Donald Trump’s plan for peace in Gaza has been welcomed by many around the world because it snares Benjamin Netanyahu’s government into accepting a future Palestinian state – but it is also doomed as a colonial con-trick on the Palestinians.
First, the trap. The plan, which has been endorsed by Netanyahu but not by his cabinet (where the extreme right holds the whip hand), demands that Israel accepts “a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood”.
Netanyahu’s vocal public position is that this is never going to happen. He uses those words. But if Hamas agreed to surrender and if the Palestinian Authority signed up, and if Netanyahu got his own government on board, then Israel would be back to talking to the Palestinians about ending the system of apartheid that has smashed the West Bank into shards of self-governing enclaves for non-Jews.
So, it’s a very useful phrase to get into a plan. It’s not just all about the facts on the ground, where Israel has ensured a Palestinian state is currently non-viable, but also about the ideas on paper – that a future Palestine may actually look like a nation, not ink spattered on a map.
Germany has said it’s a good idea. So has Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, Jordan and Turkey. But they’re cementing that idea of a future Palestinian state – trying to write it into the record for all future talks.
They like the plan if it rebuilds Gaza and “creates a path for just peace on the basis of the two-state solution, under which Gaza is fully integrated with the West Bank in a Palestinian state”.
None of that is actually in the Trump-Netanyahu scheme – and that’s the rub.
The colonial reality is that Israel and the US have come up with a cunning plan to outsource Israel’s continued dominance or occupation of the Gaza Strip under a governor, Tony Blair (a man much reviled in the Middle East), and a king, Donald Trump, who would run Gaza.
They would rule indefinitely or until the Palestinian Authority, which governs the bits of the West Bank where Israel doesn’t want to be bothered with directly occupying, can show that it can be trusted to also run Gaza the way that the US and Israel want.
The PA is dominated by the Palestine Liberation Organisation, which used to be run by Yasser Arafat. He signed up to a peace process in the early 1990s and agreed to recognise the right of Israel to exist in 1993.
He later missed opportunities to secure a viable state in talks conducted during the raging Second Intifada of the early 2000s. But the PA continues to cooperate with Israel on security matters. It works with its own occupier to keep violent resistance against the Israelis and terror inside Israel in check.
The PA said in a statement that it welcomed Trump’s ideas: “The State of Palestine welcomes the sincere and determined efforts of president Donald J Trump to end the war on Gaza and affirms its confidence in his ability to find a path toward peace.”
It didn’t say that the plans are a good idea. Because they are not. They’re a recipe for violence.
Hamas is ideologically committed to destroying the Jewish state itself. Its energy is religious and political. It can be beaten in the short term militarily. But its ideas have soaked into the soil of Gaza and been fertilised by Israel’s slaughter of the innocents there; it will grow back to fight again.
The only prospect of peace is to offer the Palestinian people some kind of hope that they will get a state they can live in outside of Israeli control.
After Israel rolled tanks into the West Bank during the Second Intifada and put down the Palestinian uprising with force and penned its population behind a “security wall”, most people in the West Bank believed that fighting Israel was hopeless. The fight in them drained away.
But the next generation took it up again. As Israel continued to take Palestinian lands and illegally turn them into Jewish colonies on the West Bank and Netanyahu openly talked of annexing the area, so violent resistance grew.
Hamas deliberately provoked a cataclysm on 7 October 2023. Israel delivered a nightmare to Gaza that is now widely considered a genocide. The two sides have flung themselves off any moral high ground into an ethical abyss.
Trump’s plan envisions an international force to police Gaza after Hamas has surrendered its weapons, released all hostages (dead and alive), and its leadership has gone into exile. This force would include soldiers from unspecified Arab states.
Anyone signing up for it would have to be mad. Doing so would drag them into violent confrontation with Palestinians kicking at what they would see as colonial rule and into the same moral quagmire of horror that is Gaza today.
