Secretary of State Antony Blinken smells like desperation. After meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for more than two hours, Blinken said the current proposal to achieve a ceasefire in Gaza and win the release of Hamas-held hostages is “maybe the last” opportunity.

Blinken is wrong. The last opportunity to win a ceasefire and release Hamas captives came when he agreed to negotiate with a terrorist group whose covenant embraces genocide and whose ideology envisions Islamic rule with religious and sexual minorities condemned to second-class status if not slavery or death.

When diplomats fall back on process, too often they lose sight of the forest through the trees. The fact remains: Hamas invaded Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, during a ceasefire to which the terrorist group had agreed. Its members raped, slaughtered, and took civilians hostage. The return of those hostages should always have been the precondition to negotiations rather than the conclusion. If Palestinians in Gaza did not want to see their territories’ collateral destruction, they could return hostages under their control or inform about their whereabouts. This is not farfetched considering that Hamas has kept hostages in supposedly civilian hospitals, in private homes, and even with U.N. employees.

To negotiate with Hamas over its blatant violation of humanitarian law not only empowers Hamas, but it permanently degrades international law.

Blinken’s second mistake was his choice of mediator. A good rule of thumb: Never place strategic interests in a mediator ideologically committed to your destruction. Egyptians may be aloof and, as the tunnels under the Philadelphi Corridor show, double-dealing, but Qatar too often uses its vast wealth to promote the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideology that at its core rejects all aspects of Western liberalism and democracy.

Blinken has also tried to include Turkey in any post-conflict order. This, too, is bizarre. Years of pandering to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan combined with the Turkish despot’s similar Muslim Brotherhood-infused ideology makes Turkey far less a partner for peace than an undesignated sponsor of terrorism. To offer Erdogan influence over post-Hamas Gaza would be akin to putting white supremacist David Duke in charge of post-apartheid South Africa.

Blinken’s third mistake is treating the Palestinian Authority as a moderate alternative to Hamas. Palestinian Chairman Mahmoud Abbas is now in the third decade of his four-year presidential term. As Blinken has restored funding to Abbas, Abbas has shown his true colors. Speaking in Turkey just the other day, Abbas declared, “America is the plague and the plague is America.”

There is no substitute for moral clarity. Moral compromise, meanwhile, substitutes groveling for justice.

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After Iran released its 52 American hostages on President Ronald Reagan’s first day in office, former Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher published a collection of essays by Carter administration alumni crowing triumphant for their success. Their thesis? The persistence of diplomacy led Ayatollah Khomeini to release his prisoners. Peter Rodman, a former Kissinger aide, responded in an article that Christopher and crew got it backward: The Islamic Republic let its hostages go when the cost of their captivity grew too high to bear.

Rather than pressure Netanyahu and have aides, underlings, and surrogates slime a duly elected leader, Blinken should be introspective. Had Blinken at every opportunity not indulged Hamas’s conceits or played into the agenda of the group’s enablers such as Qatar and Turkey, the hostages today might be free and the Hamas-imposed war over. President Joe Biden’s base might hand wring and indulge in an orgy of antisemitism, but the road to peace rests on bringing so much pain to bear on Hamas that it has no choice but to release its captives and end its reign of terrorism over Gaza’s 2.5 million Palestinians. 

Michael Rubin is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is director of policy analysis at the Middle East Forum and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.