Trump's 'Peace Plan' is hopelessly corrupted by failure to acknowledge Gaza is Palestinian
An Israeli army shelling in Nuseirat, central Gaza Strip, on Saturday. In spite of the conduct of its genocide in full public view, the West seems set on putting Israel’s interests ahead of those whom it has witnessed being subjected to a callous massacre. Photo: AP/Abdel Kareem Hana
Last week’s peace plan announced by president Donald Trump in the presence of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, betrayed, again, the hopelessness of Palestine’s cause.
Two years into Israel’s genocide, 57 years into its illegal occupation of Palestine and vicious oppression of its people, it is Israel that gets to set the terms of any ‘settlement’. Israel, which has slaughtered at least 75,000 Palestinians and most likely twice that number since October 2023, still has the West, especially the US, under its thumb.
President Trump’s singular ambition is to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize; prime minister Netanyahu’s is to avoid jail, either as a war criminal internationally or a petty criminal at home. Their plan made countless demands of Palestine, as has every US-initiated plan since the Six-Day War; yet again, a US administration’s approach started with the interests of Israel.
What would any Western nation make of a peace plan emanating from Washington that involved Russia and not Ukraine or that began with a commitment by Ukraine to demilitarise Crimea? That is akin to what is being asked of the Palestinians, specifically in clause one of the plan, that ‘Gaza will be a de-radicalised, terror-free zone that does not pose a threat to its neighbours’.
This does not refer to the status of Gaza as Palestinian or to the fact that it has been subject to an unprecedented bombardment and terror by the state of Israel for two years. It is a hopelessly corrupted basis on which to build anything, most especially a peace.
There is, however, a consistency to this. We know Israel’s genocide, which includes the slaughter of at least 20,000 children, was only possible because the West supplied it with armaments, knowingly backing the actions of the oppressor. We know Western powers were warned of Israel’s plan to induce a famine, ignoring the overwhelming evidence of that truth.
In all of this acquiescence to Israel’s demands, in the support of its genocide or a passivity of any objection to it, most of the West stands complicit in a false narrative that Israel still expounds — that the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, was the cause. It was not. The Hamas attack was brutal, but that it happened was inevitable.
A malevolent Israeli government, led by someone facing criminal trials, wanted to pursue the Zionist ambition of removing Palestine from the map. It had already significantly increased its campaign of terror in the West Bank, it had directly financed Hamas with hundreds of millions of dollars, and it chose to ignore the warnings of its own intelligence services and international agencies of an imminent attack.
We need to remember things as they were for Palestinians. Three months earlier, in July 2023, a UN report recorded that between the end of the Six-Day War in 1967 and that summer, Israel had incarcerated more than 800,000 Palestinian men, women and children from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
In 2023, Israeli NGOs said the country’s security services and prison service were arresting increasing numbers of innocent Palestinians, including hundreds of minors, and holding them without charge in appalling conditions. Legislation allows for the arrest of civilians on suspicion that they might break the law in the future, permitting their detention for at least six months.
Only 1% of complaints of abuses by Israeli forces filed by Palestinians in the West Bank between 2017 and 2021 had led to indictments.
These extraordinary levels of intimidation and aggression were part of why I’ve consistently written that to understand October 7, it’s essential to understand what life was like for Palestinians on October 6, 2023. Palestinians were without electricity for an average of 13 hours a day, and more than 96% of the groundwater in Gaza was considered ‘unfit for human consumption’.
Since 2014, Gaza’s farmers had suffered ecocide as Israel used airborne herbicides to destroy crops on any land that they could not bulldoze. Israel controlled the supply of food and other critical supplies, meaning that, before the Hamas attack, 80% of Gazans relied on humanitarian aid.
In the West Bank, Israel had supported the illegal settlement by its people and by Jewish immigrants of large tracts of Palestine. It built an extensive infrastructure there for the exclusive use of Jews, and in 2023, before October 7, Israel had killed 250 Palestinians, including almost 50 children, in its most aggressive settler push across the West Bank in two decades.
These were the life conditions for Palestinians two years ago.
Israel presented itself as ‘broken’, ‘shattered’, by an ‘act of terrorism’ so grievous that it had to respond swiftly and comprehensively. It continually dialled up the rhetoric about the level of threat posed by Hamas and played to the US obsession with Iran as though it provided some kind of security blanket against a perceived threat of Islamism.
Israel has nuclear weapons; Iran does not. Zionism is the threat not Iran. Israel is an ethnocracy not a democracy; an apartheid state whose conduct of the last two years has proven that it’s unworthy of the West’s support.
In spite of this, in spite of the conduct of its genocide in full public view, the West seems set on putting Israel’s interests ahead of those whom it has witnessed being subjected to a callous massacre. The West is again poised to give primacy to the interests of the coloniser.
The time to be hopeful will be when the first clause of a peace proposal is the establishment of an independent sovereign state of Palestine based on the pre-1967 borders. Not before!
- Fintan Drury is a former journalist and author of
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