RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: This deal would never have flown without the force of nature that is Donald J. Trump - he created the weather that made it happen
Thank you, thank you, thank you, Mr President. The gratitude of the families of the Israeli hostages who will soon be returned home was unconfined.
They were speaking directly to Donald Trump on a mobile phone held aloft by his personal emissary Steve Witkoff, who helped broker the Gaza ceasefire.
This was international diplomacy as reality television show, complete with rivers of tears and Trump as ringmaster. But to those relatives it was real life, the end of a two-year nightmare.
The money shot is still to come when the hostages, dead or alive, are reunited with their loved ones some time this weekend. There will be more tears, of joy and mourning.
Sufferers from Trump Derangement Syndrome will accuse the President of milking the moment to feed his ocean-going vanity. But, frankly, so what?
Yes, he’s a preening egomaniac who has to be the centre of attention at all time. But criticising the host of The Apprentice for behaving like, well, the host of The Apprentice is like complaining about what bears do in the woods.
Try telling that to the Israelis dancing in Hostage Square in Tel Aviv, like a sunlit Trafalgar Square in London on VE Day at the end of the Second World War. The sense of blessed relief was palpable.
And, let’s be honest, this deal wouldn’t have happened without the force of nature which is Donald J. Trump. He made the weather which made this historic deal possible.
As the old song has it, everywhere he goes he always takes the weather with him. Like it or not, we all live in TrumpWorld now.
The self-appointed Middle East ‘experts’ – the academics, the professional diplomats, the ‘respected’ foreign correspondents – all said it couldn’t be done. Hamas would never surrender, Netanyahu would never agree to a ceasefire until every last Hamas terrorist was eliminated in a pool of blood.
Trump, with the innate braggadocio of the native New Yorker, begged to differ. Critics might grumble that he was only motivated by his desire for a Nobel Peace Prize to plonk on his mantelpiece at Trump Tower.
He collects awards like some men collect baseball cards, prizes his membership of the WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment) Hall of Fame, and Gold Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, along with his Honorary McDonald’s French Fry Certification Pin.
A Nobel Peace Prize would be the icing on the cupcake, something he has been campaigning for shamelessly since his first term in the White House when he successfully negotiated the Abraham Accords which brought Israel and neighbouring Arab nations together.
The genocidal, bloodthirsty maniacs of Hamas blew that accommodation apart under Joe Biden and then incited full-scale war with the October 7 pogrom, the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
Trump took that as a personal affront. Like the Russian war on Ukraine (which he has yet to yet to solve) he claimed, with some justification, that the Hamas slaughter at the Nova music festival would never have happened had he been President at the time.
While maintaining resolute support for Israel, he was determined to bring peace to the region by whatever means necessary. The US continued to supply weapons to the IDF and refused to condemn Israel’s military war of self-defence.
The audacious US attack on the nuclear installations in Iran, Hamas’s paymasters, will come to be seen as a crucial turning point. So will Israel’s bombing of Hamas targets in ‘neutral’ Qatar.
It was a clear message to the duplicitous Qataris that if they insisted on giving sanctuary to anti-Semitic, genocidal Islamist terrorists, they would have nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.
But behind the scenes, Trump wasn’t afraid to use carrot and stick with Israel, either. As his patience ran out, he accused both sides of fighting for so long they no longer knew what they were (expletive deleted) doing.
When Netanyahu bridled at some of the conditions in Trump’s 20-point peace plan, the President told him to stop being so (expletive deleted) negative. ‘Bibi, you can’t fight the whole world.’
America is Israel’s strongest ally, especially after the EU and our own lily-livered appeaser of a PM Surkeir decided to reward Hamas violence by recognising a non-existent Palestinian state without insisting on the release of a single hostage. But Trump reminded Netanyahu in no uncertain terms who was boss.
This shouldn’t have come as a surprise to any sentient Trump-watcher with half a brain. He is routinely portrayed as a clown, a semi-imbecile with a thin skin, full of childish impetuousity.
Thin skin, maybe. He doesn’t take criticism well. And, yes, he can be impetuous. But it’s his unpredictability which makes him hard to read, but also concentrates the mind of his opponents.
I keep coming back to the American comedian who compared him to a horse loose in a hospital. You don’t know what he’s going to do next - and neither does he.
Except Trump always keeps his eyes on the prize. In this case, the Nobel Peace Prize. Previously, the presidency of the United States. As Eric Morecambe didn’t say: This boy’s no fool. And he genuinely cares about humanity, which is why he spoke directly to the families of the hostages. Friends who have seen him behind the scenes at Mar-a-Lago say he always has time and kindness for his staff.
There’s method in his apparent madness, calculation even. He doesn’t trust conventional wisdom, the smug domestic or foreign policy establishment.
That’s why he sent his old friend Witkoff as his personal envoy to the Middle East and not a career diplomat. How the grand panjandrums in the navel-gazing Washington Beltway (and our own Westminster Bubble) mocked. What does a New York real estate investor like Witkoff, or Trump for that matter, know about diplomacy?
Quite a lot, as it happened. Witkoff knocked heads together, got sworn enemies round a table with Trump’s backing. Both sides were left in no doubt they were on their own unless they reached a deal. Neither side was going to be entirely happy, but compromises are inevitable to stop the killing.
I can remember asking Tony Blair over lunch how he felt shaking the hands of Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness when sealing the Northern Ireland peace deal. He hesitated, looked uncomfortable, but confessed that sometimes you just have to bite your tongue and bear it in the interests of a greater goal.
That’s something Netanyahu has had to swallow, too, at Trump’s insistence. Yes, it could all still go pear-shaped. You can’t always negotiate with fanatical terrorists or trust what they agree to.
PLO leader Yasser Arafat got a Nobel Peace Prize, then reneged immediately and launched another intifada.
Trump will be aware of the perils inherent in this deal, but he will persist for now. He’s a seasoned negotiator. You don’t build a property empire in New York without dealing with a lot of men whose names end in vowels and have links to organised crime. So he won't be intimidated.
But he’s pulled it off against the odds, at least in the short term. He’s made the weather.
We must all hope it’s a lasting peace and brings not just a ceasefire in Gaza but an end to the disgusting war on our Jewish friends and neighbours back home.
Here’s an illustration. On Tuesday we were walking to lunch on our North London shopping parade when a young Jewish guy in a Arsenal shirt coming in the opposite direction stopped us and said: thank you for your support.
It wasn’t anything I’d written here. He didn’t know me from Adam. He’d spotted my wife’s yellow ribbon badge on her lapel. You don’t know how much that means, he said, we must get those hostages back.
That wish is about to come true. Even the BBC acknowledges it wouldn’t have happened without the intervention of the much derided 47th President of the United States.
As far as I’m concerned, he could have his Nobel Peace Prize minted and worn around his neck on a gold chain, like Mister T in the A-Team.
This may only be the beginning of the end, but if the peace holds we should all, from Tel Aviv to Tottenham, join the families of the Israeli hostages in saying: Thank you, Mr President.
