Reject Trump’s neo-colonial plan for Gaza

The United States is the main reason Israel has been able to continue its genocide in Gaza for two years.

Not only has it provided lethal weapons and intelligence to Israel, it has given it political cover and engineered a pact between the Gulf States, Israel and itself to weaken Palestine, if not ethnically cleanse it.

The “new” US-brokered plan, announced by President Donald Trump with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on September 29, is a version of Trump's extremist “Gaza Riveria” plan.

While it is sufficiently vague on some aspects of the ceasefire, it contains enough detail to see the plan is for a neo-colonial takeover of Gaza, with Trump at the helm of a “Board of Peace”, alongside war criminal and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

No Palestinian governing organisation was consulted, yet most Arab governments have responded positively to this plan. However, after two years of resistance to a genocidal war machine and even as war weariness bites hard, Hamas still commands political support in the Gaza Strip.

While the Palestinian Authority (PA) has welcomed the plan, other Palestinian parties, such as the Palestinian People’s Party and the Popular Front of the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) do not. The latter described it as a “surrender formula that legitimises the occupation”. PFLP Political Bureau member Ahmad Abu Al-Saud told the Quds Network that the resistance would fight for conditions that “guarantee Palestinian rights, genuine reconstruction and the lifting of the siege”.

Bassam Al-Salhi, General Secretary of the Palestinian People’s Party and member of the PLO Executive Committee, said it is urgent to stop Israel’s genocide “without accepting any political dictates that aim to liquidate the rights of the Palestinian people”. The Trump plan, he said, is “designed to eliminate the Palestinian cause by isolating Gaza, erasing the PLO’s representation, abolishing the refugee question and consolidating annexation in the West Bank”.

Mustafa Barghouti, Palestinian MP and secretary general of the Palestine National Initiative, condemned Trump’s “ultimatum”, adding there is no guarantee Netanyahu would stick to the plan, even after having Trump make “key edits” since it was first floated with several Arab governments.

“This plan … ignores completely the root causes of the problem, the root causes of what led to the 7th of October, the root causes that led to this war. And that is, in particular, the Israeli military occupation,” Barghouti said.

Trump’s plan excludes Hamas from any role in a future transitional or elected government — a fundamental question for Western governments, including Australia, that claim to support Palestinian self-determination and statehood.

Just as the colonialist British 1917 Balfour Declaration, which declared a homeland for Jews on already occupied Palestinian land, with a “mandate system” of administrators chosen from the winners from the break-up of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, the Trump plan bestows Gaza’s “redevelopment” on his handpicked “Board of Peace”.

This interim governing body has no time frame. It will also depend on “the Palestinian Authority [having] completed its reform program, as outlined in various proposals, including President Trump’s peace plan in 2020 and the Saudi-French proposal, and can securely and effectively take back control of Gaza”, the plan states.

Trump’s 2020 plan, authored by his son in law, was his first attempt at assisting Israel in its plan to recolonise Palestine, dressed up as defending Israel’s “security”. It involved moving Palestine’s capital away from East Jerusalem and allowing Zionist settlers to continue to occupy parts of the West Bank, in defiance of international law.

PA leader Mahmoud Abass said in 2020 that plan was the “slap of the century” and Hamas rejected it out of hand. B’Tselem (The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories) said at the time that Palestinians were being offered “a permanent state of apartheid”.

This time around, however, the PA has said it is ready to engage positively with the US and all parties to “find a path toward peace” and “a modern, democratic, and non-militarised Palestinian state, committed to pluralism and the peaceful transfer of power”.

At the time of writing, Hamas had yet to formally respond. But veteran Hamas official Mohammad Nazzal told Drop Site News on October 2 that Trump is “dealing with us as if we have to accept this plan based on the well-known English phrase: Take it or leave it. This is unacceptable in political practice. It cannot be a matter of either accepting or rejecting an agreement outright. This plan was formulated without the participation of Hamas or any Palestinian party, including the Palestinian Authority. So how can the US administration reach an agreement with one side of the conflict while excluding the Palestinian side?”

A senior figure told the BBC the plan “serves Israel’s interests” and is likely to reject the deployment of an International Stabilisation Force in Gaza, which it views as a new form of occupation.

The global streets are demanding an end to the genocide in Gaza, ratcheting up the pressure over two years on Western leaders to stop supplying Israel with military hardware and political cover. The Palestinian resistance has lasted a lot longer than Israel calculated. But these two forces, together, have not delivered enough pressure on global imperialism to dump apartheid Israel.

Instead, this neo-colonial plan, which Australian Labor supports, looks unlikely to end the hot war in Gaza any time soon and does not a present a pathway for a future democratic Palestinian state in the Middle East.

For any real peace plan, Palestinians need to be in the driver’s seat.

Blair, Trump and Netanyahu must not be allowed to decide the future of Gaza. That is up to the people of Palestine.

This means that the global Palestine solidarity movement, which has won hearts and minds, has to continue to fight for a free Palestine, from the river to the sea.

[Pip Hinman is a member of the Socialist Alliance National Executive.]