Trump’s Gaza Peace Plan: A moral and deliberate failure.
By: Ranjan Solomon
Their War, their Peace!
Donald Trump’s latest “peace plan” for Gaza, quietly endorsed or tolerated by the EU, and other global powers, is a continuation of decades-long oppression of the Palestinian people. It attempts to normalize Israeli occupation, reward aggressors, and punish the oppressed. This plan is neither fair nor constructive; it entrenches injustice under the guise of diplomacy.
The plan offers token economic incentives and vague “security guarantees” but makes no provision for accountability for Israel’s repeated massacres, starvation tactics, and systemic violence in Gaza. In reality, it punishes Palestinians for defending their lives and their land while protecting Israel’s military dominance.
Colonization deepens: settlements in the West Bank expand, Palestinian autonomy is hollowed out, and East Jerusalem faces further erasure. Israel remains on top, consolidating power, while the EU’s quiet endorsement exposes hypocrisy and racism, reducing human rights to footnotes while legitimizing occupation. Arab acquiescence compounds the betrayal, leaving Palestinians isolated, voiceless, and abandoned on the international stage.
Trump’s Gaza peace plan is a blueprint for perpetuating injustice, rewarding aggressors, and further entrenching occupation. It sidelines Palestinian rights, shields Israel from accountability, and signals complicity from India, the U.S., the EU, and other backstabbers. Rejecting this plan is not just a political necessity—it is a moral imperative.
From the streets of Gaza, the voices are raw and unfiltered – read just these three:
“They call this peace, but we call it death disguised as hope.”
“Every day, our children grow up behind walls, under checkpoints, and under bombs. Where is justice?”
“The world watches and smiles while we burn. Neutrality is complicity—we know it well.”
India’s position is no different from other global backstabbers. A country that once claimed moral authority through its anti-colonial struggle now sides with occupation, legitimizing oppression and denying reparations. Neutrality here is complicity; silence is betrayal. One can find consolation in Africa’s obstinate refusal to endorse the plan with the glee of its endorsers. So too, many countries from the Caribbean and Latin America.
Calling this a “peace initiative” is grotesque. Trump’s bloated ego and desperation to win the Nobel Peace Prize drives his ludicrous ideas. Add to that his son-in-law’s dream of a ‘Riviera’ in the Gaza Strip. Peace cannot exist without justice. The plan institutionalises inequality, militarisation, and dispossession, prioritising Israeli security and expansion over Palestinian survival. It is a strategy of prolonged occupation disguised as diplomacy. This is nothing short of a ‘cheat plan’ disguised under the pretext of peace. Justice is the pre-condition for peace, not enforced and unmerited adjustments designed to suit colonial and vested interests. Trump promised a “credible pathway” to Palestinian statehood. It stands as a testimony to his many lies to his own people and the world.
The Palestinian Street does not approve. This is plan baked from a corner half way around the world with neither substance nor logic, or political morality for that matter. Voices from the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem underscore this political fact.
“They plan our poverty, our borders, our deaths —but they cannot plan our dignity.”
“Racism is written in every document that claims to help us. This is a plan for them, not for us.”
“Settlements grow, checkpoints grow, our freedom shrinks—but our hope is not stolen yet.”
“The world pretends to care, but it counts our bodies instead of our rights.”
The make-believe peace plan’s racism and colonial logic are blatant. By rewarding Israel, encouraging Arab acquiescence, and tacitly endorsing ethnic hierarchies, global powers like the EU, US, and India expose the moral bankruptcy of their so-called neutrality. Palestinians are left to navigate a world where occupation is normalised, and aggression is rewarded. China and Russia have shown political judiciousness. Their silence signals disapproval.
Trump’s reckless political advisors bring neither a sense of even-handedness nor political ethics. Any genuine pathway to peace in Gaza must begin with multiple non-negotiable components.
Palestinians assert: “Our homes, our land, our identity – we exist and we deserve to be seen as humans first. Recognition is not a gift; it is our birthright. Political morality must validate restitution for stolen Palestinian Lands. After all, “Every olive tree, every street taken from us carries our memory. To return land is justice for the generations that were uprooted.
Besides there must be accountability for Israel’s Impunity. Those who bomb schools and hospitals must answer. Impunity fuels the next massacre; justice stops the cycle of blood. Words mean nothing when soldiers patrol streets and inflict cruelties on whims and fancies. Civil Society and Grassroots Movements must be weapons of justice – advocacy the backbone of resistance. Palestinians today must cope with decades of violence and destruction while they live with rubble and trauma as inheritance. Reparations are not charity – they are the price of stolen survival.
Peace requires sanctions and diplomatic pressure and consequences on complicit states – those that pretend neutrality while funding. Humanitarian Relief Without Political Strings – Food, medicine, water are not bargaining chips. Life itself cannot wait for permission.
Civil society, international organizations, and grassroots Peoples’ movements must press for enforceable accountability: sanctions, legal action, and isolation of states that enable oppression. Palestine’s struggle is not merely territorial; it is existential, moral, and urgent. Supporting it requires action, not rhetoric. As a Gazan asserts: “This applies to global powers, regional actors, and nations that claim moral authority. History will judge those who sided with oppression over justice”.
The world must pivot from complicity to accountability. Reparations for seventy-five years of structural violence are not optional; they are a debt long overdue. Peace cannot be imposed from above; it must emerge from justice, recognition, and the restoration of dignity to the oppressed. Anything less perpetuates systemic violence, historical betrayal, and the racism that underpins this plan.
Trump’s Gaza plan is a fantasy of erasure, not peace. Palestinians have rejected the plan outright. In Gaza, 72-year-old Fathi Abu al-Saeed mocked Trump’s fantasy of clearing Palestinians out and building a “Riviera in the Middle East.” Pointing at the ruins of his bombed-out neighbourhood, he said: “That’s more precious than the United States and everything in it.” For Abu al-Saeed, leaving Gaza would be “like death itself.” His father was expelled from Jaffa in 1948, his mother’s family from Sarafand. He carries the Nakba in his bones and sees Trump’s scheme as another attempted catastrophe. “Any sane person who knows Palestinians understands that leaving our homeland is like death itself. Did Trump really think we’d pack up and go after all this?” (Al Jazeera, Feb 5, 2025).
This testimony captures the Palestinian reality: dispossession is not an abstract debate in think tanks or Western capitals. It is lived as trauma, passed down as memory, and resisted daily in rubble and refugee camps. When Trump blithely suggests Palestinians can be relocated to Egypt or Jordan, or that the United States can “own” Gaza, he reveals delusion – what Abu al-Saeed rightly called “the talk of a madman.”
Trump’s plan, according to his own rhetoric, is designed to “stump Hamas” and erase its presence. The BBC reported Hamas’s blunt rejection: The plan “serves Israel’s interests” and ignores those of Palestinians. Hamas was not even invited to negotiate; instead, it was handed an ultimatum – surrender all weapons and hostages, disband, and accept amnesty, or Israel will be given license to “finish the job.” This is not diplomacy but coercion, not peace but capitulation. Such asymmetry renders the plan dead on arrival. Hamas is asked to disarm entirely, leaving itself defenceless, while Israel is asked for nothing it cannot wriggle out of. Trust, as Ian Parmeter of the Australian National University points out, is non-existent. Netanyahu has already walked away from one ceasefire this year and could do so again (The Conversation, Sept 2025).
Nor does the plan address the wider Palestinian question. It is silent on the West Bank, where daily clashes between settlers and Palestinians intensify, and where Israel has just approved settlements that would cut the territory in two. A “contiguous Palestinian state” is thus not merely unlikely; it is structurally sabotaged. Without addressing Jerusalem, settlements, borders, refugees, and sovereignty, Trump’s Gaza-only scheme collapses under its own emptiness.
The plan’s vagueness is another fatal flaw. We are told there will be an “International Stabilisation Force” to take over from the Israeli army in Gaza. But which nations would risk sending troops into a devastated enclave where Israeli firepower and Palestinian suspicion both loom large? No Arab country has volunteered, and for good reason. Trump also announced a “Board of Peace” chaired by himself, with Tony Blair in tow — a grotesque throwback to colonial arrogance, as if Palestinian self-determination could be subcontracted to imperial overseers.
Beyond the structural defects lies the moral obscenity. For over 75 years, the United States has armed, funded, and diplomatically shielded Israel through every massacre, occupation, and war crime. During the latest Gaza war alone, Washington supplied Israel with nearly $18 billion in weapons in one year – the largest military aid package in U.S. history (Al Jazeera, Feb 2025). Now, the same patron of destruction offers itself as architect of peace. Palestinians are right to see this as insult added to injury. Reparations, not plans, are what the United States owes: reparations for decades of enabling killing, dispossession, and blockade.
Trump’s plan also reveals something of Israel’s internal contradictions. His pledge of Palestinian statehood – even if meaningless – sits uneasily with Netanyahu’s hardline coalition, including ministers like Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, who openly demand the complete elimination of Hamas and reject any hint of Palestinian sovereignty. Their maximalist positions mean that even if Hamas were erased, resistance would not die. An ideology born of oppression cannot be bombed or legislated away. If anything, attempts to erase Hamas by decree only strengthen its legitimacy as a symbol of defiance in the eyes of Palestinians.
What Trump seeks, then, is not peace but erasure: erasure of Hamas, erasure of Palestinian resistance, erasure of Palestinian statehood. It is a fantasy in which the coloniser decides the fate of the colonised, and the colonised meekly comply. But Palestinians have shown again and again that they will not leave, will not vanish, will not surrender. As Abu al-Saeed said, tapping his cane against Gaza’s rubble: “This earth is mixed with our sweat and blood. No one here will leave — no matter the threats or promises.”
Trump’s scheme is not a peace plan but ethnic cleansing repackaged in the language of redevelopment. “Trump must think we’re living in a hotel he can shut down,” Abu al-Saeed quipped. But Gaza is not a hotel. It is a homeland.
The lesson is clear: peace cannot be scripted in Washington conference rooms, drafted by war criminals under indictment, or enforced through ultimatums. Peace requires justice, dignity, and recognition of Palestinian rights – not another fantasy of American grandeur or Israeli security. Until the world demands reparations from Israel and its sponsors, and until Palestinians are granted the statehood long promised and long denied, no plan will succeed.
Palestinians, in their defiance, remind us of something deeper than politics: that land, memory, and dignity cannot be erased by decrees or bulldozers. They have survived the Nakba, the occupation, the blockades, and now genocide. They will survive Trump’s fantasy too.
Ranjan Solomon
This write up is originally published in Middle East Monitor and republished in News Whisperer by acknowledging the copy rights of the publisher.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the l policy of News Whisperer
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