Dakota Beacon

If Donald Trump wants as his legacy the title of The Great Negotiator, he is missing the boat with his demands that Israel act stupidly in order to bring a temporary hiatus in the Hamas war.  It is the first principle of any negotiation that you come out with the value you seek.  In Trump’s case, all he seems to want out of this is that everyone over there just shut up, and if this means to placate the bullies, it is a pretty flimsy end.

In essence, this war was begun when Hamas invaded a peaceful Israel, brutally murdering 1,200 innocent civilians - 40 of them Americans - and taking 251 civilian hostages.  Thus commenced a war in which Israel has captured, for their part, a large number of jihadi terrorists.  This conflict has been raging ever since.    Biden’s administration basically betrayed Israel by telling Israel just what targets they were allowed to hit, for example.  One might well have hoped that Trump’s policies and team would be an improvement.  

However, Trump is starting very badly in forcing the hand of Netanyahu in demanding the release of some 2,000 terrorists in exchange for 33 civilians held by Hamas.  Any “negotiator” who thinks this is a good deal must be playing that 4D chess game we keep hearing about.  The people held by Israel are criminals, terrorists - it is estimated that once released they will likely kill hundreds  more Israelis.  The innocent Israeli and other hostages pose no threat to anyone.  To any normal person, this is obviously not a “fair” deal, nor is it in any way likely to result in an end to the war there.  Clearly, this is a massive victory for Hamas.  It represents a huge loss to Israel.  Trump is perhaps way out of his depth in plotting this kind of policy.  

It has long been a tenet of policy making in terms of terrorism and war that you simply don’t negotiate over hostages.  All this does is empower the ones who take innocent people hostage.  It does nothing to send a message to cease and desist in this practice.  It only gives a powerful green light to hostage-taking, and especially harmless civilians.  If this is what we want to encourage, Trump is leading the way here.  

Maybe at some point Americans, too, will get sick of Trump’s bullying tactics for his own ends.  Supposedly Hegseth is supportive of Israel.  It will be interesting to see how the Defense Department will interact with Trump’s bombastic and pointless behavior.  We should not envy Hegseth - or for that matter, Marco Rubio, in his role as Secretary of State.  Just what are they supposed to do when the Boss is ordering Netanyahu around?  Has he made any meaningful demands of Hamas?  Other than to turn over a handful of harmless victims of their raids?  

Americans might be somewhat surprised by the strange behavior of Trump.  He is probably not senile, which somewhat excused Biden.  Trump is just crashing around making a lot of enemies and causing a tremendous amount of damage.  We will, before too long, see the result of Trump’s current position on Israel.  

A means of bringing a better end result would be the execution of Hamas terrorists, one at a time, to be stopped only with the release of innocent hostages of Hamas.  Where has common sense gone?  And so many thought they had voted for it.