Don't Be Fooled: The Trump 'Peace Plan' Is Just Genocide Under a Different Name
The genocide in Gaza has not ended, but has taken on a different form.
The Trump peace scheme is not an imperfect plan that at least ends the genocide in Gaza. It is in fact a new plan to continue the genocide using a different strategy. It poses a mortal threat to the survival of Palestinians in Gaza. However this plan is not being implemented in isolation from the massive Israeli attack on Palestinians in the West Bank, but in conjunction with it. We are now witnessing, not merely a messy and complicated ceasefire in Gaza and stepped up attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank. Rather, we are witnessing a coordinated 2-pronged attack to destroy the very idea of Palestine. As a result we need to move from targeting the Gaza genocide as separate from what’s being done in the rest of Palestine to a focus on both Palestinian self-determination and opposing ongoing efforts to erase the reality of Palestinians as a people. To repeat: we must now insist on the national rights of Palestinians to live in a Palestine shaped by their own hands – and to counterpose that insistence to the Trump-Netanyahu plans being implemented throughout Palestine to savage Palestinians and destroy their existence as a people.
Gaza
Trump’s peace plan for Gaza is of course absurd. The Palestinians played no role in creating it. The country that has been committing an internationally recognized genocide is now going to “temporarily” occupy more than 50% of the territory on which it has carried out that genocide. And the President of the country who teamed up with Israel to commit that genocide is the Chairman of something bizarrely named the “Board of Peace”. As such he is given the power to oversee all aspects of Gaza’s future including an international “peacekeeping” military force and the appointment of Palestinians he judges should temporarily administer Gaza while Israeli troops directly occupy most of the area. The only party to be disarmed is the Palestinian resistance to the genocide.
On paper there was at least to be a ceasefire. But instead we see the Israeli military killing Palestinians on a daily basis. At the same time they violate their obligation to allow sufficient food, medicine and other basics of life to be brought in to Gaza by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) as Israel creates all kinds of barriers to sufficient aid reaching the people. In addition the Israelis have blown up 1500 more buildings in the area of Gaza allotted to them and are taking over parts of Gaza beyond the area given to them in the plan. Nothing gets in the way of Israel doing whatever it wants.
In the ultimate act of betrayal, the United Nations security council has turned over the future of Gaza, not to Palestinians, but to Israel, Trump and his investors. Yet this brute reality is not seen clearly by most of the world. It is now our movement’s job to take on this plan directly and create a counter narrative that explains the continuing genocide and the need to immediately rise up in opposition to it. If the millions of people who rose up against the genocide in the past saw this plan for what it is, instead of seeing it as something that might benefit the Palestinians, they would increasingly roar their opposition.
The West Bank
In the West Bank the escalating violence includes land theft, murders, the expulsion of farmers from their fields, uprooting trees, burning home and cars, and systematic attacks during the olive harvests – a central source of their livelihoods. All this to lay the ground for almost complete ethnic cleansing and a vast expansion of Israeli settlements. The ultimate goal is to turn the West Bank into a part of greater Israel.
Meanwhile thousands of Palestinians from both areas are “interred” in the Israeli Gulag of torture centers where unspeakable conditions are just as bad—or even worse–than those at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison.
In short, we are seeing a wave of expulsions, arrests and murders by Israeli settlers and soldiers in the West Bank in combination with post-ceasefire killings, demolitions and restrictions on food, medicine and shelter in Gaza. The goal of these tactics is the same as that of the genocidal military operations and food blockade during the first 2 years of Israeli rampage that has left Gaza in ruins:The end of Palestine.
We must now shift our focus from Gaza alone to the preservation of Palestine, as Palestinians and their aspirations for freedom are under deadly attack throughout their country. We must educate the public on how the genocide in Gaza has not ended, but has taken on a different form, while Israel’s goal of eliminating the possibility of Palestinian life has broadened to include the West Bank.