- >>
- OPINION
My initial reaction to the U.S. President Donald Trump's Israeli Plan for Gaza is that it was written by Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose genocidal war on Gaza has failed to achieve any of its declared goals, namely the total surrender of the people of Gaza, or their annihilation, as made clear on more than one occasion.
Trump’s Plan for Gaza is a recycling of Israel’s colonial, paternalistic policies that have long ignored our fundamental right to self-determination, which is “inalienable, erga omnes and non-derogable” under international law.
The date of the declaration of the plan, probably co-written by his own son in law Jared Kushner and British Viceroy Tony Blair, was described, narcissistically, by Trump himself as “one of the greatest days of civilization ever”, because the plan had resolved “issues that have been going on for hundreds of years, even thousands of years." GOSH!
Proposing such a plan, two years into a systematic genocide and after 77 years of apartheid, displacements, dispossession, and ongoing ethnic cleansing, reveals a profound disregard for Palestinian history and sacrifices, and a desire to impose a solution that diminishes our basic rights. But this time, it has the approval and support of major Arab and Islamic governments, including the Palestinian Authority itself.
The live-streamed genocide of Palestinians in Gaza has claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of civilians, children, women, and the elderly. It has destroyed most of Gaza, including buildings, infrastructure, hospitals, mosques, churches, schools, and universities and even towns and refugee camps. The Israeli genocide includes starving those residents (mainly children) of Gaza who Israel has not murdered yet, to death. Israel has, during its genocide, committed every kind of war crimes imaginable, from forced displacement to ethnic cleansing.
In his statements, after meeting with Netanyahu, President Trump tried very hard to paint the new American plan with rosy hues, but he did not hesitate to threaten and intimidate the colonized and genocided Palestinians, further showing full support for genocidal Israel.
He urged the genocidal power to "get the job done," i.e., finish the genocide as quickly as possible.
He has given Hamas “three or four days” to respond to his “peace plan for Gaza” and warned that it will ‘pay in hell’ if it rejects the deal!
As Palestinian commentator Mouni Rabbani puts it: “Deradicalization is the word of the day. Not of Israel, its genocidal apartheid regime, and the fanatic society that sustains it and drives it to ever greater extremes. But of the Palestinians it has dispossessed, of those who have lived under its jackboot for almost eight decades, and particularly of Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip that has experienced two years of genocide.”
Furthermore, Trump made an effort to transform Netanyahu from a war criminal convicted under international law into a "warrior" and a partner of the United States in “peacemaking”!
Netanyahu, for his part, did not hesitate to bare his teeth against the Palestinian people in general and the people of Gaza in particular, claiming similar enthusiasm for a plan that, in fact, entirely aligns with his personal agenda, despite being claimed to be an American creation.
Needless to say, every single point of the 20-point plan will require successive rounds of negotiations and sub-negotiations, which will be fruitless not only because of the internal contradictions that are formulated in a manner that hinders practical implementation, but also because Netanyahu and his most right-wing, racist, and fascist government in the history of the country will not hesitate to invent obstacles to implementing the plan.
The series of facts about the contexts that prompted the Trump administration to present this plan at this particular time will also be revealed, as Trump is desperate to provide all the reasons available to his administration in order to secure himself the Nobel Peace Prize. If this happens, it will be the Joke of the Century!
But more importantly, what worries Trump and Netanyahu are the fundamental shifts in international public opinion regarding apartheid Israel and its war of extermination in the Gaza Strip. They are also very concerned, and to some extent, about the wave of recognition of a Palestinian state by many superpowers, and worried too about the abject failure of Israel to achieve any of the objectives declared by Netanyahu.
Nevertheless, what the genocidal Israeli killing machine has been unable to achieve since October 2023, it will not be able to impose on the ground through terms that claim to aspire to “peace” but only perpetuate the Israeli war on the Palestinian people. The imperialist powers have come to the conclusion that “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born.”
The polarization between two worlds has never been more obvious: the world of governments representing a minority of political elites and their allies, and the world of the peoples. The latter is on our side, the right side of history.
HAIDAR EID is a Palestinian scholar from Gaza. The views expressed here are the writer’s own.
