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Donald Trump’s Gaza plan could end Israel’s large-scale killing and destruction, if the US President can prevent Benjamin Netanyahu from resuming it after Hamas surrenders the remaining Israeli hostages.
However, it is a big ‘if’, since Netanyahu unilaterally broke the last ceasefire and Trump is not known for his consistency. But for the suffering people of Gaza, this seems the best chance in two years for a general cessation of Israel’s bombardment.
Yet even if this does happen, it will not be the end to Israel’s genocide. So far around 90,000 people have been killed, if we accept the widely-argued case that the Gaza health ministry’s count understates the toll by 40 per cent, as well as 170,000 injured. These quarter of a million people, amounting to one in nine of Gaza’s original 2.2 million citizens. The consequences for the survivors – lifetime disability for children whose limbs have been amputated, widespread widowing and orphaning – alone represent a devastating legacy.
And Israel’s violence has not only crippled many tens of thousands of individual Palestinians; it has also crippled Palestinian society. As I wrote for Byline Times on 13 October 2023, there were already then – six days after Hamas’s massacres – unmistakeable signs that this was Israel’s intention. Raphael Lemkin, who coined the idea of genocide, defined it as “the destruction or crippling” of a group, and this has been Israel’s record over the last two years.
It is hardly necessary to itemise the means, beyond killing and wounding, through which Israel has carried this out. It has destroyed almost all the homes, hospitals, schools, farms, workplaces, mosques, churches, universities – almost everything. It has deliberately starved the population, expelled international aid agencies, and killed people seeking food. It has claimed to be fighting Hamas, but long after it reduced the Islamist group to a rump, it escalated the systematic bulldozing of whole urban areas, most recently in Gaza City. None of these terrible harms can be easily remedied – even providing adequate food will not be enough for those in the advanced stages of malnutrition.
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For a long time the charge of genocide was banned from most Western mainstream media, which censored reports from Gaza while Israel murdered Palestinian journalists. Even today Israel retains Western military and political support of a kind that would never be given to any other genocidal state. Yet at least half the population of the UK, USA and other countries now accepts that Israel is committing genocide. The liberal press finally talks about it. But few are talking about the lasting implications of this genocide, committed in plain sight by a Western state with the active US, UK and other support.
Consolidating the Genocide
If the Trump plan works, despite the signs that Netanyahu may wreck it, many will believe that the genocide is over – but it won’t be. Lemkin wrote that genocide was a way of ‘winning the peace even though the war itself is lost’, and the Nazis, despite their defeat in 1945, succeeded in removing almost all the Jews from central and eastern Europe, both through murder and forcing them to flee. But Israel hasn’t lost. As Trump reportedly said to Netanyahu, “I don’t know why you’re always so f***ing negative. This is a win. Take it.”
Even if Netanyahu doesn’t want to end the bombing, any ceasefire will be largely on his terms. No Palestinians have been involved in Trump’s proposals, which were heavily doctored by Israel after being agreed with Arab leaders. Israel will still control much of Gaza, with a large military presence – is a Tony Blair-led international committee, based in Egypt, really going to stop it continuing violent repression? This committee, answerable to Trump, might, at best, ameliorate the suffering of the population. But the plan’s long-term goals seem to be to complete the genocide, not to reverse it.
There are certainly political battles to come over how it is completed. The plan appears to represent a setback for Israel’s goal, which Trump earlier endorsed, of expelling the Palestinian population – to Egypt, Jordan or anywhere – so as to create a Trump Riviera. The opposition of the Arab states to mass expulsion may keep Gazans in the territory for the time being. But how will they live, alongside the Trump-Netanyahu-Blair push to develop a new Gaza which is no longer a Palestinian territory, let alone a component of a future Palestinian state?
Let’s just recall the Blair Institute’s early version of the post-conflict plan, with its ‘Elon Musk smart manufacturing zone’ alongside an ‘MBS ring’ (named for Saudi Arabia’s murderous ruler) and a ‘Gaza Trump Riviera’. However these ideas are modified in practice, the shiny new Strip will be a temple to US, Israeli and Arab corporate power, with at most some unelected Palestinians in lower administrative roles.
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And what of the surviving Palestinian population, who were largely glossed over in Trump’s plan? We can only guess that in the short term they will be housed in a ‘humanitarian’ tent city – Israel’s earlier concentration camp proposal in all but name. Even if Palestinians are not expelled en masse, individuals and families will probably be put under pressure to leave, as Israel also envisaged. So the phase of genocide-as-expulsion, all too familiar to Palestinians, might be carried out in slow motion, as in the West Bank. If some Palestinians remain in the medium term, this may be to carry out manual and other routine labour (rather as contract workers do in the Gulf states), under the de facto control of Israeli, US and Arab corporations.
Even in this best-case scenario, the plan would largely consolidate the genocide’s destruction of Palestinian society in Gaza. Before 2023, the territory was subject to a brutal indirect occupation regime, through the Israel blockade. Yet despite Israel’s repeated military assaults – captured in the genocidal euphemism ‘mowing the grass’ – it had a functioning Palestinian society. The genocide has largely destroyed this society, and any shrunken Palestinian presence in the proposed new Gaza will be subject to a direct Israel-US occupation, even if it involves contingents of troops from Arab states.
In this sense, the plan extends not only the Gaza genocide, but the underlying genocidal project to eliminate a distinct Palestinian society. Historically, this has gathered pace from the Nakba of 1948 to the mass expulsions of 1967, the slow-motion dispossession in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and the settler terrorism which has accelerated this in the last two years. The plan also contributes to Israel’s determination to prevent a Palestinian state, despite Keir Starmer’s and Emanuel Macron’s legal recognition of this.
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Understandably, the desperate survivors of the Gaza genocide seem to want Trump’s plan to succeed. It offers the possibility of slowing, even ending, the mass killing and of blocking plans for mass expulsion. The Palestinian national movement, including Hamas, recognises the need to make it stick. If Netanyahu is allowed to wreck it, the outcome for Gazans will likely be worse.
But let us not pretend that we are talking about ways of reversing the genocide. That would require Palestinian control of Gaza, an international effort to support them, massive reparations from Israel, and its leaders sent to The Hague as Serbian leaders were. We are not even talking about ending it in any simple sense. Rather, the discussion is about more or less murderous ways of completing the destruction and replacement of Palestinian Gaza.