Donald Trump must’ve been lusting for Oslo when he ordered the drafting of his seemingly bold peace plan for Gaza. The Nobel Peace Prize, the prize he’s been coveting with the lasciviousness of Solomon, is to be awarded next Friday. But as Lloyd Bentsen might remind him, he’s no Solomon. He needed a Hail Caesar pass, ignoring that when terrorists, murderers, dictators and warmongers like Henry Kissinger, Le Duc Tho, Menahem Begin and Yasser Arafat won theirs, it was after signing the semblance of agreements, however worthless most of those turned out to be.
The cheery Trump plan is essentially in the style of his birthday wish to Jeffrey Epstein–long on wishes, winks and nudges, short on precision. It is a readaptation of the 1993 Oslo agreement that seemed so promising at the time, and whose most critical flaws–no timeline for a Palestinian state, no let-up on Israeli expropriation of Palestinian lands, no end to Israeli colonization and apartheid in the West Bank, and Yigal Amir–ensured its demise, seeding two uprisings and Israel’s forever war of extermination.
Still, if you look past the puerility of Trump’s language (“eternal peace,” “Board of Peace,” “one of the great days ever in civilisation”)[1] there are nuggets there.
There is the implicit call for an immediate cease-fire. No one can argue that. Hamas would be foolish to reject it, though Israel’s record of respecting ceasefires is too bloody to decipher.
The plan eliminates Israel’s endgame, which is (and I think remains) the killing of as many Palestinians as possible, the removal of the rest, and the annexation of Gaza’s 141 square miles.[2]
The plan says no to annexation, yes to rebuilding and even making Gaza a preferred trade zone, giving Gazans what appears to be the right of travel in and out of the Strip and self-policing under the Palestinian Authority, which controls a few square inches of the West Bank. It calls for an international force to keep the peace with Israel and for the United Nations to feed everyone, ending Israel’s method of making booby traps of feeding sites.
Not bad.
Hamas would have to release all hostages dead or alive, in exchange for the release of 1,700 Gazans held since Oct. 7, and on top of that, the release of 250 Palestinians sentenced to life. Again, not bad at all, though if Marwan Barghouti, a potential Mandela in the making if he seizes the opportunity, is not among the 250, you’ll know Israel is uninterested in peace.[3] Spoiler: we already know that. That’s why “Bibi”–now short for Butcher–Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, so readily accepted the plan. It cannot and will not withstand his plan to undermine every hint of peace with Hamas or any suggestion that Gaza is not to be annexed and the two-state solution kept buried.
As the New York Times reported in July (“How Netanyahu Prolonged the War in Gaza to Stay in Power”), Netanyahu’s history of war at any cost is well documented, not just since Oct. 7. Since he first took power 1996 he’s accelerated the unspoken Israeli policy of gradually squeezing Palestinians out of the West Bank and Gaza. He’s not about to stop, and certainly not at the cost of losing the coalition of extremist parties that have kept him in power in exchange for Ben Gurion’s vision of Greater Israel.
As always with American plans, Trump’s proposal exists as if history did not. It is more like a glossy business prospectus than a peace plan. You can see it in the language: “Gaza will be redeveloped for the benefit of the people of Gaza, who have suffered more than enough.” It’s a nice thought. But “suffered enough” is a euphemism that masks a genocide enabled by American taxpayers and weaponry, and the war-crime complicity of two presidents while indemnifying Israel.
The plan does not call for Israeli withdrawal even if Hamas signs. The Israeli military controls 82 percent of Gaza, leaving its 2.1 million inhabitants to a coastal sliver about the size of Flagler Beach, and maybe Beverly Beach. (Are you picturing this?) Israel would conduct an unspecified and limited retreat once the hostages are released, and another limited one when the multinational force arrives. As always with Israel, “retreat” is defined as Bill Clinton might define the verb “is.”
The plan says nothing about the West Bank, where it’s been colonists’ open season on Palestinians since Oct. 7. It says nothing about Netanyahu’s intention to keep Gaza split between north and south, further balkanizing any Palestinian aspiration toward cohesion. A further retreat is unspecified, and Israel is to keep what another euphemism calls a “security zone” all along the Gaza border, stealing Palestinian land for the purpose, not Israeli land.[4]
We’ve been there before in Lebanon, when Israel maintained its so-called “security zone” in South Lebanon for almost 20 years after its 1982 invasion (the disastrous invasion that got rid of the PLO to give birth to Hezbollah, massacring some 18,000 Lebanese along the way). The permanent occupation zone was a constant provocation and trigger of subsequent wars, until Israel came to its senses and withdrew in 2000, under pressure from the same Clinton, though it took a Rabin-like move by Ehud Barak, the last peace-minded Israeli prime minister, to do it.
In sum the Trump plan requires an unconditional surrender on Hamas’s part, though Israel has earned nothing close. Its offensive is at an impasse but for the continuing slaughter. Hamas is degraded. It isn’t defeated. Hamas has many reasons to surrender (and should surrender), but as Hamas sees it, not unconditionally. Not with Israel’s history of fecklessness. To pretend that that history does not exist is like pretending that gravity does not exist, that 110 years of western deception going back to the secret Sykes-Picot agreement that carved up the Middle East between Britain and France doesn’t exist, that the forced expulsions of 1948 and 1967, the ethnic cleansing of Arab villages in Israel proper never happened, that the systematic expropriation of Palestinian land in the West Bank officially by the Israeli government and unofficially by Israeli colonist-terrorists isn’t happening. Arab memory isn’t that shallow, nor that dumb.
But again: the Trump plan isn’t hopeless, and relative to the worthless peace initiatives to have come out of the White House since 2001, it is the best thing since, as long as it is taken as a starting point for negotiations, not a poisoned take-it-or-leave it threat.
Israeli withdrawal milestones must be spelled out in dates and mileposts. So must Palestinian self-rule in the middle run, and a pledge and a timeline toward a two-state solution in a long run measured in years, not decades–the sort of pledge that would win an immediate peace treaty with Saudi Arabia and all the other holdouts of the Middle East. Playing “Apprentice” with Trump as chairman of his “Peace Board” and Palestinians as pawns begs failure.
The United States has mediated successful peace agreements with some of the most notorious “terrorist” organizations of the last 50 years–Ireland’s IRA, Palestine’s PLO, the Balkans’ long list of cutthroats. Hamas is no different. Those agreements started with a willingness to negotiate from a point of relative equality, at least diplomatically, and a recognition that there are no military solutions. Trump’s mobster threat that Israel will “finish the job” if Hamas doesn’t unconditionally surrender ensures failure from the outset, and continued failure of Israel’s offensive in Gaza, genocidal results aside. There is no job to finish. Only lives. Two years of war and a death toll approaching 70,000 prove it.
Negotiations, on the other hand, could result in a perfectly imperfect peace that’ll make no one too happy–like Camp David in 1978, like Oslo in 1993, but without the fatal flaws, like the oversold and underperforming Abrams Accords in 2020–and that may be the best and the only possible breakthrough.
“`The sight you see before you at this moment was impossible, was unthinkable just two years ago,” Isaak Rabin said at the signing of the Oslo accords in 1995. “Only poets dreamed of it, and to our great pain, soldiers and civilians went to their death to make this moment possible.” Arafat, who had called it the “peace of the brave,” sat nearby. “We who have killed–and have been killed – are walking beside you now toward a common future. We want you as good neighbors,” Rabin told his former enemy.
Four weeks later Rabin was assassinated for those words–shot in the back–by Yigal Amir, an Israeli fanatic who’d been inspired at the funeral of Baruch Goldstein, an Israeli terrorist who murdered 29 Palestinian worshippers in a mosque in Hebron, and who, in death, was subsequently glorified and sainted by his followers, his grave a shrine to this day (sounds creepily familiar, doesn’t it.)
Rabin’s death took any hopes of making good on Oslo with him. Here’s another chance. And with it, if he takes it in earnest and drops the theatrics, Trump’s guarantee of a Nobel, which even I would applaud.
But who are we kidding.
Pierre Tristam is the editor of FlaglerLive. A version of this piece airs on WNZF.
Notes and amplifications
[1] The language brings to mind the nonsense of another captain of industry pretending to save the world’s problems in another age: Henry Ford in 1915 sailed his “Peace Ship” to Europe, promising an end to World War I and “get the boys home by Christmas.” Woodrow Wilson and the media were too cynical about it but so was Ford, who abandoned ship soon after it docked in Oslo–where the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded–and returned Stateside as if it had all been a marketing ploy to sell a new tractor he was launching (he marketed it at his only news conference in Oslo). Ford, too, minted his own coins, enriched himself on the spoils of World War I and, likely thinking there are fine people on both sides, became one of Hitler’s closest pals. And yet the armistice of 1918, 15 million deaths later, had a lot in common with the proposal the Peace Ship had carried.
[2] I never tire of reminding my Flagler County audience: that’s the size of Bunnell, and not much larger than Palm Coast’s 95 square miles. If you’re scoring at home, that means, as of now, that Israel has massacred the entirety of Palm Coast’s population from State Road 100 north (65,000 people) and maimed or wounded twice as many Palm Coasters (170,000) while making uninhabitable 92 percent of homes.
[3] Marwan Barghouti is serving five life sentences, not for killing anyone, but for allegedly creating the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, the Palestinian militia styled after the Jewish Irgun, Lehi and Haganah, the paramilitary terrorist militias of Mandate Palestine that merged into what Israel calls the Israeli Defense Force after 1948. Today’s Jewish paramilitraries terrorize and murder Palestinians under the banner of Hilltop Youth with impunity identical to white terrorism under Jim Crow.
[4] When Israel built the wall between the West Ban and Israel, 85 percent of the wall was built on West Bank land, and Israel stole 130,000 acres of Palestinian land, according to B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization. Land expropriation is an Israeli method since 1948, accelerating over the years. Since the Oct. 7 attack, profiting from diverted eyes, Israel has stolen and annexed more Palestinian land in the West Bank than in the previous 30 years.
JimboXYZ says
Regardless, he has done more in just 9 months than Biden-Harris ever did. Hamas, the moment Trump is out in 2029 will go back on their agreements. That’s just the nature of the beast that is terrorism. Trump may not have ended it in 2 days or whatever the timeframe was that he said it would be resolved in. But let’s face it, Biden was getting nowhere, everyone that has been a casualty would’ve been that casualty if Biden-Harris-Walz won in 2024 to get 4 more years. Hate Trump all you want, but there are some things when dealing with terrorists that simply are wishful Biden thinking that has led this nation to what is going on. What happens when there is peace in the Middle East ? Maybe the campus protestors will have to go to class & learn what they went to a USA University to do in the 1st place ? Imagine that ?
Lynne says
Yes, it all sounds very nice but no specifics and no timeline. I think Donny pushed this through in order to say he has presented a plan before the Nobel Peace Prize is announced – he is still campaigning for that! And the campaigning is one very good reason to NOT give him that award!
Little of the other peace processes he claims have been due to him and on the opposite side of the coin, he has essentially declared war on Venezuela on the pretext of obliterating those four boats and all on board. How does he even know those were Venezuelan citizens?!?!?!? I spent time in that area and others have fast boats -the Trinis, the Grenadians, etc.
Jack Howell says
Pierre,
Excellent comments! However, your last sentence, “But who are we kidding?” says it all.
Laurel says
My Republican husband hates that fist Trump makes. It’s the Trump version of a Nazi salute, make no mistake.
I hate to say this, but Netanyahu makes Jews look bad. American Jews should be pissed! I mean, we have, for decades, learned of the horrible stories of Nazi Germany, and how the Jews, along with others, were exterminated in cold blood. Now, Netanyahu is neutralizing that sympathy.
Years ago, I went to work at a Jewish subdivision’s club in Boca Raton. I thought it would be fine, working for people who suffered prejudice. You know, like there would be more empathy. Holy beans, man, no! They preach superiority too! Literally.
Humans are humans, no matter the land, the religion or the philosophy. I only accept individuals, one at a time by learning their heart. That “heart of gold” that Young sings about, is a rare thing.
Allyn Susan Feinsetin says
It’s so sad that the residents of that Jewish subdivision in Bioca Raton didn’t live up to “Laurel’s” expectations and standards. One might ask, what does that have to do with this particular conflict–which was started by a genocidal attack upon Jews on a Sabbath, during a Jewish Holy day?
Sherry says
@allyn. . . Your comment sounds a bit childish . . . like saying “they started it”. Let me ask you this. . . just “How Many” innocent children need to be murdered for you to understand that enough is enough?
Here we go again says
@ Pierre – Why is it you seem to talk only about the casualties that Israel has done and not the horrendous atrocities of Hamas? You write as if Hamas are innocent Terrorists.
Pierre Tristam says
No such thing as “innocent terrorists.” In this war, as horrendous as the Hamas atrocities of Oct. 7 were, they pale compared to the war crimes and genocide conducted since by Netanyahu and the Israeli army. To create any equivalence between the two ignores reality, though of course it’s meant to indemnify Israel. Not doing it.
Mike P says
Maybe you should have waited another day before writing this article….it may have been a little different. Israel paused its ground offensive in Gaza City on Saturday and prepared to send a delegation to Egypt for indirect talks with Hamas, Israeli officials said, after Hamas announced it would accept President Donald Trump’s 20-point peace plan and release all Israeli hostages, subject to conditions and negotiations.
Here we go again says
@ Pierre- no such thing as innocent terrorists. But you fail to incorporate in your articles Hamas atrocities. They killed innocent civilians and childrens and tortured them as well.
At anytime Hamas could have released the hostages and surrendered. Like it appears they do now. What about the treatment of the hostages? Many died at the hands of Hamas after Oct 7th and their capture. Why not put pressure on Hamas this whole time? The people who support the Palestinians and many of Hamas as well, only point the finger at Israel. Not what Hamas has been doing. Through all of this Hamas and allied groups have launched very large numbers of rockets and mortars toward civilian areas in Israel over the course of the conflict causing casualties, property damage, and force people into shelters.
The UN’s Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict said there is “clear and convincing information” that some women and children taken by Hamas were subjected to rape, sexualized torture, and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.
JW says
Whatever will happen, Pierre, you help people to THINK and realize there is a long history that most of us never heard of or have forgotten already.
I will add that the major reason for the awful battles and killing by both sides is RELIGION, particularly the Torah story, quoted by Netanyahu and his ultra right cabinet) about the Amalek history (which is also part of the Christian Old Testament). The Quran has recommendations for killing as well.
May be the biggest lessons for Americans are our own religious battles in Congress and unwillingness to compromise. That’s not what the bible teaches. We keep killing our own neighbors and then we pray? History repeats itself unless you teach; something that is very much needed in Florida and the rest of America!
With all the good intentions, America is no longer a good example for Israel or the Ukraine or the world at large.
So, yes , who are we kidding?
Pierre Tristam says
@JW, let’s not forget Christianity, the (soul for soul, anyway) worst of the three. I’m recalling Gore Vidal’s words: “Now, at the risk of hurting more feelings, I must tell you that I regard monotheism as the greatest disaster ever to befall the human race. I see no good in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam-good people, yes, but any religion based on a single… well, frenzied and virulent god, is not as useful to the human race as, say, Confucianism, which is not a religion but an ethical and educational system that has worked pretty well for twenty-five hundred years. So you see I am ecumenical in my dislike for the Book. But, like it or not, the Book is there; and because of it people die; and the world is in danger.”
Pierre Tristam says
@here ok. Hamas bad. Hamas real bad. My piece is about what’s next. Not the obvious.
Kennan says
Indeed. Who are we kidding?
Let me be Frank. Many of you are going to realize very soon, that voting for the
“Diaper Don” helps no one except Trump.
The most disconcerting and pathetic thing is I hear many conveniently leave out critical facts to try to support an impossible narrative.
It started with Joe Biden, The State Department, and an equally complicit media.
The State Department as well as U.S. representatives at the UN Security Council have said for 2 years that they support a” Cease-fire” deal.
The US agreed to multiple deals with Hamas only to have Israel back out at the last minute. The US representatives as well as Israel voted no to a cease-fire deal at the UN at least seven times.
The US and Israel were the only countries to do so. The complete dereliction of coverage of the genocide turned 21st century holocaust, has only aided and embedded the killing of Palestinians in Gaza on a mass scale. The fact that Israel has not allowed press in Gaza to cover anything is telling in their attempted burying of facts both figurative and literal.
It is an insult to humanity to use the term “Two State Solution” in a region where there is nothing left. To talk about ceasefires that are never implemented while the world watches in horror. At this point any ceasefire just gives Israel the ability to complete the ETHNIC CLEANSING they want, as they push over 1 million Palestinians out of Gaza.
The truly depressing part is how Israel has tried to control the narrative with their friends at Fox, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, and NBC.
Now Donald Trump says he wants to broker a peace deal? A cease-fire? For what? A piece of what? Rubble?
Let’s be honest. Our current president lies like most of us breathe. I wish I were exaggerating. I really do.
Donald Trump is a transactional grifter, a real estate agent with no real plans for Gaza until everybody is either dead or gone. He thinks that if he garners a Peace deal , In a territory owned an occupied by Israel, a territory that is now dust, almost 30,000 children that we know of are dead, well over 100,000 civilians dead above and below ground, and somehow this imbecile we elected. King thinks he will get a Nobel peace prize? I think not.
Complete and extensive sanctions are the only way to save the Middle East long-term. No more money for Israel. No more weapons to a country that doesn’t defend itself as much as it has, past and present become aggressor with the full and blossomed Blessing from the West and many of it’s leaders.
Shameful, thoughtless, heartless, and final.
Kennan says
Donald Trump has a 20 point plan that to me seems very very light on details. What concerns me is there is no real plan for what to do with Palestinians. Everybody seems to talk about hostages, and what to do from the Israeli angle of things. This has been the case from day one. When you think about it, nobody talks about anything post October 7. People know what has been going on and what has been happening for the last two years, yet still there is this air of protection for the nation of Israel, more so than I believe is necessary.
My major fears is no matter what happens with negotiations Palestinians will be left out in the cold.
Now with former British prime minister Tony Blair getting involved in whatever
“Post Game” plans the U.S. has is concerning. Seems very post Ottoman. A opportunity to divvy things up.