Commentary
The truce of joy and rage
This is the colonialists’ truce. It is a truce we welcome with joy because it saves lives, but also with anger, because we are well aware it could have come much sooner.
It is a strange truce. In suspension between the release of hostages and a partial Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, the ceasefire has not yet truly begun, and already they are calling it ‘peace.’ But to please Trump, people will say anything. At first glance, after this genocide, the ancient words of Tacitus still ring true: “they make a desert and call it peace.”
Because a desert is what is left. After 70,000 dead, the Gaza Strip is completely destroyed, without homes, water, food, schools, or hospitals, with thousands of Palestinians in makeshift tents, starving and still without recognized rights. Because this is the Palestinian people today: reduced by this agreement to ghostly extras in their own story, a people whom no one thinks to consult, not now and not in any foreseeable future.
This is, as we already knew, the colonialists’ truce. It was imposed by Trump and could have come much earlier, sparing thousands of lives and preventing immense destruction. It is a truce we welcome with joy because it saves lives, but also with anger, because we are well aware it could have come much sooner. It could have come over a year ago, for instance, with the Biden plan that was scuttled by Netanyahu, who feeds on war to stay in power. This is why we cannot speak of peace: even the most novice observer of the Middle East would be wary of a deal that leaves behind such vast human and political wreckage.
This is an agreement that involves the main actors in the Sunni world but excludes the entire Shiite universe – from Iran to Lebanon to Yemen – which for decades has been the soul and the financier of the “Axis of Resistance.” Some may be pleased by this, but it suggests that the exterminator Netanyahu, with his ally Trump, may be planning a new attack on Iran. The U.S. recently demanded that Tehran get rid of its missiles with a range of over 500 kilometers, a clear sign that the Israeli-American war in June left much of the Islamic Republic’s arsenal intact. And on the horizon for Washington and Tel Aviv, there is always the goal of regime change. This was surely discussed in a recent phone call between Putin, Iran’s ally, and Netanyahu.
As for Hamas, which had to yield to pressure from its sponsors such as Turkey and Qatar, it shoulders the blame for the October 7 massacre and the historic defeat of the Axis of Resistance. But it can claim that it secured the release of political prisoners and, above all, got an opportunity for its remaining leadership to save their own skins while they wait to see who will truly be released from Israel’s prisons. The name of the charismatic Marwan Barghouti is, of course, on everyone’s lips, even if he remains behind bars for now.
The Palestinian leaders, now facing an exile far from Palestine, will try to play the role that for so many years belonged to the PLO, when people would wait in line at night to meet Yasser Arafat at his headquarters in Tunis. In some ways, we are starting all over again, but this time on the ruins of a gutted Gaza and a West Bank torn to shreds by Israel and its settlers.
But the game is afoot once more in Israel as well. As Tel Aviv’s government deliberated on the deal, the Israeli public’s questions about its strategy in Gaza, the post-war plan, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s great share of responsibility for the deaths of hostages and the failures of October 7 grew more insistent by the hour. Netanyahu, who is still wanted on an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court, has so far avoided the courts and commissions of inquiry. But it seems quite likely that early elections will be on the horizon if his messianic, far-right coalition partners, who oppose the deal, abandon his government.
As for Trump, the aspiring Nobel Peace Prize candidate and godfather of the Abraham Accords, he is already on a plane that will take him to the Israeli Knesset, where he will surely celebrate himself and his court of real estate developers as the great winner of the agreement forged in Egypt.
Let’s be clear, however. This deal is not the result of a compromise between the warring parties, Israel and Hamas. It is, above all, the result of the U.S.’s will, supported by regional mediators. The genocide in Gaza had clearly outlived its usefulness to the president’s plans.
One thing is certain: Palestinian resistance will continue, even if its civil society must be reborn from the destruction and from Israel’s bloody, pervasive repression. And the mobilization in Europe must also continue, especially here in Italy, where the government cannot wait to empty the streets and take credit for a deal to which it contributed nothing but the buying and selling of weapons, all while refusing to recognize the Palestinian state, acting as Netanyahu’s hand puppet, and insulting the volunteers of the humanitarian flotillas. So much for “sovereignism.”
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/una-tregua-di-gioia-e-di-rabbia on 2025-10-10