BEN HARVEY: Why Nobel Prize for infuriating Trump after Gaza peace is not so far fetched

It’s being held together with dental floss and snot but, against the odds, the Gaza deal is still largely intact.

It’s not the end of this horrifying spectacle, to parrot Winston Churchill, or even the beginning of the end. But it might be the end of the beginning.

If peace in our time turns into peace for all time the world’s MAGA-hating progressives will have to face a spectacle they’ll find just as horrifying as the war in Gaza: Donald Trump receiving a Nobel Peace Prize.

What an awfully conflicted time to be on the far left. Will their love of peace trump their hatred of Trump?

Few on the left can bring themselves to admit, at least publicly, that this lying, overbearing, infuriating, pugnacious leader has pulled off something nobody else could.

Fewer still will concede that, should the 20-point peace plan play out the way Trump envisages, then yes, he does deserve the ultimate gong.

That a medal reserved for true statesmen should go to the most undiplomatic creature on earth will rile the left, perplex the centre and electrify the right.

Even in securing peace, this bloke can divide us.

That scenario is getting ahead of ourselves. After all, 20 is an awful lot of points for any two enemies to agree on.

The Israelis and the Palestinians are not just regular old enemies. They are two peoples so blinded by rage they’ve lost perspective.

Trump nailed it when, in a rare moment of clarity, he said “we basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the f… they’re doing”.

It’s more Joe Rogan than Churchill, but he got the point across.

You’d be a particularly churlish observer not to wish the President the best in his endeavours to bring some order to the chaos of the Middle East.

Which brings us back to those 20 points in the peace plan.

The return of the hostages, which has understandably dominated the agenda over the past few days, is just one twentieth of the complete job.

To understand where the rubber hits the road with the peace plan you need to go to the bookends of the agreement.

Point one talks about Gaza as a deradicalised, terror-free zone.

How do you deradicalise someone who kills a baby in cold blood? Or cheers someone who does that?

No amount of group therapy sessions can change the mindset of a Hamas operative capable of that callousness.

Many of them don’t want to change their mindset for the sake of peace because they don’t see peace as the end game. They don’t even see a declared Palestinian state as the end game.

Hamas see one thing and only one thing as the end game and that’s the wholesale destruction of Israel.

So, point one is a big hurdle. Even if we manage to clear it we’re set for an even higher jump at the other end of the peace plan.

Point 20 requires us to establish a dialogue between Israel and the Palestinians for peaceful and prosperous co-existence.

That is surely the mother of all stretch targets.

Hamas plumbed new depths of depravity on October 7 and Israel killed a lot of kids in retaliation.

Would you sit down and break bread with someone who raped your mother or sent your child to an early grave?

I’d be quietly hoping that, some day, I might run into the person who did that to my family.

And should I see them in West Bank or the Golan Heights, I’d be of a mind to try to find one of those weapons we’re told Hamas is going to be happy to surrender.

Point 20 will require the kind of diplomacy we haven’t seen in this world since Japan and Germany were pacified. And this at a time when the age of the statesman is long dead.

It’s hard to believe the Middle East is immune to the principle of reversion-to-mean, which dictates that, over time, things will always return to the long-term average position.

In the case of the Holy Lands, the long-term average position is soaked in blood.

But, never say never, because if there is one person on earth capable of confounding long-held truisms, it’s Trump.

Maybe it’s not so far fetched that a Nobel Peace Prize might one day go straight to the pool room at Mar-a-Lago.