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What Trump’s Peace Plan Gets Wrong About Hamas
Hamas fighters on Feb. 22, 2025. Photo: Majdi Fathi via Reuters Connect
Despite his successful effort to release the hostages, Donald Trump’s plan for peace in the Middle East is destined to fail. Among other things, the American peace plan fails to understand basic Hamas ideas of death and time. Without a correct understanding, Israel will be left hanging in the wind, directionless, desperately fighting an interminable and unwinnable war.
Truth is exculpatory. Contrary to Trump’s hopes, there is no credible outlook for genuine peace in the region. Though Palestinian violence has once again been turned on itself, including the extra-judicial Hamas executions of “collaborators,” longer-term consequences will imperil Israel. Soon, the newly-released Hamas criminals will prepare not just for “ordinary” terror attacks, but also for calibrated escalations to chemical, biological or nuclear (radiological) weapons.
There is more. Any future war between Israel and its jihadi adversaries would have little or nothing to do with Palestinian sovereignty or self-determination. To wit, the October 7 massacre of Israeli civilians was detached from any rational plan for a Palestinian state. This mega-crime’s only plausible motive was debasement and lascivious satisfaction.
While veiled from ordinary assessments of politicians, pundits and strategists, the most authentically animating motives for jihadi terror stem from primal needs to overcome personal mortality. It follows, ipso facto, that visible struggles between the Jewish State and Hamas et. al. are generally reflections of much deeper issues.
Rejecting the syntax and generalities of Trump’s “Board of Peace,” Israeli planners need to inquire: What are actual jihadi goals? If Hamas and kindred terror groups seek “power over death,” how should Israel respond? This query is urgent because the jihadist path to immortality is expressly linked to “terror-sacrifice” and “martyrdom.”
For Israel, the potentially existential threat stems from an adversary that regards violence against Jews and the Jewish State as “sacred.” Today, in the bewildering cacophony of a demonstrably false peace, Jerusalem should distinguish Middle Eastern reality from shadows of reality. To do this capably, three basic concepts will need to be examined in tandem: death, time, and immortality.
What can these three interrelated concepts teach Israeli planners about the force-multiplying perils of Trump’s agreement? To answer thoughtfully, refined thinkers should undertake disciplined inquiries at the individual level, i.e., the level of microcosm. Though an illogical assurance, the promise of “power over death” offers jihadists the greatest imaginable reward for faith-based destructiveness. Significantly, this reward pertains to Islamist adversaries both as direct beneficiaries and reciprocal benefactors.
But first there must be a prior order of business. A two-part question will need to be raised and answered:
How can any one individual, terror group, or state gain “power over death,” and what can such presumed gain have to do with Israel’s fate?
On occasion, as Israelis ought already to have learned, the search for “power over death” demands an explosive end to the jihadist’s life on earth. Although revered by Hamas as “martyrs,” virtually all jihadi leaders strive more-or-less desperately to avoid personal death. As recent facts will affirm, these openly-unheroic commanders are usually “willing” to endure Israeli military retaliations while residing in Qatari five-star hotels. For such senior commanders, it would be difficult to contest, life amid secular affluence remains preferable to a martyr’s existence in asphyxiating tunnels.
All jihadists welcome the “sacrifice” of “unbelievers.” On October 7, 2023, Hamas and kindred perpetrators raped children as well as adults, males as well as females. They burned alive more than a dozen “enemies of the faith.” To support these “battles,” and later engagements with IDF forces, absent Hamas leaders sent large sums of money to “heroic martyr’” families. Often, as a correlative benefit duly sanctified by Islamic clerics, these families were gifted “collective immortality.”
On such matters, history deserves pride of place. In his Lecture on Politics (1896), German historian Heinrich von Treitschke observed: “Individual man sees in his own country the realization of his earthly immortality.” Earlier, German philosopher Georg Friedrich Hegel opined in Philosophy of Right (1820) that the state represents “the march of God in the world.” Such widely-believed views link loyalty to the state with the promise of “power over death.” In world politics, this is always a monumental promise, but one recognizable only in the eternal shadows of death and time. In the issue at hand, Hegelian and von Treitschke linkages apply equally to an aspiring state (i.e., “Palestine”).
Though it is an incomparable promise, personal immortality still represents an unseemly and disfiguring goal. This judgment owes both to the promise’s calming expression of scientific nonsense (“An immortal person is a contradiction in terms,” reminds philosopher Emmanuel Levinas) and to the fact that any search for life everlasting can foster war, terrorism, and genocide. Looking beyond Trump “remedies,” Israel’s task should be not to remove adversarial hopes for personal and collective immortality, but to “de-link” this search from variously barbarous behaviors.
In Reason and Anti-Reason in our Time (1952), Karl Jaspers comments: “There is something inside all of us that yearns not for reason but for mystery – not for penetrating clear thought but for the whisperings of the irrational….” The most seductive of these irrational whisperings are ones that offer to confer some otherwise unattainable “power over death.” It is somewhere within the twisted criteria of such a “selection” (an appropriate term made infamous at Auschwitz) that rapidly expanding acts of terror-violence can be spawned. This is because any jihadi- promised power over death requires the “sacrifice” of specific “others.”
To deal satisfactorily with both immediate and long-term security threats, Israeli policy-makers will have to understand the most elemental sources of war, terror, and genocide. These sources, which generally evade analytic scrutiny, are rooted in complex intersections of death, time, and immortality. In the end, ipso facto, it is at the conceptual or theoretical level that Israeli scholars and policy-makers must fashion pragmatic operational responses to jihadist violence.
Donald Trump will not save Israel. The Hamas/jihadi terror threat has not been eliminated or reduced. In significant measure, this continuing vulnerability is explicable by enemy ideas of time. Ultimately, it is to “sacred time” rather than “profane time” that jihadi criminals will turn for confirming chronologies of life-everlasting.
Prof. Louis René Beres was educated at Princeton (Ph.D., 1971) and is the author of many books and scholarly articles dealing with international law, nuclear strategy, nuclear war, and terrorism. In Israel, Prof. Beres was Chair of Project Daniel (PM Sharon). His 12th and latest book is Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016; 2nd ed., 2018).
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Minnesota man charged with ISIS-inspired plot on Jewish-owned Mall of America
(JTA) — The FBI accused an 18-year-old man of buying an AK-47 assault rifle with plans to commit a mass shooting in support of ISIS at the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, the largest indoor shopping mall in North America.
Sheikhdoon Abdullahi Mohamud, of Richfield, Minnesota, was charged on Wednesday with one count of knowingly receiving a firearm and ammunition in order to commit a federal crime of terrorism, according to a federal complaint filed on Wednesday.
Mohamud’s attorney did not respond to JTA’s request for comment.
Mohamud wanted to attack the Mall of America because he believed its owners to be Jewish, the FBI said in a statement. He planned to kill between 30 and 60 people, according to messages he exchanged with a confidential source, according to the complaint.
Mall of America is owned and operated by Triple Five Group, controlled by the Ghermezian family, a Canadian family of Iranian Jewish origin.
Messages sent in September 2026 included a video in which Mohamud pledged allegiance to ISIS, the complaint said. He planned his attack for Oct. 24 because he expected a crowd at the Hmong Arts Celebration scheduled for that day.
The complaint said an undercover FBI agent sold an AK-47 rendered inoperable, four 30-round magazines and 200 rounds of ammunition to Mohamud for $600 on Oct. 6. During the sale, Mohamud confirmed his plans to commit a mass shooting. Mohamud was arrested shortly after the sale.
The complaint said Mohamud wanted to commit an attack similar to the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in which 49 victims were killed; the Bondi Beach mass-shooting in Sydney last December, during which 15 victims were killed during a Hanukkah celebration; and a New Orleans truck-ramming attack that killed 14 victims in New Orleans on Jan. 1, 2025.
The investigation into Mohamud began around December 2024, when he messaged the confidential source on multiple social media platforms, according to the complaint, detailing his desire to travel to Somalia to join a group that the U.S. has designated a foreign terrorist organization. If travel was not possible due to financial constraints, he said would move forward with an attack in Minnesota.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Minnesota man charged with ISIS-inspired plot on Jewish-owned Mall of America appeared first on The Forward.
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Is Israel or Iran a bigger threat to the U.S.? Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed won’t say
(JTA) — Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed was asked multiple times by a debate moderator on Thursday which country he considers a bigger threat to the U.S.: Iran or Israel.
Each time, he parried.
“That’s a ridiculous hypothetical because here’s what’s happening right now: Our ostensible ally in Israel has lobbied us to go to war with Iran,” said El-Sayed, Michigan’s Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate.
“I don’t consider an ally a country that takes us to wars we don’t need to fight, and I don’t want to be fighting wars we don’t need to fight,” he added, describing both as “kind of dangerous.” Another attempt yielded a similar response, with El-Sayed denouncing “one at risk of attacking us, one getting us into wars we have no business fighting.”
El-Sayed, a former county health official, was responding to a question repeatedly posed by WOOD TV8 political reporter Rick Albin, in a debate against his Republican opponent, former U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers. The two candidates hurled insults at each other during the hourlong discussion, often returning to issues related to Israel and the Middle East.
After making criticism of Israel a top issue in his primary campaign, El-Sayed eked out a victory against U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens in that early August race. Although he has earned the support of many democratic socialists, including Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, El-Sayed has stated that he is not a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.
Rogers, on the other hand, has the official endorsement of President Donald Trump. However, the candidate has been distancing himself from the president, including by criticizing the trade war with Canada.
Results of a CBS News poll published earlier this week showed El-Sayed leading Rogers, by 45.6% to 41.4%, with a 3.8% margin of error. A Quantus Insights poll released on Wednesday, meanwhile, gave El-Sayed a slightly narrower lead, with 47.6% to Rogers’s 46.5%, and a 7.8% margin of error.
While El-Sayed has been meeting with Jewish voters and leaders, he has not budged on certain issues of concern to many Jewish voters. For example, he has indicated only a willingness to recognize Israel’s identity as a Jewish nation-state if Israelis and Palestinians jointly agree to it..
Liberal Michigan rabbis last month signed a petition from the Zioness Action Fund, a progressive Zionist group, calling upon the Democratic Party to agree to “nonnegotiable” principles related to Jewish safety and Israel. A separate cohort of Michigan Jewish leaders urged community members to reject El-Sayed entirely.
Rogers and his representatives in August indicated that they would like AIPAC to refrain from spending directly on him in the general election, according to media reports. Asked about this at the Thursday debate, he said he’d welcome “anybody that wants to help my campaign stop a guy who can’t condemn terrorism in our own country.”
El-Sayed condemned the March attack on Temple Israel in West Bloomfield Township, but added that “hurt people hurt people,” which critics interpreted as justifying the attacker’s actions. He later apologized for those remarks.
Rogers has repeatedly slammed his opponent for taking funds from donors affiliated with the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Unity & Justice Fund super PAC and other groups and individuals.
El-Sayed, on the other hand, accused Rogers on Thursday of accepting corporate PAC money and labeled him the “guy who’s going to rubber stamp everything Donald Trump tells him to rubber stamp.”
The two candidates criticized each other’s policies and interrupted each other so often that Albin, the moderator, needed to step in.
“We’ve got dozens of questions we want to get to,” Albin said. “You can’t litigate all of these with 14 different rebuttals.”
Even prior to a pause for ads, Albin announced that the station is going “to take a break from this pleasant conversation.” When they returned, he declared that “in 30 years of doing debates, I’ve never seen it continue during the commercial, but it did.”
The candidates continued to clash over Iran, with El-Sayed accusing the U.S. government of teaching “the Iranian regime that they had a choke [hold] on the Strait of Hormuz.”
“That’s the kind of policy you’re going to get from a guy who wants to be a sock puppet for the Trump administration,” El-Sayed added.
Rogers, meanwhile, claimed that the U.S. had set back Iran’s nuclear program by at least 20 years, adding that “this would be the time to wrap it up.”
As for Israel, Rogers said he supports “the right to exist for the Jewish state, and the right to defend itself in a very difficult neighborhood.” The only way Israel could lose his support, Rogers stated, would be if the country talked about using nuclear weapons.
Israel is widely assessed to possess an arsenal of approximately 90 nuclear warheads, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. The country is not a party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Israel has never acknowledged possessing nuclear weapons.
Albin then turned to El-Sayed, noting the politician’s opposition to direct U.S. military funding for Israel. He asked, however, whether that position could change “if Israel were attacked tomorrow by Iran or another state actor.”
“I want our tax dollars spent here,” El-Sayed responded. “Israel has pushed us to go to war in Iran, and of course, my colleague, who thinks there’s a war for everything, went right along with it.”
When Albin pushed again for a yes or no answer, El-Sayed replied that he doesn’t want the U.S. “buying weapons for other countries.”
Toward the end of the discussion related to the Middle East, Rogers recognized the third anniversary of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel. He blasted his opponent for failing “to even acknowledge the pain, the terrorism, the rape, the murders.”
To this accusation, El-Sayed responded, “I’ve condemned that. I didn’t turn it into theater like you did.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Is Israel or Iran a bigger threat to the U.S.? Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed won’t say appeared first on The Forward.
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Ossoff says IDF violated law of armed conflict in Gaza, but genocide is an issue for international courts
(JTA) — Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff and Republican challenger Rep. Mike Collins clashed over Israel’s conduct in Gaza, U.S. weapons sales to Israel and the war in Iran during Thursday’s debate in Georgia’s closely watched Senate race.
The race could help determine control of the Senate, with implications for U.S. policy toward Israel.
The incumbent Ossoff, who is Jewish, has long supported Israel’s security, but over the last two years he has criticized its conduct in the Gaza war and voted to block some U.S. arms sales to the country.
A day after the third anniversary of the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack, Ossoff was asked whether Israel had committed genocide in Gaza, whether he was concerned about growing anti-Israel sentiment within the Democratic Party and whether he would support a proposed $2.8 billion U.S. weapons package for Israel.
“The question of genocide is a question of whether a government has the specific intent to destroy a national or ethnic group, and that is a question for the International Criminal Court,” Ossoff responded. “There is no doubt in my mind that Israeli forces prosecuting the war in Gaza violated the law of armed conflict and international humanitarian law, and I care deeply about the security of the Israeli people, among whom are members of my family.
“I also care about innocent Palestinian life,” Ossoff continued, “and make no apology for my votes.”
Collins accused Ossoff of having aligned himself with anti-Israel figures including Twitch streamer Hasan Piker and Michigan U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed.
“Imagine being a U.S. senator, and out there recruiting, endorsing, and supporting these people that want to see Israel wiped off the map,” Collins said. “They would rather be for Iran than for Israel — now that’s who Jon Ossoff is supporting.”
Piker had previously called Ossoff a possible contender for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination. He subsequently disavowed Ossoff after the senator condemned antisemitic comments, Jewish Insider reported in August.
During the hourlong debate, Ossoff repeatedly condemned the U.S. war in Iran while highlighting Collins’ support for it. At least three times Ossoff called the war in Iran a “disaster” or “disastrous,” and he blamed the war for rising gas prices in the state of Georgia.
Collins, on the other hand, said he supported the war as necessary to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. “The president had every right to go in there and make sure that Iran does not get a nuclear weapon,” Collins said. “The IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency], they had already sounded the bells, the alarms that Iran was close to getting a nuclear weapon. And the thing is, Iran doesn’t only want to decimate and kill Israel, they want us as well.”
The evening was not without its personal attacks. Collins described Ossoff as “a radical” and a “trust-fund kid who has never had a job in his life,” while Ossoff repeatedly spotlighted the alleged ties between Collins and white nationalists. A recent report alleged that Collins’ former aides were involved with antisemitic and white nationalist rhetoric.
Ossoff leads Collins by about nine percentage points in FiftyPlusOne’s polling average as of Oct. 9.
The candidates are scheduled for a second debate hosted by the Atlanta Press Club on Oct. 13.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Ossoff says IDF violated law of armed conflict in Gaza, but genocide is an issue for international courts appeared first on The Forward.
