The Palestinian Situation… Gaza
Gaza Is the Future
The AI-generated image for the “Gaza Riviera” project captures, in all its seductive beauty, the real-estate imagination of President Trump and his son-in-law Kushner. It stretches across 365 square kilometres of golden sands lapped by the warm waves of the Mediterranean, under a climate that the wealthy of colder countries can only dream of.
From this image, only the landowners are missing — people who have no place in the scene to come, not even as cleaning staff or construction workers, much like the recently freed dark-skinned slaves who built and maintained Washington with their muscles and sweat at the time of its founding, and who make up the majority of its population to this day.
The people of Gaza, however, were not merely erased from the image: they were also denied a ceasefire, with the dead and wounded now averaging dozens daily — a rate deemed acceptable by the standards of a war of extermination!!! The war is therefore considered over in President Trump’s view, and what the Netanyahu government is doing is simply what circumstances demand — nothing more, nothing less. It warrants no classification, no name, save that of “clean-up operations”?!!
The founders of Washington deserve some recognition, then: emancipators of slaves and employers of the poor in building the world’s seat of decision-making. They were, it must be said, considerably more humane and civilised than their contemporary heirs.
But if we leave Washington for “Jerusalem-Al-Quds”, we may find a different image, generated this time from the texts of the Torah. A broad swathe of politicians and ministers — with hardline rabbis at their forefront — is demanding that the Netanyahu government expel the population of Gaza to wherever they can be sent, tolerating the presence of no more than a hundred thousand “elect” carefully screened for their service value. Not as dark-skinned slaves, but as “beasts of burden” — in the terminology of the Torah — creatures the Lord assigned to serve the Children of Israel returning from their wandering to the Promised Land.
In truth I say unto you: as Palestinians, we did not know that God had created us for this purpose, or that our mission on earth was to serve them!! Had we known… we would have refused His will.
The story of “Gaza Is the Future” is not new. It was born during Trump’s first term, when his son-in-law Kushner — by his own account — read every plan that had failed to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the ones that had been sleeping in the drawers of the White House. He concluded that he could distill a workable plan, which he duly announced under the name of the “deal of the century” — an economic approach designed to bring prosperity to the Palestinians, far from the headache of politics… He proposed that the Gaza Strip serve as the geographic foundation of the solution, to which all West Bank cities would be linked, with the exception of East Jerusalem, which Trump had annexed to Israel — a move that delighted Netanyahu and his circle. The aim was to spare the settlers their daily friction with the non-Jews — the “goyim” — and to grant them two-thirds of the West Bank as a reward for their patience with the indigenous population.
But the matter had another dimension, which Kushner found in the plans of Obama’s second term: the project had previously been called the “Islamic State of Palestine” and had been the subject of negotiations with the international leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood, with Hamas, and with Egypt’s elected Islamist president, Mohamed Morsi. Hamas, which has governed the Gaza Strip since its coup against Palestinian legitimacy in 2007, was to be tasked with promoting this “Islamic State of Palestine” — one that would recognise the “Jewish character” of the State of Israel, Netanyahu’s cherished slogan at the time — enabling him to contemplate expelling all non-Jewish holders of Israeli nationality.
The Achilles’ heel of the plan, however, lay in the proposal to expand the Strip’s territory at the expense of the Sinai desert, in compensation for the annexation of two-thirds of the West Bank. This set the Egyptian deep state in motion in its struggle against the elected president, until he was brought down.
It was likely against this backdrop that Kushner set about stripping his proposal of any ideological dimension, settling for purely economic content and renaming the project the “deal of the century” — promising prosperity for all in the Middle East!!?
There are questions that seem simple, almost naive, that nonetheless demand an answer. How can one override the right to private property and strip it of protection — the very cornerstone of the United States Constitution?!! How can one dismiss the right to political self-determination of a people that numbers fifteen million souls this year, half living in their homeland and half in the diaspora?!! What remains of America’s founding legacy at the moment the United Nations was established?!! — especially when its Secretary-General and his teams find themselves in the daily crosshairs of Trump and Netanyahu!!? And who deserves the peace prize, Donald Trump or António Guterres!!?
The Peace Council
This body was established under Security Council Resolution 2803, with the aim of ending the war of extermination in Gaza and administering the Strip during a transitional period of undefined duration — one whose length depends entirely on the understanding between Washington and Tel Aviv. The Council had announced its tasks: monitoring the ceasefire agreement, supporting peace and security in the Strip through a provisional international force, and mobilising financial commitments for reconstruction and humanitarian aid. Since the Council included no Palestinian figure whatsoever, the compromises reached to break this deadlock called for the formation of an administrative committee of Palestinian technocrats, endowed with executive powers under the Council’s authority, so that a link could be established with the Gazan population — the legitimate Palestinian Authority having been sidelined from its natural role under the Israeli veto.
When the American president sought to expand the Peace Council’s mandate beyond the terms of the UN resolution, intending to make it a broader mechanism for peace in the region and the world — a mechanism that would transcend the framework of the United Nations, its rules and its laws — the European Union and a number of Arab and Islamic states voiced their objection, insisting on the imperative of respecting international law, Palestinian representation, and the need to anchor any plan to a comprehensive political solution aimed at establishing the Palestinian state. In the same vein, Beijing expressed its reservations, while Moscow emphasised the need for balance, the preservation of UN legitimacy, and the securing of an active Palestinian role in managing the transitional period.
All of this led to a renewed role for the Palestinian Authority in managing the Rafah crossing, under the partnership agreement concluded with the European Union in 2005. The Peace Council also found no solution for providing an internal police force in the Strip other than returning to the internationally recognised Palestinian police apparatus. It was within this context — which the Netanyahu government acknowledged only under duress from American, Arab, and international pressure — that the Peace Council was able to hold its first meeting in Washington in mid-February. The outcome included the mobilisation of approximately seventeen billion dollars, the preparation of a reconstruction plan for the Strip, confirmation of the Palestinian administrative committee’s role in the recovery plan, consolidation of the ceasefire, and the initiation of the transition to the second phase of Trump’s plan — a plan divided into twenty stages.
But where do things stand today?
Amid the din of the war with Iran, no one is paying much attention to what is happening in the Gaza Strip, where Netanyahu managed to block the transition to the second phase of the peace plan on the pretext that Hamas must first surrender its weapons — without disclosing the agreement reached in Doha and announced by President Trump, according to which Hamas had been permitted to continue governing Gaza and to retain its weapons until the international force arrived?!!
Meanwhile, the occupation army is expanding its presence in the yellow buffer zone, which now covers more than half the Strip’s area, and conducting daily military operations that push Palestinians toward the sea, dividing the Strip vertically from north to south along the axis of Salah al-Din Street — with a lower population density east of the road and a considerably higher one to the west.
As long as the international peacekeeping force continues to face legal difficulties in terms of its definition and mandate — and its formation remains delayed at the time of writing — the Israeli government is maintaining the pace of its military operations to reshape the Gaza Strip’s landscape in a way that suits its long-term security interests.
This situation has reduced the members of the Palestinian administrative committee to doing nothing but sitting in their offices, thinking of resignation: the committee’s provisional headquarters is in the Egyptian city of El-Arish, and Israel has barred its members — as well as its lead official, engineer Ali Shaath — from entering the Gaza Strip. Israel has likewise conditioned the entry of aid trucks on a reduction in their numbers and a restriction on their contents, through unrelenting pressure that results in a scarcity of free food supplies and a ban on new tents — even as 90% of those currently in use are worn to shreds. This is compounded by the prohibition on heavy machinery needed to clear rubble from the streets — a deliberate effort to obstruct the search for the bodies of more than ten thousand people missing beneath the ruins.
To date, no announcement has been made regarding an Israeli withdrawal schedule from the Strip. What is happening instead is that the occupation army is systematically severing every link between the administrative committee and the Gazan population — as a number of those involved in the process have publicly stated.
What is happening on the ground is the transformation of the Gaza Strip into an Israeli buffer zone, where life for Gazans in “peacetime” proves harsher and more humiliating than it was under the war of extermination.
All the while, Hamas is being domesticated and an agreement reached with its leaders over their role in the coming phase — allowing its military-security-administrative apparatus to continue governing the western part of the Strip, which houses three-quarters of Gazans — pending settlements to come whose nature no one can predict if the matter is left to Washington and Tel Aviv. At the same time, the Netanyahu government reaffirms its demand to expel Gazans to the Sinai desert and its refusal to allow the Strip to recover its population density — treating the Palestinian as a human mass with no identity, no will, and no right to self-determination.
The very fact that the Palestinian remains in their land has become an existential obsession for the State of Israel. Thus, the operation of 7 October detonated the deepest of fears — those that call for the elimination of the other, rather than the search for peace with the other.
The hatred between the two peoples has never reached the intensity it has today. It has taken on a pathological dimension that is difficult to treat or overcome in any foreseeable future.