Colin Sheridan: Under Trump's plan, a VIP lounge of powerful nations is carving up Palestine
The UN Security Council. Colin Sheridan writes that powerful nations are gathering around the Trump Peace Plan for Gaza 'like men at a yacht club discussing how best to divide a coastline they’ve never actually visited'. File picture: Evan Schneider/UN/AP
There are many moments in world history when you can pinpoint the exact second humanity appears to abandon its last functioning brain cell. In the past, these moments came with trumpets, horsemen, or at the very least, a telegram. Today they arrive via incoherent verbal diarrhoea on Truth Social.
Such was the case with the recently-unveiled Trump Peace Plan for Gaza, which — in an act of celestial mischief — was presented as though it had been forged in the fires of wisdom rather than hammered together by a cabal of clowns who confuse empathy with weakness and cartography with wish fulfilment. If ever there existed a document that deserved to be printed on novelty toilet paper, this was it.
The plan is many things — misguided, morally corrupt, geopolitically illiterate — but above all, it is an abomination for the Palestinian people. One assumes when its authors drafted it, they did so with the same energy as someone assembling flat-pack furniture without instructions: loudly, confidently, and incorrectly.
But perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. After all, the plan’s spiritual home is the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), an institution that increasingly resembles an Epstein Island of nations — a sun-bleached VIP lounge of the powerful, where some are horribly complicit, others merely guilty by association, and all carry themselves with the casual arrogance of people who believe accountability is something that happens to other countries.
Like any exclusive island retreat frequented by the rich and entitled, the UNSC is full of states that treat moral scrutiny the way one treats the help at a family picnic: Inconvenient, ignorable, and best swatted away.
Of course, unlike Epstein’s notorious island, the Security Council doesn’t offer massages by minors — but it does specialise in its own form of ethical gymnastics, the kind that leaves civilian populations crushed underfoot while the council’s permanent members sip cocktails and debate which populations deserve rights this fiscal quarter.
The parallels are uncomfortable, but instructive: Power, when self-policed, becomes a self-serve buffet of catastrophe.
Into this tropical archipelago of geopolitical ego arrives Donald Trump — a man who could stroll through a library and emerge dumber — bearing a “peace plan” that appears to have been constructed by holding a map of the Middle East upside down while blindfolded.
It promises “opportunity”, “renewal”, and “security”, which in diplomatic terms translates to: We’ve found a way to give one side everything and the other side a bloodied, commemorative bookmark.
The plan reads less like an agreement and more like a LinkedIn love letter to perverted ego.
One can imagine Trump, Sharpie in hand, circling Gaza like a man assessing a derelict golf course: Needs a few luxury villas, maybe a casino, and definitely a wall. A big wall. With decorative suffering. And who nods along? Why, the island guests, of course. Nations with vetoes larger than their moral horizons. Countries who consider themselves above reproach because they have permanent seats and flags that flutter handsomely.
They gather around the proposal like men at a yacht club discussing how best to divide a coastline they’ve never actually visited.
Some, undoubtedly, know the plan is nonsense — but like guests on Epstein’s flight logs who claim they “didn’t notice anything unusual,” they maintain their innocence through the ancient art of strategic blindness. We saw nothing. We questioned nothing. We assumed everything was fine because the champagne was cold and the air conditioning worked.
Others are happily complicit, recognising that a weakened, disfigured, and ultimately homeless Palestine suits their interests perfectly. They lean back, feet up, and congratulate one another on another year of successful global mismanagement.
But what of the Palestinians? Well, according to the plan, they are to be reassured that peace is on the horizon — a horizon that moves further away the closer they crawl toward it. They must accept “conditions”, “expectations”, and “transitions”, all of which are international-relations code for: “Do as you’re told and we might murder fewer of your children.”
It is, in essence, a peace plan that requires only one group to sacrifice, and it is the group already living in squalor and rubble.
This is the problem with power: It assumes its own virtue.
The Security Council sits on its own island bought with blood money, perched atop its moral high stool, ladling judgement upon the world while ignoring the grease dripping from its own chin.
Like the wealthy acquaintances of Epstein who insisted their proximity to horror didn’t mean they were involved, the great powers insist their fingerprints on global disasters are mere coincidence. Purely for administrative purposes. Nothing more.
But both stories — Epstein’s and the UNSC’s — are reminders of the same uncomfortable truth: Power should never be trusted simply because it looks expensive. It must be questioned, prodded, dragged kicking and screaming into daylight. Otherwise, it will continue behaving like a man who boards the plane of a renowned child abuser, certain they will never have to answer for their choices.
The Palestinian people deserve more than this immoral farce.
They deserve more than a plan drafted by men who see suffering as a negotiable clause. And they certainly deserve better than the sanctimonious applause of island nations who mistake their own privilege for wisdom.
When history writes this chapter, it will not remember the plan as a diplomatic achievement. It will remember it as yet another entry in humanity’s flightlog of preventable tragedies — authored by people who mistook stolen power for permission.
And if we are wise, we will treat it as a warning: Never trust the island.
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