Maybe the United Nations isn’t as useless as it so often shows. Last Monday the Security Council endorsed President Trump’s 20-point peace plan for Gaza, ratifying for the first time the requirements that Hamas disarm and Gaza be demilitarized. The resolution passed 13-0, with Russia and China abstaining. It’s a setback for the terrorists.

Many had worried that the U.S. jaunt to the Security Council would come at the price of bending the peace plan’s terms for Hamas or adding anti-Israel terms. Would France’s Emmanuel Macron elbow his way into the deal’s implementation? Would Russia and China transform the Trump initiative into another U.N. peacekeeping boondoggle?

Not this time. Credit to Trump and U.N. Ambassador Mike Waltz for flexing U.S. diplomatic muscle. That’s the only reason this text, which detracts nothing from the original 20 Trump points, could get through. Waltz calls it the most pro-Israel Security Council resolution in decades.

That’s a low bar, but consider the point. This resolution doesn’t pretend there is currently a Palestinian state. It doesn’t demand a risky Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and east Jerusalem and the expulsion of every Jew living there. It doesn’t prejudice negotiations by specifying final borders on “1967 lines.” It doesn’t condition progress in Gaza on the creation of a Palestinian state, which it treats instead as a highly contingent event of its own.

The resolution, like the Trump plan, says that if the PA undergoes a stringent course of reform and deradicalization laid out by Trump in his first term, “the conditions may finally be in place for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood.” In other words, the time to talk about statehood is when such a state would cease to be a mortal threat to Israel.

The resolution also authorizes Israel’s presence in a Gaza buffer zone and conditions PA administration of Gaza until it “can securely and effectively take back control of Gaza.” This should be understood as a requirement that the PA be capable of restraining Hamas and wanted by the people of Gaza — it isn’t currently — rather than parachuted in and imposed on them.

It all sounds sensible and it doesn’t sound like the U.N., which in September was saying the opposite via a nonbinding General Assembly resolution. That was when pressure on Israel was at its peak. No longer. On Monday a Bloomberg headline declared “Israel Is a Markets Favorite” and Germany lifted its partial arms embargo. Israeli defense firms are racking up record deals to export abroad.

The way to tell the U.N. has done something out of character is that Hamas has issued a statement condemning the resolution. In particular, Hamas announced, “The Palestinian factions also stressed their rejection of any clause related to disarming Gaza.”

Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu and Trump are no longer the only ones insisting on that. By not disarming, Hamas is in continuing breach of the agreement, holding up the reconstruction of Gaza and the rest. The question is what Trump is willing to do about it. If “Phase Two” of his plan isn’t working, he’ll need the bravery to call it quits — as the “peace processors” of old never could.

SCRIPTURE

But I trust in you, Lord; I say, “You are my God.” The course of my life is in your power; rescue me from the

power of my enemies and from my persecutors.

Psalm 31:14-15 CSB