For the past few days—as the IDF closes in on Gaza City—the word ceasefire has everywhere been on the lips, placards, and tweets of the more moderate defenders of Hamas in West. It is generally assumed that it is something that can be imposed on Israel from Washington, and it’s not clear if its advocates also expect Hamas to cease firing rockets. Matthew Continetti comments:

A ceasefire would be worse than useless. If Israel were to end combat operations now, with Hamas in control of the Gaza Strip and captives hidden in the maze of tunnels known as the Gaza Metro, then the terrorists will score a remarkable victory. Harassment and attacks on Jews worldwide will surge.

Hamas will regroup. Its strategy of using civilians as pawns in a chess match for global opinion will have proven effective once again. Its ranks will swell. It will plot its next move. “Al-Aqsa Deluge”—Hamas’s name for its October 7 crime against humanity—“is just the first time,” Ghazi Hamad, a Hamas factotum, said on Lebanese television the other day. “And there will be a second, a third, a fourth.”

At an event in Minnesota on Wednesday, a deranged heckler screamed at President Biden to impose a ceasefire. Biden could have stayed silent. He could have told off the heckler by detailing Hamas’s evil—yes, evil—acts and by saying America will stand with Israel in this existential struggle. Instead he told the crowd that “I think we need a pause. A pause means give time to get the prisoners out.” That is the message Secretary of State Antony Blinken will convey to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

A “pause” is nothing less than a short-lived ceasefire. And for Biden, a mini-ceasefire is an excuse. It is his way of playing for time, of getting the left off his back. It won’t work.

Today, Prime Minister Netanyahu is expected to meet with President Trump in the White House. High on their agenda will be Iran, and the next steps following the joint assault on its nuclear facilities, as well as the latest proposal for a cease-fire in Gaza. But there are other equally weighty matters that the two leaders are apt to discuss. Eran Lerman, calling this a White House visit “unlike any before it,” surveys some of those matters, beginning with efforts to improve relations between Israel and the Arab states—above all Saudi Arabia:

[I]t is a safe bet that no White House signing ceremony is in the offing. A much more likely scenario would involve—if the language from Israel on the Palestinian future is sufficiently vague and does not preclude the option of (limited) statehood—a return to the pre-7 October 2023 pattern of economic ventures, open visits at the ministerial level, and a growing degree of discussion and mutual cooperation on regional issues such as Lebanon and Syria.

In fact, writes Lerman, those two countries will also be major conversation topics. The president and the prime minister are likely to broach as well the possible opening of relations between Jerusalem and Damascus, a goal that is

realistic in light of reconstruction needs of this devastated country, all the more destitute once the Assad clan’s main source of income, the massive production and export of [the drug] Captagon, has been cut off. Both Israel and Saudi Arabia want to see Syria focused on its domestic needs—and as much as possible, free from the powerful grip of Turkey. It remains to be seen whether the Trump administration, with its soft spot for Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, will do its part.