Some Thoughts on Trump’s Gaza ‘Peace Plan’
On October 10, President Trump’s “Peace plan” brought forth a fragile ceasefire in Gaza, the third since October 7, 2023. Israel had violated the previous two and has violated this one multiple times. For example, on October 19, it launched an assault on Gaza, claiming retaliation for a Hamas attack that killed two Israeli soldiers. Hamas denied responsibility. Later reports suggested the soldiers’ vehicle struck unexploded ordnance. By then, Israeli airstrikes were already devastating Gaza’s neighborhoods, threatening to shatter the fragile ceasefire.
The Israeli violations aside, the main clauses of Trump’s plan are: a call for ceasefire; Hamas to release all living and dead Israeli captives in exchange for Israel freeing roughly 2,000 Palestinian “prisoners” (out of more than 11,000 held in Israeli jails), including returning fifteen dead Palestinian hostages for every one dead Israeli captive; Israel to lift its blockade of humanitarian aid; Gaza’s governance to pass to a nonpolitical administration while Israeli troops withdraw in stages; and Hamas is disarmed.
The first phase of the plan has already been completed: so far, a fragile ceasefire is holding despite the multiple Israeli violations; the captives and hostages have been exchanged, short of several hard-to-get-to bodies of dead Israeli captives remaining under rubble of bombed-out buildings and tunnels; though only about 15% of the promised aid has reached Gaza, nowhere close to the level needed or envisioned in the plan. Reportedly, there are negotiations currently underway on the tougher remaining issues, such as who governs Gaza, who pays for reconstruction, whether Hamas will disarm, whether Israel will fully withdraw its forces, and whether Israel will lift its 18-year-long brutal siege of Gaza.
Hamas has agreed to a transfer of governance to an independent Palestinian administration while insisting that the issue of political representation be settled within an inclusive Palestinian national framework. As in the past, Hamas has linked the question of disarmament to the question of Palestinian statehood. It is unlikely that it will change this position. Israel, of course, can be counted on to oppose any demand for Palestinian sovereignty and to look for every opportunity to violate or derail the ceasefire.
The Trump plan’s conditions, at first glance, look comprehensive. Yet, like so many US initiatives before it, the plan avoids the central question: the political rights of Palestinians and the existence of a sovereign Palestinian state. Without addressing those, any truce will collapse, regardless of how much Trump insists on conflating a ceasefire with peace. To be exact, the plan acknowledges Palestinian self-determination but only as a distant “aspiration of the Palestinian people” to be attended to, if at all, in a post-reconstructed Gaza — the latter now reduced to a vast graveyard of tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of Gazans, with nearly all of its infrastructure destroyed, and more than 50 million tons of rubble, the removal of which the UN has estimated will take a quarter century to complete.
It is important to note that Palestinian self-determination is not limited to Gaza and includes the Palestinians living in East Jerusalem and under military occupation in the West Bank. The latter have been subjected to intensified and vicious settler attacks and pogroms since Apartheid Israel’s genocidal attacks in Gaza after October 7, 2023. Indeed, Israel’s Knesset (parliament) voted on October 22 in favor of annexing the West Bank just as Trump’s VP Vance was visiting Israel.
The question of annexing the West Bank can be consequential. The reactionary Arab allies of the US have made it clear that annexing the West Bank is one of their red lines, potentially stopping them from normalizing relations with Israel through joining the Abraham Accords. This is Saudi Arabia’s declared position, a key country whose normalization through joining the Abraham Accords is most sought after by Trump. This fact may explain VP Vance and Sec. of State Rubio promptly proclaiming the US opposition to the Knesset vote. We will have to see how serious the US is in opposing the annexation of the West Bank. What is clear, however, is that Trump has not called for ending the occupation of the West Bank and the removal of more than 700,000 settlers in some 160 Jewish-only settlements established on stolen Palestinian land. The same goes for East Jerusalem and the creeping Judaization (“de-Arabization”) policies of Israel. Of course, no one is addressing the issue of the Right of Return of the by now seven million Palestinian refugees either, an issue inseparable from any meaningful consideration of Palestinian rights.
To be clear, then, the deeper problem is conceptual. President Trump, like many US leaders before him, mistakes the silencing of guns (though not entirely silenced, as Israel has killed and injured several hundred Palestinians since the ceasefire went into effect on October 10) for peace itself. But a ceasefire is not peace—it is a pause. True peace requires confronting the structures of occupation, siege, dispossession, discrimination, rightlessness, and displacement that perpetuate violence. His plan, for all its clauses, leaves the core system of settler colonialism untouched with all that it requires in terms of domination, ethnic cleansing, and genocide — slow or massive.
Israel will likely continue to choke Gaza’s surviving people with its blockade and ability to restrict aid convoys. It is unclear whether Washington will use the means at its disposal to press Israel to stop annexing West Bank territory beyond the urgings by VP Vance and Sec. of State Rubio to stop. Meanwhile, regional mediators and Palestinian factions are meeting to outline a post-genocide political framework. There is a broad agreement among Palestinian factions that Gaza’s next phase of governance must be Palestinian, with no separation between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Discussions even include the possibility of UN peacekeepers, an idea the US and Israel strongly oppose, but one that could protect civilians.
In sum, real peace demands justice, accountability, and equality of rights. Gazans are in desperate conditions. As winter is approaching, they face hunger, homelessness, and despair. They need food, medicine, and safety. Trump’s version of “peace” may fill headlines, but peace rooted in justice —the kind envisioned by movements for liberation and echoed by activists everywhere —is the only peace that lasts.