1/2. Their silence is deafening, their hypocrisy nauseating, their callousness exposed for all to see. We have a ceasefire now in the Middle East, courtesy of Donald Trump’s superlative diplomacy, and yet many of the “ceasefire now” activists that keep marching on the streets of London appear distraught, or at least nonplussed. They are still chanting "death to the IDF", "from the river to the sea" and other foul slogans as if nothing has changed. Perhaps they just don't know what to do with their weekends, but I fear the truth may be more sinister. A common view among the more extreme protesters is that Trump's is “not a plan for an enduring peace” as it “says nothing about the root causes of violence”: for many, the fundamental, intractable issue appears to be the very existence of one small Jewish-majority state in a vast Middle East. What started off as supposedly "pro-Palestine" marches now feel increasingly explicitly like anti-Israel jamborees. Some still hide it, but many no longer do. The ceasefire has triggered an explosion of joy in Israel and Gaza, but mostly stunned silence among the British activist class. Their inability to share in these celebrations is revealing, if not surprising. They never cared about emaciated Israeli hostages and the inhumane conditions in which they were kept, but why aren’t they happy at the end of the combat operations? Why aren’t they loudly expressing their joy at the fact that the Palestinians they claim to care about are no longer dying? Wasn’t that the stated aim of their protestations? Some activists are pretending the ceasefire hasn’t actually happened, just as they pretended that Gaza was “occupied” prior to the savage invasion of Israel launched from the strip on October 7 2023. They haven’t bothered to update their rhetoric. Swathes of the pro-Palestinian movement in the West have gone fully post-modern, unbound by the facts, untethered from the actual reality of the region, turning their supposed cause into a mere symbol of the anti-Western omnicause. Its most extreme advocates have long spread incendiary lies about Israel; now, their truth-bending extends to protesting a war that is no longer being waged. Some Western advocates of the “pro-Gaza” cause even wanted Hamas to refuse to take the deal, and still hope the terrorist group might wreck it come the second phase. Some don’t want it to disarm, contrary to the Trump plan, which is backed by all of the important Muslim and Arab nations as well as Israel. Many of those who screamed, over and over, in one of the vilest blood libels of recent years, that Israel was conducting a “genocide” in Gaza don’t seem to want to end it. Many of the “pro-Palestine” advocates in the West appear staggeringly unconcerned by the well-being of real Palestinians, or at least want to sacrifice more of them for an everlasting war with Israel.