Know your enemy: Trump must wise up, fast, to inhumane Hamas and ruthless Iran
No, Mr. President, Gaza’s genocidal terrorists don’t wink at their hostages or show any ‘sign of love,’ and Iran’s nuclear ambitions can’t be ‘easily’ solved in talks led by an overextended non-expert
David Horovitz is the founding editor of The Times of Israel. He is the author of "Still Life with Bombers" (2004) and "A Little Too Close to God" (2000), and co-author of "Shalom Friend: The Life and Legacy of Yitzhak Rabin" (1996). He previously edited The Jerusalem Post (2004-2011) and The Jerusalem Report (1998-2004).
This Editor’s Note was sent out earlier Wednesday in ToI’s weekly update email to members of the Times of Israel Community. To receive these Editor’s Notes as they’re released, join the ToI Community here.
One of the less-noticed but very telling moments in US President Donald Trump’s Oval Office press conference with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week came when the president was asked two questions in quick succession — first about the familiar subject of how exactly he was going to get the hostages out of Gaza, and then about why he thought his just-revealed initiation of direct talks with Iran would yield a better nuclear deal than the 2015 agreement he inherited, denounced and abandoned in his first term.
He initially gave a fairly brief and unremarkable answer to the hostages’ question, and then offered an even briefer response to the question about Iran, the day’s hot subject — saying only that his planned new deal would be “different and maybe a lot stronger.” But then, unprompted, he returned to the hostages issue, and began musing at length about what the freed hostages with whom he has met have told him about the conditions in which they were held.
What the president was clearly doing, if you watch the tape or read the transcript, was trying to process, in public, the horror stories he had been told about Hamas — stories that he knew were true but found unthinkable, unfathomable.
“I had people right in this office, this beautiful Oval Office, they came in, ten people, hostages, you know that,” he began. “And I said to them, So how was it? And the stories they told me, as an example: I said to them, Was there any sign of love? … Did the Hamas show any signs of, like, help or liking you? Did they wink at you? Did they give you a piece of bread extra? Did they give you a meal on the side? Like you think of doing, like what happened in Germany, happened elsewhere — people would try and help people that were in unbelievable distress.”
Trump kept on going, overtly internalizing the inhumanity of Hamas, repeating himself: “I said, Did they ever wink at you, like, You’ll be okay. You’re going to be okay. ‘No, they didn’t do that. They’d slap us.’ The hatred is unbelievable… You know, they lived in a pipe. Not really a tunnel. It was a pipe. And they always thought they were suffocating, they were going to suffocate… We hear tunnels, bad, but pipes are worse. And the stories I heard were incredible. But I just said, Was there any sign of potential love or affection? And there were none whatsoever. It was amazing to me. There was nothing like, ‘Here take this,’ just a little extra meal or something. They lived like hell…. These are people that have been really, really horribly treated. I’ve never seen anything like it, actually. I was very surprised to hear the answer.”
In a way, it was refreshing to watch the leader of the world’s only superpower, Israel’s vital, existential ally, attempting to better understand the barbaric, cynical and pernicious enemy. An enemy that invaded sovereign Israel on October 7, 2023 — from the territory it completely controlled and from which Israel had completely withdrawn — to slaughter 1,200 people and abduct 252 because they were Jewish or connected to the Jewish people.
For people and nations whose very existence is not continually threatened by those who do not sanctify life, and with the Nazis’ industrialized mass-murder long-since receded into impersonal history, truly understanding Hamas’s barbaric, genocidal mindset does, indeed, require a fundamental reminder or reevaluation of man’s capacity for evil.
But given the US president’s power and influence, it was also highly disturbing to watch him still struggling to make sense of the enemy, or rather one of the enemies, that we are up against, and of the nature of the threat they pose to Israel, to America and humanity.
Trump came into office admirably promising to end wars rather than start them. But that can’t be done, and won’t be done, unless or until he grasps the scale of the challenge.
Where Hamas is concerned, the president’s publicly expressed bafflement at Hamas’s behavior, his struggle to understand its motivations and actions and what he and we are up against, has also been mirrored in his airy talk of evacuating Gaza’s “wonderful” people while somehow separating them from Hamas, and in the words and deeds of the two officials he has charged with trying to solve the hostage crisis.
First came Adam Boehler, despatched to hold direct talks with Hamas leaders, and reporting back on his strategy of seeking to “identify with the human elements of those people” and his conviction that a terror government that subverted every life-affirming interest of the Gazans upon whom it has brought ruin will ultimately agree to put down its weapons and slink away.
And then followed Steve Witkoff, vouchsafing three weeks ago that Hamas is “not ideologically intractable” and that he has assured the president of this expert conclusion, before partially sobering up soon after and acknowledging that Hamas might just have “duped” him into thinking it was accepting his latest hostage-ceasefire proposal.
The avuncular gentlemen of Tehran
Immensely exacerbating the concern that the president and at least some of his most trusted officials simply don’t get the ideology, motivation and genocidal ambitions of Hamas, of Hezbollah and of their state sponsor, is the handling, now, of Trump’s outreach to the ayatollahs, with the ubiquitous Mr. Witkoff again at the helm.
The president blithely asserted on Monday, two days after Witkoff held a first round of talks with the Iranians, that, “We’ve got a problem with Iran. I’ll solve that problem. It’s almost an easy one.”
“It’s really simple,” Trump went on to declare: “They can’t have a nuclear weapon.”
But it’s not “really simple.” This regime in Iran not only “can’t have a nuclear weapon.” It also cannot have the means to attain one. Ever.
Witkoff, untenably cramming the talks with Iran into his calendar while also still overseeing Gaza negotiations and the small matter of the Russia-Ukraine war, and hitherto unfamiliar with the specifics of Iran’s decades-old rogue nuclear program, does not appear to recognize this, or even to recognize who and what he’s dealing with.
Indeed, the jack-of-all-trades negotiator felt sufficiently up to speed as to indicate that the deal he was working toward with the avuncular gentlemen of Tehran would cap Iran’s uranium enrichment to levels required for civilian use and set out verification procedures to ensure the ayatollahs were both sticking to that cap and were not sneakily attempting to build a nuclear arsenal. Job done. Problem solved. On to the next global crisis.
His first interaction with the Iranians, Witkoff enthused to Fox on Monday, “was positive, constructive, compelling.” And the next round of talks, he confidently predicted, would focus on “verification on the enrichment program and then ultimately verification on weaponization.”
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei soberly pronounced on Tuesday that the order of the day was neither exaggerated optimism nor extreme pessimism, while doubtless laughing into his beard at the arrogant amateurism of those Americans.
It should not require saying that even a deal that dismantles Iran’s nuclear facilities, sets out iron-clad verification procedures, and prescribes clear measures to punish any violation, is a high-risk venture, given the regime’s history of patient, persistent progress toward a nuclear weapons arsenal and the fact that it today has all the knowledge to break out to the bomb at a moment of its choosing. But the kind of deal Witkoff was describing, which would not even dismantle Iran’s known facilities, must have been beyond the ayatollahs’ most bullish expectations.
By Tuesday, presumably after some frenzied, not to say hysterical, exchanges on the hotlines from Jerusalem, Witkoff was in full reversal mode, stating in a tweet that in “any final arrangement… Iran must stop and eliminate its nuclear enrichment and weaponization program.” (My emphasis.)
It is worth stressing that even the resort to force that Trump has promised should the talks fail is no guaranteed panacea. Iran has constructed its program, and continued to entrench it, with the goal of rendering it impregnable to attack.
Ultimately, the regime in Tehran cannot be indulged. It needs to go, notably including for the good of the Iranian people.
Not so simple after all.
Empathy, patience, horror
Last Wednesday, two days after he had dropped his Iran talks bombshell and mused about Hamas’s unwinking inhumanity, Trump hosted three released hostages — Aviva Siegel, Keith Siegel and Iair Horn — at a “President’s Dinner” of the National Republican Congressional Committee.
More than an hour into his speech, he invited the three to the microphone to address the audience. When his turn came, Iair Horn became overcome with emotion — his voice breaking when he spoke of “my little brother Eitan,” still held hostage in Gaza — and then stood speechless at the microphone for long seconds, trying to collect himself.
Trump waited at his side, patient and supportive, and gave him a little squeeze on the shoulder when he was done.
The president then returned to his Oval Office theme, telling this fresh audience about the Hamas inhumanity he has been processing. “The conditions were so horrible,” he said. “This is a terrible thing that is going on with Hamas. Terrible. The hatred is so incredible. It’s unbelievable. And the way they were made to live,” he said, gesturing to the Siegels and Horn — “was not even understandable, I think, by anybody in this audience.”
The hatred is indeed terrible, incredible, hard to understand. But it is all too real. As Trump is gradually appreciating, Hamas doesn’t wink. And the ruthless ayatollahs of Iran will wipe out Israel, and come for the Great Satan too, if we let them.
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles,” the Chinese philosopher-general Sun Tzu is said to have written two-and-a-half millennia ago. “If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained, you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
That’s an ancient lesson the president and his emissaries must internalize, and fast, for the sake of us all.
The Times of Israel Community.