still in Gaza.

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Trump intends to end the war, bring all the hostages home, send humanitarian aid into Gaza and, down the road, promote a tectonic shift in the Middle East with a Saudi Arabia deal at the heart of it. Nobody can know whether he will achieve these goals. But any sane country led by a government that desires life – and by life, we mean human life, not the life of the governing coalition – would wish him success and do anything he asked it to enable progress in this direction.

But in today's Israel, the only hope the prime minister's circles expressed on Monday was that Hamas would prove unwilling to embark on negotiations, and thereby enable Israel to intensify the fighting and move forward to a full occupation of Gaza for an indefinite period of time that would also include expelling the population. Tell me what your hopes are, and I'll tell you who you are.

The moaning about how Trump is abandoning Israel is fundamentally ridiculous. The United States shouldn't let Israel do whatever it pleases at a time when it's led by a government whose only real concern is staying in power – one that doesn't care about the hostages, the soldiers, the people, their needs and their future. Trump's ostensible "sobering up" should inspire hope in anyone who understands that this war must end, and that the only chance Israel has left lies in strengthening its old alliances and forging new ones.

To Israel's shame, foreign governments have been more committed to freeing the Israeli hostages than its own government is. As a result, anyone who holds only Israeli citizenship rather than dual citizenship – those "immobile" people whom the right-wing government pretends to represent – has found himself at the end of the line.

Trump's moves have exposed the nakedness of Israel's government. Let's hope that even Netanyahu's supporters will understand the depth of his failure and settle scores with him. Until then, we should wish Trump success in his efforts to free all the hostages and to end the war.

The above article is Haaretz's lead editorial, as published in the Hebrew and English newspapers in Israel.