Donald Trump can kiss goodbye to his coveted Nobel prize after his proposer for the award, the genocidal Binyamin Netanyahu, ensured his Gaza peace plan was designed to fail. In a stroke inspired more by witchcraft than state craft, the Israeli prime minister has duped the vainglorious leader of the free world into thinking his “eternal peace” document is not what it actually is – a licence to continue the genocide.
Practised ceasefire-buster Netanyahu appears to have inserted enough loopholes to allow Israel to break this one too, once the Israeli hostages are returned within the first 72 hours. The plan is a recipe for consolidating Israel’s power over Palestinians, making it nigh impossible for Hamas to accept. It evokes Michael Collins’s verdict on endorsing the Treaty as signing his own death warrant.
Reports of Trump and Netanyahu’s joint announcement in the White House have described the latter’s demeanour as “defeated”, but he was practically licking his lips when he vowed: “If Hamas rejects your plan, Mr President, or if they supposedly accept it and then do everything to counter it, then Israel will finish the job by itself.” Trump obligingly promised him America’s full support to do whatever it takes.
After leaving the White House on Monday, Netanyahu gloated in a social media video: “Now the whole world, including the Arab and Muslim world, is pressuring Hamas to accept the terms that we created together with Trump to bring back all the hostages – the living and the dead – while the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] stays in the majority of the Strip.”
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The omens looked dubious from the outset. There were no Palestinians at the negotiating table or in the White House for the announcement of what is, effectively, a surrender order. They were not given copies of the plan until after it was publicly unveiled. Their absence was accentuated by Trump’s roll call of kings, emirs and sheikhs in supportive Middle Eastern petrostates where his family business has lucrative investments.
[ What’s in Trump’s 20-point peace plan for Gaza, and will Hamas accept it?Opens in new window ]
Neither Trump nor Netanyahu mentioned the tens of thousands of Palestinian children who have been orphaned, made amputees, bombed, shot and starved to death by Israel. The Norwegian peace theorist Johan Galtung, who died last year, believed “peace is something you make with your adversaries, not your friends”. Rather than placating the enemy, the choreography was composed to alienate Palestinian rulers.
Trump did not even pretend to be an honest peace broker. During the no-questions announcement, he repeatedly referred to the Israeli hostages as “our hostages”. This on a day when American weaponry assisted Israel in killing dozens more Palestinians in Gaza, including four people shot dead while waiting for humanitarian aid. Meanwhile, centre stage at the White House, Netanyahu was making it explicit that, as far as he was concerned, the plan was not about achieving detente but total conquest. Addressing Trump, he said “we are taking the next steps to win the war”.
There are irresistible promises in the plan. Who could refuse to end the wholesale killing of men, women and children, or the repatriation of living and dead hostages to their families, or the reconstruction of a razed land where countless bodies lie buried beneath the rubble? Hamas knows that if it rejects the chance to save its compatriots after two years of hell on earth it will not be forgiven.
[ Netanyahu’s big lie is that ‘They’ are not really the same species as ‘Us’Opens in new window ]
Netanyahu has categorically ruled out a Palestinian state while insisting that his enemies must recognise his “Jewish state” and has asserted, without demur from Trump, that Israel will maintain security control of Gaza. After at least 66,000 people have been killed, more than 167,000 have been injured and the entire population has been forcibly displaced and traumatised, the vision they are being offered for their children’s future is no statehood, no guaranteed self-determination, and an enemy army patrolling them after massacring their people. That – or die.
Trump’s greed and vanity were easy plays for Netanyahu. All he had to do was dangle “the greatest day in the history of civilisation” deserving of the Nobel prize and a fat slice of the real estate action in rebuilding Gaza by making him chairman of the Board of Peace. A “confidential” document leaked to Australian broadcaster ABC envisages the appointment of various other foreign billionaires to that “transitional” governing board.
The reward for Netanyahu is his own political skin. Wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity, the plane carrying him to the US had to dodge the airspace of countries willing to arrest him and, when he arrived, most of the audience in the UN assembly hall walked out for his speech. With several countries formally recognising a Palestinian state and others threatening to boycott the Eurovision Song Contest if Israel participates, Netanyahu needed a – literally – foolproof plan to get the US back on his side. On the New York pavement outside the UN building, somebody had painted a warning to Trump not to be fooled by the Israeli leader again.
Netanyahu and Trump are evil twins with a shared penchant for trying to rig their judiciaries, flouting the law and being hauled before the courts, but only one of them is an evil genius.
Even after his 11th-hour editing of the 20-point plan’s clauses on Hamas decommissioning and the IDF’s perpetual presence in Gaza, Netanyahu continued setting the bar for Palestinians ever higher during the joint announcement. The PA, he said, must “genuinely” transform before it can be allowed to run Gaza in the long term. Among the reforms he demands are “stopping incitement in the media [and] ending law-fare against Israel at the ICC and ICJ”, the international criminal and justice courts, as well as “changing poisonous textbooks that teach hatred of Jews to Palestinian children”. There is no quid pro quo requirement to rescind the ban on the word “Nakba” – the 1948 Catastrophe in Palestinian history – in Arab schoolbooks in Israel.
Leaders of other countries have welcomed the peace plan for fear of saying anything that could jeopardise even the tiniest sliver of hope for an end to the horrendous slaughter in Gaza. But this plan’s chance of success is diminished by all the evidence that the lives its two chief architects care most about are their own.
