Shalom!

It means hello and goodbye, but most importantly today, it also means peace. It’s sort of the Hebrew “aloha.”

Finally, at long last, I get to write something positive about Donald J. Trump. The remaining living Israeli hostages are free, and hope in the region is palpable. It is legitimate and accurate to say this would not have happened without President Trump, so credit where credit is due.

If in fact, the 20-point Trump peace plan for Israel and Gaza holds, President Trump will have been instrumental in bringing at least a respite, and maybe even peace to Gaza. And if you really want to throw some wildly speculative dice, it may even be a path to peace in the wider Middle East, via cooperation between Israel and the Arab states surrounding it. That’s a risky bet since no one—not Israel or the Arabs—has wanted to solve the Palestinian problem at its core. Maybe that day is also at hand.

Somewhere between our president’s desire to win a Nobel Peace Prize and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu‘s miscalculation in bombing a Hamas building in Qatar, the White House and a number of Arab leaders found the leverage they needed to push Netanyahu and Hamas along. One, or maybe both of those things, proved to be points of leverage that the rest of the world needed to bring combatants to the bargaining table. Credit the team of the President Trump, his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and envoy, Steve Witkoff.

Credit is also due the Arab nations who deemed this to be the moment. Thank goodness they did. We can only hope that this leads to long-term peace and the long-sought, long-languishing two state solution that was on track before Netanyahu and his ultra-right wing government took power.

There was a lot of risk-taking here, so tip your hat to Trump for taking them all on this ride. Now, if only he’d apply the same love to his own country, rather than continuing to drive a wedge between us. The peacemaker abroad seeks division through retribution at home.

Antifa?

I guess it might surprise people who don’t know history and live in the right wing media ecosphere to learn that there is no such organization. It’s a name applied to all protesters who are alarmed by the fascistic inclinations of our current leadership. I hasten to remind those people that the founders of “antifa“ were Five-Star Army General, and our 34th president, Dwight David Eisenhower, and his cohorts who saved the world from fascism in the 1940s. Those troops that stormed the beaches at Normandy? They were antifa.

Projection is confession.

Every single thing that the Trump minions accuse their political “enemies“ of is actually a confession of the things they themselves are guilty of. They’re just trying to project their guilt onto their opponents, who, by the way, aren’t enemies. “Enemies” is a word that in this context I find quite distressing and historical because no president before has professed to love America and hate Americans or our states and cities (which, incidentally, are not “burning hell holes”).

It turns out that trade routes, like democracies, are fragile things. Our president who claims to have resolved seven other wars, has simultaneously created a trade war that has meant rising prices and has left America’s farmers in the lurch. It looks as though all of the tariff treasure that he’s collected will have to go to our farmers, whose trade routes to China have been disrupted. History indicates trade routes rarely come back the way they were. Right now, China is buying its soy from Brazil. It’s hard to imagine the incentives that would be required—not to mention the trust—to reestablish trade with China.

If only the Gaza cease fire had domestic ramifications, but so far it doesn’t, so I’ll join what looks to be millions of Americans in the streets this Saturday for the second No Kings March. The violence of war in the Gaza Strip has been stilled, and now we must get back to saving our democracy from a significant minority that includes six Supreme Court justices that favor an all-powerful “unitary executive.” Our aim is to reestablish the checks and balances imbued in our three branches of co-equal government.

The guardrails aren’t holding. We need an independent Justice Department that respects the rule of law, and doesn’t allow itself to become an instrument of political revenge. We need a Congress that fights to keep its power-of-the-purse, and we need science-based health and research institutions like the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health.

Mostly, we need a leader willing to unite us rather than divide us. He did it in Gaza, and we’re tremendously grateful for that. Now let him do it at home.

©2025 Jon Sinton