02 Oct Colonial Logic Redux: Scholars Comment on Trump and Netanyahu’s Proposal
With contributions from Mohsen al Attar, Brendan Ciarán Browne, Shahd Hammouri, Nawal Hend, Ata Hindi, and Ali Osman Karaoğlu
The Gaza Riviera: Colonial Fantasy Masquerading as Peace
Both the American president, Donald Trump, and the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, caught the headlines this week, with much of mainstream media publicising the offering of a “peace plan” to the Palestinians. The European Union, several Arab states, and even the UN Secretary-General welcomed the proposal. While the desire to see an end to the bloodshed is understandable, the acceptance of this plan is not, with even the most cursory examination exposing the inequalities embedded in the now-infamous 20 points. Not only does it not contain any of the characteristics of a genuine peace agreement, but it revisits the worst excesses of colonial diktat, a modern iteration of the “civilising mission” speckled with the language of peace.
Parties are always disappointed by a peace agreement. While the end of violence is welcome, negotiations between adversaries necessarily result in painful concessions, with each side accepting the unacceptable to break the stalemate. Reciprocity is central, with terms meant to facilitate not just the cessation of violence, but agreement on contentious issues: prisoner swaps, land exchanges, compensation packages, and, occasionally, mechanisms to achieve a combination of accountability, justice, and societal renewal. Even where antagonism reigns, a principle of equality must anchor the negotiations, lest either side fall prey to the dangerous belief that they may unilaterally dictate peace terms. It’s a morbid reality that peace agreements are strongest when both sides have suffered proportionate casualties, creating an impetus that would otherwise be missing, something that is self-evidently absent here. It was thus telling that Trump and Netanyahu stood before the cameras beaming about their peace plan, with Trump promising a very sad end if Palestinians do not concede to the capitulation he demands.
To be clear, this is not a peace plan but an abdication document, with the terms of Palestinian surrender laid out in Times New Roman. Foremost, Palestinians are to release all hostages — a legally and morally justifiable demand, but one that underscores the inequality of the agreement, as no reciprocal commitment from Israel to cease its genocide is included. Hamas is to disarm, an act that would, in an instant, render the population of Gaza defenceless. Again, this might be an understandable request if it were met with something of comparable weight — such as an end to Israel’s occupation, blockade, and starvation campaign. No such reciprocity is on display. Instead, the plan explicitly envisages the indefinite presence of Israeli troops, disregarding both the primary Palestinian condition for any truce and the key sources of Israel’s international legal wrongs (and Netanyahu’s indictment), as repeatedly affirmed by the International Court of Justice.
And if we thought it could not get any worse, lo and behold, a pitch for one of the most discredited practices in modern international law: the “international administration” of native lands. Technocrats, investors, and snake oil peddlers are to descend on Gaza, coordinated by a dystopian overseer committee — chaired by Trump himself, with Tony Blair as vice-regent — to ensure that Kushner’s “Gaza Riviera” is developed at breakneck speed. Palestinians are to be tutored by the civilised in the art of self-rule and capitalist development, at least the few Palestinians permitted to remain as a pliant labour class. Indeed, just as the Palestinians were disappeared from the negotiations, so too are they to evaporate before the condominiums are ready for sale, with Trump and Netanyahu’s joint plan for ethnic cleansing expected to accelerate before digging for the Trump Tower begins.
This proposal was not negotiated with the Palestinians. While bypassing their negotiators may be more humane than assassinating them, the outcome is equally vile with their demands — for independence, dignity, return, and justice — wholly absent. We are faced with colonial logic at its most raw: dictating a people’s future under the threat of extermination.
To see states such as Pakistan and France, Saudi Arabia and Belgium welcome this proposal is unsurprising. They, like many other states, would like to see the Palestinian Question recede from the headlines — not out of a commitment to Palestinian aspirations nor to international law, but because their domestic agendas make kowtowing to Trump a convenient course of action, principles, the rule of law, and basic humanity be damned. Yet, this is not only a betrayal of Palestine; it is a betrayal of the promise of the international order itself, signaling a return to 19th-century gunboat diplomacy, now peppered with 21st-century gangster politics. Palestinian life, self-determination, and even their very survival are swapped in exchange of political favours, construction projects, and domestic expediency.
While this plan represents a natural culmination of decades of Western policy towards Palestinians, it also presages something much worse. Trump and Netanyahu have presented the world not with a peace plan but an imperial one. It is smothered in racialised dynamics that demand the perpetual subjugation of the Palestinians and the obliteration of international law. To see so many states acquiesce to this act of civilisational vandalism is to peer at the return of empire in its most naked form — not as legacy, nor as metaphor, but as UN-sanctioned domination. Implementation of this plan would not only erase a people. It would bury international law itself.
Mohsen al Attar
Between the Sword & the Neck
‘Peace’ packaged as erasure. Land ceded, piece by colonial piece. Palestinian security swapped for total surrender. What has been heralded as a breakthrough, warmly embraced by many states who stand accused of aiding and abetting Israel’s Genocide in Gaza, is not peace at all. Rather, this is the latest attempt to pacify and delegitimise the aspirations of those who have the temerity to want to determine their own decolonial futures.
The critical need for an end to the brutality of the past two years of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza, and for peace, is unquestionable. But let us be clear in our understanding and direct in our language. More crucially, let us adopt a longer gaze in our analysis, one that goes beyond the past two years of horror and situates the demand for ‘peace’ in a broader context. Our friends and colleagues in Gaza have always had the desire to live a peaceful life, one that is not dictated by Zionism and associated colonial violence. To enjoy freedom of movement beyond the confines of the Gazan concentration camp. To live a life absent of Israeli occupation and 24/7 surveillance. To move freely across their indigenous land, visiting friends and family in Ramallah, Jenin, Acre and Haifa.
To suggest anything otherwise is a racist trope as old as time.
There is much to chastise in the 20 point plan; from the patronising language calling for a change in Palestinian mindset, to the total absence of Palestinian involvement in decision making processes. However, the weaponising of humanitarian aid, as we have seen throughout the past two years (and 17 under siege) remains a particularly grotesque and brutal form of colonial coercion. Medieval tactics in an era of modern, brutal asymmetric and unchecked colonial warfare.
Nothing on offer here gives a pathway to a ‘peaceful’ future. Devoid of justice, of a clear recognition of an attainable pathway to Palestinian self determination, and silent as it is on any possibility of decolonial repair that centres land back and Palestinian return, what has been proposed is a stalling tactic, the hitting of the ‘pause’ button, with Israel banking on the (misplaced) assumption that Palestinians will accept anything on the table.
History has shown, for Palestinians envisioning a justice oriented future, the passing of time can be measured in subsequent deeply flawed, bastard versions of ‘peace’; from Wye River, Camp David, Oslo, Hebron, Taba, and Beirut. Trump’s ‘plan’ is the latest in a long line of insulting and naive attempts, and the words of Ghassan Kanafani, prescient as they were in 1970, remain as relevant as ever:
‘You do not mean peace talks, you mean surrender … that is a kind of conversation between the sword and the neck’
Cheering for the Illegal, Hailing Coercion
This week, Trump and Netanyahu presented the world with their vision for Gaza’s future: an ultimatum demanding Palestinians either accept their plan or face the threat to “finish the job” of genocide. The proposal seeks to establish a demilitarised and heavily policed Gaza, designed to serve the interests of foreign capital and administered by an authority led by none other than Tony Blair and Donald Trump. In violation of their duties under international law, some Arab and European states have swiftly endorsed this plan as a viable path to peace.
This casual tone of physical coercion, threatening to “finish the job,” is a direct result of the global disregard for third-state obligations and the duty to prevent genocide. Israel’s policy of leveraging excessive civilian casualties as a negotiating tool is so entrenched it has a name—the ‘Dahiya Doctrine’. For 58 years of illegal occupation, the diplomatic hesitance, bureaucratic processing, and bad-faith legal interpretations by third states have created a hospitable environment for global bullying. The Trump administration further tested the limits by establishing the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a private military contracting agency responsible for killing over 1,400 aid seekers and injuring over 4,000. Despite the horror inflicted by the GHF, states remained hesitant to take concrete action against Israel, fearing they would agitate the United States – opting only for symbolic condemnations. The global tolerance for Israel’s bullying reached a new low last week at the UN General Assembly, where the platform designed to foster international peace and security was instrumentalised to terrorise a population living under genocide, as Netanyahu’s speech was broadcast live via loudspeakers across Gaza.
The proposed plan does not end the occupation but merely rebrands it, partially replacing direct Israeli control with an American one. Bringing back traumatic flashbacks of the Coalition provisional Authorities, responsible for the dismantling of the economic and social fabric of the Iraqi society. It proposes a foreign stabilisation force and a foreign administrative body – the presence of Palestinian or Arab individuals in these bodies does not negate their foreign and imposed nature. According to Article 42 of the 1907 Hague Regulations, a “territory is considered occupied when it is actually placed under the authority of the hostile army.” Consent for this deployment is unequivocally absent, as the plan flagrantly contradicts the will of the Palestinian people in Gaza. The prospects of the use of advanced technology in the control of the Gazan population – offers a dystopian image of hostility in contradiction to self-determination and human rights. Notably, the plan does not offer concrete guarantees that Israeli troops would completely retreat.
Furthermore, the plan imposes conditions that violate the jus cogens Palestinian right to self-determination. As I have argued elsewhere, the pillars of this right include the dismantling of the occupation, the right of return, reparations, and resistance until the illegal occupation ends. These basic tenets are not subject to negotiation nor can they be forfeited. Other customary rights, such as the duty of non-intervention, sovereignty over natural resources, and accountability for international crimes, are equally non-negotiable. Any conditions that contradict these pillars, especially in the absence of Palestinian consent, are de facto void. In this context, states that endorse the plan are endorsing illegality, further normalising coercion as a modus operandi of international relations – and reviving the colonial spirit of ‘mentorship’ of the ‘uncivilised’. They are accepting a lesser standard of humanity for Palestinians—a standard they would never accept for themselves. Instead of cheering for such a dehumanising proposal, states must raise the bar for what is acceptable by using their leverage. The only viable way forward begins with fulfilling third-state obligations: implementing arms and energy embargoes, imposing economic sanctions, and taking collective action to support a strong resolution under the Uniting for Peace initiative at the UNGA led by the Hague Group.
Liberation Through Real Estate Projects and Private Security
“They steal your bread, then give you a crumb of it… Then they demand you to thank them for their generosity… O their audacity”
Ghassan Kanafani
The so-called 20-point “peace” plan, drafted by Trump’s son-in-law and his envoy, is a blueprint authored by pro-Israeli architects struggling with fever dreams of erecting free-trade zones on the rubble of an ongoing genocide. It is framed through an ethno- supremacist lens, where a white man sitting in a metropole rules over his colonies, people denied the right of self-determination, people marked by race, colour, and legacy as less than fully human. Within this distorted image, the life of a single Israeli is calculated as equal to fifteen Palestinians under this Plan.
This dystopian proposal was presented with the backing of a unified front: Arab and Islamic states, the European Union, and a broader Western bloc. For the Palestinian resistance, this plan amounts to a form of political suicide and the undoing of the only meaningful outcome of the Oslo Accords: the promise of Palestinian sovereignty and self-rule over the fragmented territories of the West Bank and Gaza.
In essence, the proposal sets out four main steps for the establishment of another US base in the Middle East. First, Hamas must disarm Hamas, including weapons manufacturing equipment, and commit to never taking up arms. Those who comply may receive amnesty; those who resist will face exile or worse. In plain terms, surrender or be expelled, a classic imperial move: disarmament for the defeated, impunity for the powerful.
Second, they are to uproot the governance in Gaza. Neither Hamas, the current authority in Gaza, nor the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank would retain control. Rather, they would be sidelined by a technocratic “apolitical” committee. Palestinians lose self-governance in favour of externally appointed managers. Gaza is to be placed under international trusteeship rather than local rule. Political authority would only be returned to the Palestinians if the PA complies with a vague program of “reform”, details forthcoming. In other words, alongside being physically displaced, Palestinian political power is usurped, subject to unknown conditionalities and colonial discretion.
Third, Gaza will be repurposed as free trade zones for foreign investment, with capital flooding rubble and collective graves. Does this ring a bell? Recall the AI images of Trump standing between the rubble in Gaza, with emerging skyscrapers, casinos and belly dancers? This is classic imperial choreography: carve up the spoils, channel resources to outside investors, and offer the local population a few jobs while foreign capital extracts the real value. US and Gulf money will deplete the natural gas reserves in Gaza, monetize the ruins, and leave Palestinians destitute.
Fourth, deploy a private security apparatus – not peacekeeping troops – to oversee Israeli security and train Palestinian police units, creating the coercive forces needed to implement the plan. Having disbanded Palestinian resistance and substituted Gaza’s political institutions, self-determination will no longer exist, not even symbolically.
What are Palestinians offered under this plan? Despite its polished language, this satirical text is not a pathway to justice nor to peace but a recipe for the endless subjugation of the Palestinian people.
Entrenching the Illegal Occupation, and Other Thoughts on the So-Called “Peace Plan”
The so-called peace plan is a slap in the face of international law and to the Palestinian people as a whole. It is an attempt to deal with the growing isolation of both the US and Israel – a marketing ploy to buy more time to regain some relevance and a false semblance of victory in the face of a genocide. The plan further entrenches the illegal occupation. It reads like a formal United States-led transformative occupation of the Gaza Strip, not only in clear contradiction with core rules of the law of occupation but also against the peremptory norms of international law.
Recently, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) affirmed that due to the illegality of Israel’s occupation, for its serious violations of international law, namely the prohibition on annexation and denial of the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination – along with pointing to racial discrimination and apartheid – Israel must immediately end its occupation in its entirety. This would entail a complete and immediate military and civilian withdrawal from the territory of historic Palestine occupied in 1967, being the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. Third States have an obligation to ensure that this happens, without conditions.
The plan – which is more of a plan for a plan for a plan – seems to create conditions on only the possibility of such a withdrawal and only within the Gaza Strip. It proclaims that “Israel will not occupy or annex Gaza.” In reality, it provides no guarantees. The occupation must end without exception. Moreover, regardless of the situation, humanitarian aid and access is unconditional. UNRWA and others must be able to operate to their fullest extent.
Third States and the United Nations Secretary-General seem to be careful in their language welcoming the plan, while not addressing its contents. It is possible that they saw a different version. Nonetheless, it would have been more careful for those statements to have reiterated the demands that should be guaranteed without exception in line with the ICJ’s advisory opinion and condemn the agreement’s clear contradictions and willingness to violate international law and, more so, what seems to be an open invitation for third States to take part in those violations.
A New Mandate for a Familiar Colonial Project
Donald Trump’s plan for Gaza amounts to the establishment of a second Mandate administration — and there is no reason to believe that this project will not produce results similar to those of the first. Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations contained the following provision:
“Certain communities formerly belonging to the Turkish Empire have reached a stage of development where their existence as independent nations can be provisionally recognised, subject to the rendering of administrative advice and assistance by a Mandatory until such time as they are able to stand alone. The wishes of these communities must be a principal consideration in the selection of the Mandatory.”
Yet, like other mandated territories such as Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq, Palestine should also have been granted independence. However, when the resolution on the Palestine Mandate was adopted in 1922 by the League of Nations, it became clear that the Mandatory Power — the British Government — was granted powers well beyond mere “advice and assistance.” These expanded powers enabled the implementation of the Balfour Declaration. As the preamble of the Mandate Resolution explicitly provided:
“Whereas the Principal Allied Powers have also agreed that the Mandatory should be responsible for putting into effect the declaration originally made on November 2nd, 1917, by the Government of His Britannic Majesty, and adopted by the said Powers, in favour of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, it being clearly understood that nothing should be done which might prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”
Moreover, Article 1 of the same decision vested the Mandatory with sweeping authority:
“The Mandatory shall have full powers of legislation and of administration, save as they may be limited by the terms of this mandate.”
In practice, the Mandate regime thus served as the legal and political vehicle for establishing a “national home for the Jewish people” on Palestinian land. Over time, we know how this process unfolded. While the Mandate text claimed that the rights of Palestine’s non-Jewish communities would be protected, no effective guarantees were ever put in place — and the consequences are well known.
Trump’s current plan mirrors this history. It also promises that the rights of the local population will be safeguarded and that they will not be displaced. But where is the guarantee? What if, after the release of hostages, Israel — as it has done repeatedly in the past — invokes a new pretext, reneges on the agreement, and persists with its occupation of Gaza? What if it declares dissatisfaction with a demilitarised Palestine and refuses to withdraw?
Trump speaks of a new mandate-like regime. Hamas will be exiled, and in its place a version of Palestine that Israel can “approve of” will emerge. Far from paving the way to self-determination, the plan will render Palestine even more vulnerable to Israeli domination — precisely as the first Mandate did between 1922 and 1948.
Moreover, enacting such a plan without consulting the Palestinian people constitutes a direct violation of their right to self-determination. Article 22 of the League Covenant stipulated that “the wishes of these communities must be a principal consideration in the selection of the Mandatory.” Even then, that principle was disregarded. In Trump’s plan, the views of the Palestinian people are nowhere to be seen.
Photo by British Library on Unsplash
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