Jan. 16: The Art of the Ceasefire Deal

WaPo cartoonist arrested for child porn; Trump proposes strategic U.S. crypto reserve; Hill progressives want 32-hour weeks

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The Big Story

On Wednesday, U.S. President Joe Biden and President-elect Donald Trump, as well as the prime minister of Qatar, officially announced that Israel and Hamas had reached a cease-fire-for-hostages deal based on the Biden proposal from May. At the time of our writing, the deal seems like a fait accompli. But it still must be approved by the Israeli cabinet, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delayed a cabinet vote scheduled for this morning after accusing Hamas of attempting to change the terms of the deal. That may be, and Bibi may also be stalling to secure his right flank following promises from Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and his Religious Zionism Party to withdraw from the government in protest of the deal. Still, we’d bet on the deal getting done. Trump is the most powerful man on the planet, and he already has a personal grudge against Bibi for the latter’s perceived disloyalty following the 2020 election. We suspect Bibi is highly motivated not to piss him off.

As we wrote on Tuesday, the deal is not good. Israel will release thousands of Palestinian security prisoners (i.e., terrorists) in exchange for a phased release of Israeli (and American) hostages, many of whom are likely dead. More serious, in the long run, will be Israel’s consent to the continued internationalization of Gaza and the IDF’s withdrawal from the Netzarim and Philadelphi Corridors, which were the strategic prizes of the war so far. Without an IDF presence in Philadelphi, in particular, the only obstacle to Hamas’ reconstitution will be time and the goodwill of Qatar, which is Hamas’ patron (as well as Trump Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff’s sugar daddy), and Egypt, whose officials have grown rich from aiding smuggling into Gaza. So we are likely to see an eventual return to something resembling the pre-October 7 status quo, with a few minor modifications. Hamas will probably assume a Hezbollah-type role in Gaza, where it will remain the most powerful actor and the de facto ruler of the territory but leave formal governing responsibilities to others—probably the Palestinian Authority, backed by Western and Arab cash and supported by a U.S.-trained-and-equipped Palestinian security force modeled on the Lebanese Armed Forces (i.e., fake). Hamas appears to be thrilled with this outcome, and its officials have been celebrating all over Arab media for the past 24 hours, promising continued resistance until “victory or martyrdom,” in the words of Politburo member Khalil al-Hayya.

The Israelis have reason not to be too despondent. “They made historic changes in the regional balance of power,” Tony Badran wrote in a message to The Scroll, crippling Iran’s regional empire and taking one of its key chess pieces, Bashar al-Assad’s Syria, off the board. Still, Badran writes, they will now need to ensure that this deal does not work as intended: i.e., as an internationalized protective umbrella for Hamas’ reconstitution and rearmament:

They did hurt their sovereignty with these agreements in that they conceded the insertion of the empire into their affairs and on their borders in a manner that leaves in place the possibility of a resurgence of their enemies down the road. But the destruction they visited on their enemies has been so thorough that it would require many years to reverse. Their job now, assuming they have the leadership for it (which, if Bibi is toppled, is an open question, leaning toward the negative), is, in a few months, to start eating away at these constraints, paving the way for their collapse.

I’m skeptical they’ll be able to do so as their enemies, including Washington, will rush to throw all kinds of on-the-ground obstacles in their way, like they’re doing in Lebanon. They will have to buck them all. What this past year showed is that the only thing that’s real is their military power. Washington will try to obscure that and replace it with fiction: Peace with the Saudis! A Palestinian state! Integration! Abraham Accords! The LAF! The PAF! None of these things are real. In fact, they’re anti-real. That is, they’re designed to eliminate the real. Asserting the primacy of military power in Lebanon, in Gaza and the West Bank, in Yemen, and ideally in Iran is key.

Moreover, the Israelis need to bypass the United States and try to reach an understanding with Turkey. Everything in Israel is pushing them in the opposite direction, and so will Washington and American Jews. What just happened shows how precarious their position could become if they forfeit their gains and pursue destructive fantasies. The Turks will be tempted to fuck them, just as the Saudis are, which is why a sober discussion between the two powers—who really changed everything against Washington’s will—is mandatory.

In the large sense, then, Trump’s victory appears to have been a false dawn for the Israelis, who will need to continue reducing their dependence on the United States, just as they would have needed to do if Kamala Harris had won. The incoming administration may still be friendlier than the outgoing one on the margins; soon-to-be national security advisor Mike Waltz has publicly stated that Washington will “back Israel 100% to go back to the war” if Hamas violates the terms of the deal, and we expect a rollback of sanctions and a resumption of arms deliveries, as well as, hopefully, increased pressure on Iran. But Jerusalem should not fool itself that Washington is now safely “on its side.”

For those of us who believed that Trump was a successful foreign policy president the first time around, however, this week’s developments are alarming. During his first term, Trump stood nearly alone against the entrenched idiocy and psychopathy, respectively, of the Bush and Obama foreign policy establishments. His much-derided “transactional” attitude toward diplomacy was in reality a mental prophylactic against ideological fantasies about making the Middle East “safe for democracy” or pursuing “regional integration” with a second-rate, anti-American terror state. Instead, Trump identified America’s real interests and real allies and backed them against enemies. Now, having been thoroughly vindicated by events and swept to power with an unprecedented popular mandate, he appears to be using that mandate to breathe new life into the Obama-Biden regional project. Naturally, Obama is thrilled:

The obvious question is, why change now? Here, theories abound. For perhaps the first time in his political career, Trump can bask in near-universal adulation for ending the war—the handful of critics on the right being easy to mau-mau as “Israel firsters.” And beyond the desire to claim credit as a peacemaker, Trump has a host of domestic priorities for his first 100 days in office. He no doubt wanted the Gaza war over with in one way or another, details be damned. The deal is also a tangible reward to the Arab and Muslim voters who helped deliver him Michigan, and a stick in the eye to Jews who, despite shifting somewhat into the Republican column, still voted majority Democrat in 2024. Then there are the family dynamics at play: Jared and Ivanka, so influential in Trump’s first-term foreign policy, are on the outs thanks to their disloyalty following Jan. 6, while Donald Trump Jr. and his good friend Tucker Carlson are in.

There is also the simple fact that Trump is now mainstream. We have noted here that Big Tech, Wall Street, celebrities, and even, to some extent, universities are attempting to make their peace with the new president. The same goes for the foreign policy Blob and what is often called “the deep state,” much of which is or aspires to be on the Qatari payroll. Trump does not want all of established D.C. fighting his every move, and established D.C. doesn’t appear to have the heart for Resistance 2.0. So why not help Obama and Biden get their little deal across the finish line, declare victory for “the Trump effect,” and buy some goodwill from your former enemies? After all, who is going to be mad about it?

Bibi and a bunch of Zionists, that’s who. And they have to play ball with you anyway, because right now, you’re the only game in town.

— Park MacDougald

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The Rest

→Image of the Day:

That’s a cartoon from Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Darrin Bell, whose work has been published by The Washington Post, and who was arrested on Wednesday on suspicion of possessing and creating child pornography. The warrant against Bell, 49, was served following an investigation by the Sacramento Valley Internet Crimes Against Children Detectives task force, which linked “134 videos of [child sexual abuse material]” to an account owned and controlled by Bell, according to reporting by The Sacramento Bee. The case is the first arrest in the jurisdiction of someone creating child pornography using AI- and computer-generated images.

On his Substack, Bell describes himself as a creator of “progressive, anti-fascist, anti-racist political cartoons and comic strips.” In many of those images, right-leaning political figures are depicted self-editing their viewpoints to conceal fascism hidden beneath more mainstream talking points—as in the cartoon above, in which a white man in an elephant mask and a Nazi-style armband criticizes “DEI” and “progressive policies” in place of “blacks” and “gays.”

Bell is hardly the first Antifa affiliate or progressive identitarian to be accused of child pornography or pedophilia. Anarchist philosopher Hakim Bey, whose concept of the “temporary autonomous zone” was the influence on Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone that ended with a flurry of crime and two homicides in 2020, wrote several controversial texts that used anarchism to justify adult-child sex as a “natural freedom.” Bey also wrote for the NAMBLA (North American Man/Boy Love Association) Bulletin. Luke Kuhn, an anarchist who was caught on camera by Project Veritas planning to disrupt an inauguration party for Trump using butyric acid in 2020, according to The Washington Free Beacon, was found to have made several posts advocating for pedophilia legalization in the 1990s when he was a member of the Utopian Anarchist Party, according to Disobedient Media. Anarchist writer Robert P. Helms wrote in an essay in 2006 that a “pedophile thread” has been embedded in certain strains of left-wing anarchism since the beginning of the 20th century.

→According to various reports, Trump is planning to create a strategic reserve of U.S.-founded cryptocurrencies, such as Solana and XRP. This plan, as well as the previously announced news that Trump would also create a strategic reserve of Bitcoin, has facilitated a huge rebound in crypto prices and sent a wave of enthusiasm throughout the crypto community. The New York Post reports that the crypto investing community sees the inauguration of Trump as the end of the “four-year terror” of the Biden administration, which, while it never explicitly made a point of objecting to the crypto industry, was blocking the industry’s growth without making a clear argument to the public, according to “pause letters” sent from the FDIC to regulated financial firms and leaked to Axios last year. This shift is marked by the appointment of crypto-friendly officials like David Sacks as AI and crypto czar and the nomination of Paul Atkins for SEC chair, plus the promise of day-one executive orders that will create the crypto reserves and end debanking. “The entire market is relieved,” Frank Chaparro, an early Bitcoin investor and director of special projects at crypto news site The Block, said to the Post. “What this means practically is, banks will be able to touch crypto — for the last four years they’ve been told they can’t.”

→Quote of the Day

With an abbreviated work week, Congress could make longer tenures for staff the norm, thereby making the work on the Hill more efficient and effective.

That’s from a letter addressed to Speaker of the House Mike Johnson from Congressional Progressive Staff Association asking that its members’ workweek be slashed from 40 hours to 32 hours. What exactly is emboldening the progressive Hill staffers to make such a request now, after their politics have been so completely rejected at the ballot box, is unknown, but the letter is framed in such a way that they aren’t demanding the change to their schedules so much as they are requesting certain members of Congress to “give it a shot”: “We’re urging members to give it a shot, to pilot it for a six-month period,” CPSA spokesman Michael Suchecki said to Roll Call. “If it doesn’t work 100 percent, bring it back to the way it was.” The letter also cites legislation proposed in the Senate by Bernie Sanders and in the House by California Democrat Mark Takano proposing a federally mandated 32-hour workweek. Given that Republicans now own the House and the Senate and are planning on restricting remote work, the letter isn’t likely to affect much change.

→In a TruthSocial post, President-elect Trump announced some of his most famous supporters and Hollywood stars—Jon Voight, Mel Gibson, and Sylvester Stallone—to be his Special Ambassadors to a “great but very troubled place, Hollywood, California”: “They will serve as Special Envoys to me for the purpose of bringing Hollywood, which has lost much business over the last four years to Foreign Countries, BACK—BIGGER, BETTER AND STRONGER THAN EVER BEFORE!”

Trump says in the post that he longs to revive a new “Golden Age of Hollywood.” Indeed, after the COVID-19 pandemic, the writers’ strike, and overall fatigue with the quality of the entertainment products being released by Hollywood, the American film industry has lost one-fifth of its overall theater attendees, according to The Hollywood Reporter. After the 2023 films Barbie and Oppenheimer, which created the “Barbenheimer meme,” and the conservative-skewing film The Sound of Freedom did better than long-running successful franchises like Mission Impossible and Indiana Jones, Hollywood executives started to rethink their production strategies: “We can’t just keep cranking out the same franchise fare,” said an anonymous executive to The Hollywood Reporter in 2024. Trump’s announcement signals that the “America-first” agenda isn’t just a political agenda, but a broader cultural one as well.

→Stat of the Day: 61%

That’s the percentage of the electorate that views the Biden presidency as a failure, according to a CNN poll conducted by SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRP). Biden’s overall favorability rating, according to exit polls, is also well below that of his Democratic predecessors—33%, against 65% for Bill Clinton and 59% for Barack Obama, Gallup reported. On the economy, for instance, the most important issue for voters in 2024, according to Gallup, Biden’s approval rating was a bleak 33%. On immigration and foreign policy, Biden’s approval rating polled at 31% and 32%, respectively. Perhaps most damning of all is that voters pin the failures of the Biden presidency directly on Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris; 42% of those polled blamed the failures of the administration on the personal shortcomings of the leaders and not on extreme circumstances outside their control. There’s something heartening, of course, in the bleak exit polling for Biden and his administration. For all of the Democrats’ sophisticated messaging machinery and loyal media coverage, if a presidency is marred by the kind of extreme incompetence demonstrated by this one, voters will notice—and punish the party in power.

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