Donald Trump, on the disarmament of Hamas:

They’re going to disarm because they said they were going to disarm. If they don’t disarm, we will disarm them.

Asked how he will do that, Trump responded:

I don’t have to explain that to you. And I spoke to Hamas, and they said, “Yes, sir, we’re going to disarm.”

Hamas never said it was going to disarm, and Donald Trump never spoke to them. He doesn’t speak Arabic. They wouldn’t have spoken in English. The whole story is bullshit, including the supposed existence of a “peace plan.” A bunch of bullet points randomly thrown together–without impartial adjudication or enforcement mechanisms, without detailed contingency plans, without even the simplest logistical problems addressed–is not a peace plan.  It’s a blank check for mass murder and indefinite military occupation. The widespread adulation over it is a form of mass psychosis, the collective abdication of reason by people who, by their insulation from all consequences, can afford the lapse.

Contrary to our dear leader, we are in fact owed an explanation how he intends to disarm Hamas. If Israel couldn’t do it after a two year killing spree, how will the United States? The United States currently has 200 troops in Gaza. Can 200 troops do the job? How? How about 2,000? Or 20,000? Will it take two weeks to do the job? Two months? Two years? How is it that in the orgy of celebration over this “peace,” so few have bothered to ask: peace at what price, paid by whom? What labyrinth are we being led into? And how did the refusal to answer become evidence of heroism?

It’s terrifying to watch people, both Left and Right, Israeli and American, worship at the throne of blatant, willful insanity, unable to distinguish literal psychosis from the power “to get things done.” The right-wing is a lost cause, but liberal-centrists, both Israeli and American, make an even more abject spectacle. These are people so in love with the exercise of power that any exercise of it gets them aroused, no matter what the circumstances, what the object, and what the form.

A reality check: A couple of bodies have crossed a couple of armistice lines. That’s it. That’s not nothing, but it’s not much. It’s not peace in our time. It’s not the end of the war. It’s just a replay of the expulsion of the PLO from Beirut in 1982, except that this time no one trusts anyone, and no one has disarmed.

People often quote Tacitus in this connection: “They made a wasteland, and called it a peace.” This time, the question is less why they called it that than why anyone believed them. It’s a sobering thought that so many have.