What was unveiled in Washington was not a peace plan, but a parody of one. Dressed in the language of statesmanship, the Trump-Netanyahu proposal is, in essence, an elaborate script for surrender. It is the culmination of a colonial logic that has long sought to decide the fate of a people without their consent, and this week’s spectacle was its most brazen performance yet.
There was President Donald Trump, beaming beside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, thanking him for “agreeing” to a plan that their own circles largely drafted. The glaring absence on that stage was the most telling detail of all: the Palestinian people. No Hamas, no Palestinian Authority—not even a token presence to lend the charade a veneer of credibility. They were, as they have so often been, ghosts at their own funeral, their future being bartered away by the very powers that have dispossessed them.
This is the same logic that birthed the Abraham Accords: the illusion of peace forged by striking deals over Palestine without Palestinians. It is a peace that celebrates normalization while ignoring occupation; that parrots reconciliation while systematically excluding the only voices with the right to speak for the Palestinian nation. This is not negotiation; it is imposition.
A History of Eliminating, Not Negotiating
Netanyahu’s strategy has been chillingly consistent. His policy is not to outmaneuver his adversaries at the table, but to eliminate the table itself. From the assassination campaigns targeting Hamas leaders like Ismail Haniyeh to the targeted killings of negotiators in Doha as they sat to discuss earlier drafts, his intent is clear: eliminate the negotiators, eliminate the negotiations, and then stand beside a complicit Washington to announce a unilaterally crafted “solution.”
To dignify this spectacle, a host of Arab and Muslim leaders were summoned—not to defend Palestinian rights, but to pressure Palestinians into relinquishing them. Their assigned role was to serve as Trump and Netanyahu’s moral cover; their duty, not to shield Palestine from injustice, but to shove it towards submission. Netanyahu himself crowed in astonishment: “Who could believe it?” He was right to be amazed. The sight of Muslim regimes providing the fig leaf for a Israeli diktat is a profound betrayal, a stark symbol of a geopolitical order prioritizing stability over justice.
The Hollow Core of the “Deal”
Strip away the theatre, and the plan is exposed as thin gruel. Its one concrete item—the return of hostages—is a humanitarian imperative cynically leveraged as a political bargaining chip. Everything else is smoke and mirrors. There are no guarantees of permanent Israeli withdrawal, no binding commitments to end the blockade, no viable pathway to sovereignty. Only vague promises and phased “maybe’s,” all while Israeli troops remain entrenched and settlement expansion continues unabated.
What Trump offered Netanyahu was not a compromise, but a victory lap—the very victory he failed to achieve through two years of bombs, sieges, and massacres. Israel failed to crush Gaza’s spirit. It failed to break the Palestinian will for self-determination. This deal is an attempt to conjure through diplomatic alchemy what could not be won on the battlefield.
The Rising Tide They Fear
But Israel is not triumphant; it is increasingly isolated. Recall the image at the United Nations: Netanyahu at the podium, declaiming to a hall from which 77 delegations had walked out in protest. This isolation is not merely diplomatic; it is moral. Polls across Europe and the United States show public opinion, particularly among younger generations, tilting decisively against the Israeli project and toward Palestinian solidarity. The tide of global conscience is swelling, powered by boycotts, relentless protests, and an unassailable narrative of resistance.
This is the true aim of the deal: to break that tide. To smother the momentum of a global movement by replacing Palestinian agency with an imposed guardianship—a “Board of Peace” chaired by Trump and overseen by figures like Tony Blair, a man whose colonial delusions and blood-soaked record in Iraq disqualify him from administering a schoolyard, let alone the future of Gaza. This is not peace; it is the Gaza Humiliation Foundation writ large, the same machinery of external control dressed in humanitarian jargon.
As Egypt’s former UN delegate Motaz Khalil rightly stated, this is nothing but a “surrender plan.” It seeks to silence Palestinians, strip them of legitimate representation, and hand Netanyahu the absolute victory he promised his far-right base but failed to secure with tanks and F-35s.
The Unyielding Conscience
History will not be kind to this moment. A ceasefire plan that excludes the occupied is not a peace plan; it is a colonial diktat. It is the language of mandates and tutelage, revived for the 21st century. It is the same arrogant conceit that promised away Palestinian land in the Balfour Declaration of 1917, that drew lines on maps in distant capitals, that has always treated the native as a problem to be managed rather than a people with inalienable rights.
Trump and Netanyahu can draft as many decrees as they please in their sealed conference rooms. But outside those walls, the world is shifting. Millions march in cities from London to Jakarta. Academic and cultural boycotts deepen. The moral arc of the universe, though long, is bending. No paper agreement, no matter how grandly unveiled, can stem this tide. For in its relentless struggle for dignity, Palestine has transcended its geography. It is no longer just a cause; it has become the conscience of the world. And a conscience, once awakened, cannot be negotiated away.
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