Trump’s 'peace plan' is a repackaged demand for Palestinian surrender

The Israeli-US vision for Palestinians has long been capitulation, and two years of genocide in Gaza offer a new opportunity to impose it.

(Photo by ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images)

Given the scale of Palestinian suffering in Gaza after two years of Israeli mass murder and starvation sieges, Hamas may have no choice but to accept the ultimatum handed down by President Trump. Yet whatever comes of the ceasefire talks underway in Egypt, Trump’s proposals should not be seen as a “peace plan.” Instead, the Trump administration seeks the full surrender not just of Hamas, but of the struggle for Palestinian self-determination.

If Hamas releases all remaining Israeli captives, the Trump plan says, Israeli bombing will be “suspended.” Yet nothing prevents Israel from resuming its wanton aggression. And while the plan asserts that “Israel will not occupy or annex Gaza,” it establishes loopholes by tying Israeli withdrawal to undefined “standards, milestones, and timeframes linked to demilitarization.” At best, this would mean Israel handing over control to an Arab League-adjacent “temporary International Stabilisation Force (ISF)”, but only in areas deemed by Israel to be “terror-free.” Meanwhile, Israel will establish a “security perimeter presence” that will endure “until Gaza is properly secure from any resurgent terror threat” – a condition that Israel could perpetually claim is unmet.

Israeli officials have repeatedly defined all Palestinians in Gaza as legitimate military targets, including in the ongoing destruction of Gaza City, where Defense Minister Israel Katz declared that all residents “who stay... will be [treated as] terrorists and terror supporters.” Accordingly, Trump’s provisions offer Palestinians no protection from continued Israeli terror in the name of fighting it.

To cement Israel’s monopoly on violence, the plan insists that Hamas and other Palestinian factions in Gaza disarm. This would leave Palestinians even more defenseless against a state that has slaughtered (at minimum) tens of thousands in Gaza, carries out routine attacks in the West Bank, on top of a long history of atrocities dating back to its founding in 1948. The September 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacres in Lebanon remain vivid in Palestinian memory. Back then, Israel’s allies in Lebanon, with the Israeli army’s protection, massacred between 2,000 and 3,500 Palestinian refugees after the PLO withdrew from Beirut – based on the false Israeli assurance that no civilians would face harm once they left.

The Trump plan does acknowledge that Israeli claims about providing aid to Gaza are entirely fraudulent. “Upon acceptance of this agreement,” it says, “full aid will be immediately sent into the Gaza Strip.” This is a tacit admission that Israel, contrary to its debunked lies about Hamas stealing food, has blocked full aid to Gaza, and could immediately end the starvation siege if the US president wanted it to.

The plan also calls for the eventual resumption of aid via the United Nations. This is another tacit admission that Israeli-US claims about a corrupted, terror-compromised UN aid system, which necessitated the Israeli-US-run Gaza Humanitarian Foundation in its place, was another fabrication. And all of this will be overseen by a new “transitional” authority involving former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, whose own longstanding colonial blueprint for Gaza heavily inspired Trump’s plan. Fittingly, the Trump plan makes no mention of the West Bank, a de-facto endorsement of continued Israeli land theft, and the geographic and political separation of the Israeli-ruled Palestinian population.

When it comes to Palestinian self-determination, the plan offers no guarantees, just empty platitudes. “While Gaza re-development advances and when the PA [Palestinian Authority] reform programme is faithfully carried out,” it says, “the conditions may finally be in place for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood, which we recognise as the aspiration of the Palestinian people.” That PA “reform” process is described as having been “outlined” in “President Trump’s peace plan in 2020”, which instructed Palestinians to accept Israeli settlement blocs in the Occupied West Bank and abandon all efforts to uphold their rights under international law.

Note here that “Palestinian self-determination and statehood” is described as something to “recognize” as an “aspiration” – but not as a right. If one recognizes an aspiration, as opposed to a legally guaranteed right, one has no obligation to grant it. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been emphatic that the US will not do so. Asked on Sunday if the US now supports Palestinian statehood, Rubio replied: “We’ve always said that, that if there’s going to be a two-state solution, it has to be negotiated with Israel. It has to make sure that Israel’s security is taken into account... I wouldn’t say this is a new policy position.”

Rubio is correct. When it comes to Palestinian statehood, the US is not offering a new policy position, but reaffirming its longstanding opposition. In declaring that potential statehood “must be negotiated with Israel”, Rubio is telling Palestinians that their fate is in the hands of a military occupier whose leaders openly declare that there will never be a Palestinian state. “We are going to fulfill our promise that there will be no Palestinian state; this place belongs to us,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared last month, at ceremony marking the expansion of the E1 settlement bloc. Former Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz, a self-described critic of Netanyahu, recently observed that “opposition to... Palestinian statehood stands at the heart” of the Israeli “national consensus,” which is “rooted in the hard realities of our region.”

Within Israel, that opposition is so deep-rooted that even the Israeli leaders who pursed the so-called Oslo “peace process” used it to prevent a Palestinian state from being established. In the more than thirty years since Oslo was signed in 1993, the number of Israeli settlements and outposts in the occupied West Bank, which carve up Palestinian land and make any future state impossible, has more than doubled.

Thirty years ago this month, and just weeks before his assassination by an extreme-right wing Israeli, the Israeli architect of the Oslo accords, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, explained that Israel was seeking “an entity which is less than a state, and which will independently run the lives of the Palestinians under its authority.” Israel’s borders, he added, will incorporate the major West Bank settlement blocks, because “we will not return” to Israel’s pre-1967 lines. By granting Palestinians “less than a state,” Israeli legal advisor Joel Singer later explained, Oslo “leaves us with the territory and them with the populated areas... and it even leaves them with the dirty work of patrolling the cities and refugee camps.” Just as Trump and Netanyahu seek to do today.

Israel’s famed withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, falsely described as end to its occupation of the besieged enclave, was undertaken for similar reasons. Dov Weissglass, the chief of staff to then Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, explained the year prior that the Gaza withdrawal meant a “freezing of the political process,” whereby Israel could “prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state” and a “discussion about the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem.”

The Israeli leader who went the furthest in addressing Palestinian concerns, Ehud Olmert, was in reality offering nothing that he could follow through on. As veteran US-Palestinian negotiators Robert Malley and Hussein Agha recount in their new book on the post-Oslo diplomatic record, Olmert’s September 2008 “offer” to Palestinian counterpart Mahmoud Abbas was negated by his own legal troubles, a pending exit from power, and a cabinet that privately declared his overture to be dead on arrival:

The Israeli Prime Minister lacked the authority to make, sell, let alone implement, his concessions. His own ministerial colleagues deserted him; publicly, they continued the talks; backstage, they told another story. Olmert’s foreign minister advised the Palestinians not to be fooled; the prime minister’s ideas committed nobody but himself. Ehud Barak, now serving as defense minister, dismissed the talks as an academic seminar.

In short, before the current Israeli national consensus of opposing a Palestinian state, there were some leaders who preferred to pretend that one could be established. Two years of Israeli genocidal warfare in Gaza, along with attacks on deterrent forces in Lebanon, Syria, Iran, and Yemen, have made it easier for Israel’s government to abandon the ruse.

Meanwhile, the Gulf States, particularly Qatar and Saudi Arabia, no longer make any effort to use the limited leverage they have. In 2002, the Arab League offered Israel full normalization in return for a withdrawal from all Arab territories (Syrian, Lebanese, and Palestinian) that it occupied in 1967; the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, with East Jerusalem as its capital; and a “just resolution” to the refugee issue. (The initiative was subsequently endorsed by Iran and Hamas). Today, these same Gulf states focus on making lucrative side deals with Trump rather than championing their decades-old peace plan, which itself would be a massive compromise for Palestinians, who would be accepting just 22% of their stolen homeland and a Jewish supremacist state in the rest of it.

Like their more moderate predecessors, Trump and Netanyahu are not interested in compromise. The Israeli-US plan for Palestinians has long been surrender, and two years of genocide have given them a new opportunity to impose it.