The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Tuesday, September 30, 2025

Editorial Notebook: Like Genesis, in the beginning of the Trump plan for peace in Gaza there is light, or the semblance of light, an oddly reasonable slant of light: end hostilities, return all hostages dead or alive, release 250 Palestinians under life sentences (Marwan Barghouti should be at the top of that list), redevelop Gaza for the people of Gaza, “who have suffered more than enough,” let Hamas members stay who want to stay (disarmed), let those leave who want to leave, full aid allowed back in and through the UN and Red Crescent, not Israel or Hamas. Then comes the punchline: while Gaza will be “under the temporary transitional governance of a technocratic, apolitical Palestinian committee,” the committee–to be called “Board of Peace”–will be chaired by Trump, with “other members and heads of State to be announced, including Former Prime Minister Tony Blair.” Some of them may or may not be called Sykes, Picot and Balfour. The plan suggests the Palestinians can take back control at an unspecified point, but we heard that in 1967 and 1993, too. That segment is prefaced by lines like this: “A Trump economic development plan to rebuild and energize Gaza will be created by convening a panel of experts who have helped birth some of the thriving modern miracle cities in the Middle East.” This line is interesting: “No one will be forced to leave Gaza, and those who wish to leave will be free to do so and free to return.” Free travel: an end to Gaza as the world’s largest prison, alongside the West Bank. Also: an International Stabilization Force to be deployed but its makeup is unspecified. “Israel will not occupy or annex Gaza,” a line slipped in there to ensure the kind of poisoned pill Netanyahu needs to refuse the deal (it’s not Hamas you have to worry about). This, too, is almost lovely: “An interfaith dialogue process will be established based on the values of tolerance and peaceful coexistence to try and change mind-sets and narratives of Palestinians and Israelis by emphasizing the benefits that can be derived from peace.” But maybe too lovely, too idealistic, and oddly un-Trump. Some of these lines make you wish he applied the same principles in the United States. But it reads too much like a ploy, a 22-point Wilsonian 14 points that borrows pages from the French and British mandates that got us here, and that leaves entirely silent the most salient issues of all: Palestinian independence, an independent Palestinian state, and the same principles applied to the West Bank. 

—P.T.

“But the principal dogmas of Orientalism exist in their purest form today in studies of the Arabs and Islam. Let us recapitulate them here: one is the absolute and systematic difference between the West, which is rational, developed, humane, superior, and the Orient, which is aberrant, undeveloped, inferior. Another dogma is that abstractions about the Orient, particularly those based on texts representing a “classical” Oriental civilization, are always preferable to direct evidence drawn from modern Oriental realities. A third dogma is that the Orient is eternal, uniform, and incapable of defining itself; therefore it is assumed that a highly generalized and systematic vocabulary for describing the Orient from a Western standpoint is inevitable and even scientifically “objective.” A fourth dogma is that the Orient is at bottom something either to be feared (the Yellow Peril, the Mongol hordes, the brown dominions) or to be controlled (by pacification, research and development, outright occupation whenever possible).”

–From Edward Said’s Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (1978).

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