In December 2016, then-Secretary of State John Kerry insisted that, without first securing peace with the Palestinians, “there will be no separate peace between Israel and the Arab world.” Kerry was proved wrong by the Abraham Accords, which effectively neutralized the Palestinian “veto” over peace agreements between Israel and Arab countries. Ellie Cohanim argues that the recent spate of terror attacks against Israeli civilians, timed to coincide with a summit between the Jewish state and its new allies, demonstrates the determination of Palestinian and Iranian leaders to “destroy this burgeoning peace.” But the Biden administration hasn’t learned the lessons of the recent past:

The historic Negev summit, hosted by the Israeli foreign minister Yair Lapid and also featuring Lapid’s Bahraini, Egyptian, Moroccan, and Emirati counterparts, was a significant step forward in advancing the Abraham Accords. The optics of four Arab foreign ministers intertwining hands with Israel’s Lapid and America’s Blinken were powerful. Powerful too was the agreement to make the summit a “permanent forum” with “shared capabilities.”

That same [day the summit began], March 27, Blinken met with the Palestinian Authority (PA) president Mahmoud Abbas. In remarks following their meeting, Blinken created a moral equivalency between Israel’s supposed “settlement expansion, settler violence, home demolitions, [and] evictions” with the PA’s “payments to people convicted of terrorism [and] incitements to violence.”

These equivalencies pose a danger to Israeli lives, as they signal to Palestinians that their terror and violence will be met with American statements about Israeli settlements—instead of demands for accountability among Palestinians. The Biden administration last year went so far as to resume U.S. funding to the PA despite its “pay-for-slay” policy, and against the animating spirit of the duly enacted Taylor Force Act legislation.

It is high time for the Biden administration to recognize the reality of the new Middle East. In this post-Abraham Accords era, there are two clear paths for nations to choose from. One is the path of coexistence, peace, and prosperity. That was the path on display at the Negev Summit. The other is the path of radicalism, terrorism and, ultimately, war.

For the past 36 hours, I’ve been reading and listening to analyses of the terms and implications of the recent hostage deal. More will appear in the coming days, and I’ll try to put the best of them in this newsletter. But today I want to share a comment made on Tuesday by the Palestinian analyst Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib. While he and I would probably disagree on numerous points about the current conflict, this analysis is spot on, and goes entirely against most arguments made by those who consider themselves pro-Palestinian, and certainly those chanting for a cease-fire at all costs:

When a cease-fire in Gaza is announced, Hamas’s fascists will do everything they can to frame this as the ultimate victory; they will wear their military uniforms, emerge from their tunnels, stop hiding in schools and displacement centers, and very quickly reassert their control over the coastal enclave. They’ll even get a few Gazans to celebrate and dance for them.

This, I should note, is exactly what has happened. Alkhatib continues:

The reality is that the Islamist terrorism of Hamas, masquerading as “resistance,” has achieved nothing for the Palestinian people except for billions of dollars in wasted resources and tens of thousands of needless deaths, with Gaza in ruins after twenty years following the withdrawal of settlements in 2005. . . . Hamas’s propaganda machine, run by Qatari state media, Al Jazeera Arabic, will work overtime to help the terror group turn a catastrophic disaster into a victory akin to the battles of Stalingrad and Leningrad.

Hamas will also start punishing anyone who criticized or worked against it, and preparing for its next attack. Perhaps Palestinians would have been better off if, instead of granting them a temporary reprieve, the IDF kept fighting until Hamas was utterly defeated.