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.
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