Trump is turning Gaza into a brutal colonial protection racket

Trump’s ‘peace plan’ will never be meaningfully realised – and was never intended to be. It is simply a way to justify prolonging Gaza’s living hell

[First published by Middle East Eye]

The West has spent two years partnering Israel in its campaign of wanton destruction in Gaza. Now the United States – with the permission of a cowed United Nations Security Council – has appointed Donald Trump to preside over the ruins.

Like a Roman emperor, the US president will be able to dictate the fate of Gaza’s people with a simple gesture. Whatever he decides – whether the thumb turns up or down – it will be called “peace”.

Trump’s most likely side-kick in this depraved charade will be Tony Blair, the former British prime minister. He won his war-crime spurs more than 20 years ago, when he joined one of Trump’s predecessors, George W Bush, in launching an illegal invasion of Iraq and a subsequent, catastrophic occupation that left that country in ruins too.

Satire cannot do justice to this moment.

The eradication of Gaza could be achieved only with the complete hollowing out of international law – the legal global order that was established many decades ago to prevent a third world war and the horrors of the Holocaust.

Marking the demise of that era, the Security Council voted 13-0 this week to endorse Trump’s “peace plan” for Gaza, with only Russia and China daring to abstain.

The dissenting representatives of the crumbling legal order – from the judges of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to Francesca Albanese, the UN’s legal expert for the occupied territories – have been isolated, vilified and sanctioned by the Trump administration. No one appears to be willing to come to their defence.

Quite the contrary. Germany, whose own genocidal rampage across Europe more than 80 years ago once left it a pariah state and drove the creation of the new legal order, now confidently leads the way in flouting those very rules.

It has resumed supplying Israel with the weapons it needs to continue the slaughter, justifying the decision on the grounds that Israel is murdering fewer Palestinians during Trump’s duplicitous “ceasefire”.

On Wednesday, Israel broke the ceasefire once again, killing more than 30 people in a series of air strikes, including 20 women and children.

Even the current “peace” allows Israel to occupy some 58 percent of Gaza in a depopulated “Green Zone”, effectively partitioning the territory for the forseeable future. Daily, Israel bombs families sheltering in the wreckage of the enclave’s interior, declared a “Red Zone”. And Israel continues to block the entry of food and medicines, including the temporary housing needed as winter rains deluge the territory.

Is this what, 19 years ago, Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s secretary of state, meant when she spoke of the coming, painful “birth pangs of a new Middle East”?

Now, it seems, they have arrived in full force – and the region has never looked more terrifying.

A joint US-Israeli occupation

UN Resolution 2803 makes Trump the debauched feudal overlord of Gaza. His lackeys on a so-called “Board of Peace” will “include the most powerful and respected Leaders throughout the World”, according to the US President.

They will have sovereign power over the enclave’s ruins for at least the next two years – and undoubtedly long beyond that. The Board will decide how Gaza is governed, what constitutes its borders, how or whether it is rebuilt, and what economic life is permitted.

In effect, oversight of the system of colonial control and abuse Israel has exercised over the territory since the late 1960s – which the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled illegal last year – will be transferred to the United States, with the Security Council’s blessing.

This is now formally a joint US-Israeli occupation.

The US that now holds Gaza’s fate in its hands is the same US that has spent the past two years arming Israel.

Those weapons made possible the levelling of Gaza, the ethnic cleansing of 2 million people from their homes, and a mass slaughter identified by every major human rights group and international legal body as a genocide.

Trump’s “peace plan” is the international order’s equivalent of putting a convicted serial child abuser in charge of a primary school.

There will be no UN peacekeeping force in Gaza to try to protect its people. That would too readily expose the masquerade of Trump’s version of “peace”.

The UN force in Lebanon, Unifil, has reported thousands of Israeli violations of a supposed year-old “ceasefire” there. Israel is not just bombing Lebanese families, but this week shot at Unifil peacekeepers too.

Rather, the Board – meaning Trump and the Pentagon – will supervise an “International Stabilisation Force” (ISF) in Gaza, supposedly to be in place by January.

Disarming Hamas

Last year the ICJ ruled that Israel must end its occupation and pull out of all Palestinian territories “as rapidly as possible”, including Gaza. Apparently in line with that ruling, Britain and France led a handful of other western states in recognising a Palestinian state a few months ago.

But in supporting UN Resolution 2308, both have, entirely predictably, reneged on their promise. Although at the insistence of Arab states, the resolution makes a vague nod to a possible “pathway” to statehood, the “Board of Peace” – that is, the US and Israel – gets to decide when, or if, that actually happens.

A precondition is that Mahmoud Abbas’ supine Palestinian Authority (PA) submits to an undefined “reform programme”. The PA already serves as Israel’s reliable security sub-contractor in the Occupied West Bank, having turned itself into a modern-day Vichy regime.

It was the PA’s endorsement of Trump’s “peace plan” that gave Russia and China the cover to abstain at the Security Council rather than scuttle the resolution with their vetoes.

The reality is that nothing the PA can do – even colluding in its own evisceration – will make Israel view it as a suitable Palestinian government. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyhau reiterated as much this week, shortly after the resolution was passed, saying he would never allow a Palestinian state.

Instead, Israel will simply stay on in Gaza. It is not required to withdraw until the multinational force is deployed and the Israeli military agrees that it has enforced “demilitarisation milestones” in the enclave. Yet it is hard to imagine who will be willing to take on disarming Hamas.

Trump has ruled out deploying US soldiers or funding Gaza’s reconstruction. “The US has been very clear they want to set the vision and not pay for it,” a diplomatic source told the Guardian.

The US regional military command, Centcom, initially drew up plans for thousands of British, French and German soldiers to form the core of the ISF, according to documents seen by the paper. A source described the plans as “delusional”.

No European state will wish to risk its soldiers in the Gaza hellscape, caught between Hamas’ battle-hardened guerrilla fighters and an Israeli military continuing to treat much of the enclave as an effective free-fire zone.

Instead, the White House is reported to have approached Egypt, Indonesia, Azerbaijan, Qatar, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates.

But Arab and Muslim states, having already sickened their publics by mutely colluding in the genocide, are unlikely to want to be seen being dragged into disarming the only practical resistance to that genocide.

Astonishingly, it was left to Hamas to remind the world of what international law actually requires. In a statement after the UN vote, the group noted: “Assigning the international force [ISF] with tasks and roles inside the Gaza Strip, including disarming the resistance, strips it of its neutrality, and turns it into a party to the conflict in favour of the occupation.”

In the meantime, Israel will continue to fill the breach unhindered.

Ties to crime gangs

In fact, the ISF is a consolidation of Israel’s long-running campaign to oust the UN from any role in monitoring its illegal occupation of Palestine.

In that sense, it is a continuation of the same sham cooked up earlier this year by Israel and the US in establishing the “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” (GHF). That “charity”, staffed by mercenaries, forcibly replaced UN aid agencies that for decades had been responsible for distributing food.

The Foundation’s handful of “aid hubs” rapidly became killing grounds, with starving Palestinians lured into these traps like mice seeking cheese. More than 2,600 desperate Palestinians were gunned down in its queues, and at least 19,000 wounded.

UG Solutions, the military subcontractor that supplied mercenaries for the GHF, is recruiting again – this time, one of its officials told Drop Site News, “in support of humanitarian aid delivery and possible technical assistance to the International Security [Stabilisation] Force”.

Previously, UG Solutions was found to have hired members of an anti-Muslim US biker gang to serve as security guards in Gaza.

The job of the ISF will not be to keep Israel’s genocidal army in check. It will be to “disarm” all Palestinian resistance to Israel’s continuing – and now Security Council-approved – illegal occupation of Gaza.

While the international community is dragooned into helping Israel crush resistance to its criminal occupation, Israel will be given cover to further cultivate ties to Palestinian crime gangs.

For the past year it has armed those gangs so they could steal the trickle of aid Israel allowed into Gaza. Israel then blamed Hamas for the thefts. This self-rationalising narrative allowed Israel to conceal the fact it was the party responsible for depriving ordinary Palestinians of food, while also giving it a military pretext to refuse to allow in more aid.

This alliance will now grow more sophisticated. The gangs can be sheltered and trained inside the “Green Zone” before heading out on operations, backed by Israeli air power, into the ruins of the “Red Zone” to fight Hamas.

Hebrew media has already reported that the Israeli army has been “guarding” the gangs behind a “yellow line” separating the Green and Red Zones. Any other Palestinians who approach this cordon are shot on sight.

By looting aid from Gaza’s starving population, the gangs have proved they have no interest in protecting civilians – or any compunction about helping Israel to tear apart their own society.

There is already a model – if a failed one – for Israel to draw on. For years, until it was forced out in 2000, Israel protected Christian-led paramilitaries that helped enforce its illegal, brutal two-decade occupation of south Lebanon.

Behind the curtain

This week, hand-picked members of the media were given a peek behind the curtain to see who will be running Gaza.

The New York Times reported that a warehouse in the Israeli town of Kiryat Gat, north-east of Gaza, was serving as the headquarters of a new “Civil-Military Coordination Centre”.

It is filled with Israeli, US and European military officials, Arab intelligence agents, diplomats and aid workers. There was, the paper noted, no one representing Palestinian interests.

The same building was used earlier to house the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the US and Israeli-backed mercenary group that pretended to be an aid agency until it was wound up last month.

The new centre is led by Aryeh Lightstone, who served in Trump’s first term under the then US ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, an outspoken, pro-Israel zealot whose main mission was to get the US embassy moved – in violation of international law – to the Israeli-occupied city of Jerusalem.

Lightstone is likely to emerge as the new Paul Bremer, the hugely unqualified US-appointed governor of Iraq following the illegal 2003 invasion.

Bremer gutted what was left of Iraqi national institutions and civil society after a US “shock and awe” bombing campaign. The resulting lawlessness made the Iraqi population prey to sectarian death squads, while US firms sought to plunder Iraq’s wealth.

The profits from untapped oil and gas now beckon off Gaza’s coast – a prize Palestinians have been denied for decades, not least by Blair when he served as the Quartet’s Middle East envoy. It is hard to imagine Trump will not now be eyeing Gaza’s riches.

So clueless are many of the centre’s officials about Gaza that it had to hold a primer for newcomers on “What is Hamas?”, according to the New York Times.

To keep things light, each day is reportedly themed on one of the catastrophes facing the people of Gaza: “Wellness Wednesdays” deal with the issues thrown up by Israel’s eradication of hospitals and schools, while “Thirsty Thursdays” concern Israel’s destruction of the enclave’s water infrastructure.

Nowhere safe

Shortly before the UN vote, the Guardian reported that the US had decided only to rebuild in the “Green Zone”, the section of Gaza under Israeli control. The Red Zone is to be left in ruins for the time being.

A US official told the paper of the Gaza plan: “Ideally you would want to make it all whole, right? But that’s aspirational. It’s going to take some time. It’s not going to be easy.”

According to reports, the US will build what are to be called “alternative safe communities” – a polite way to refer to the construction of holding pens for Palestinians – in the areas under Israeli control. There is no indication yet that these will be permanent communities.

The Green Zone is where ISF troops will be stationed too, presumably alongside the Israeli military. They are expected to man crossing points along the yellow line, the death zone separating the Green and Red Zones.

“You’re not going to leave [the Green Zone],” a US official told the Guardian of the multinational force, in an all-too-obvious echo of US experiences in Iraq two decades ago. Then, the US had to build a giant garrison town in the centre of Baghdad called the Green Zone, from which its soldiers rarely ventured unless on military operations.

Palestinians will supposedly be permitted into these “safe communities”, but only if they can prove they or their extended families have no connections to Hamas, Gaza’s government for nearly two decades. That will necessarily exclude large chunks of the population.

Everywhere else in Gaza will presumably remain “unsafe” – meaning Israel will have a free hand to bomb it, as now, under the pretext that these areas remain Hamas strongholds.

This will play to all of Israel’s devious strengths. It will pressure Palestinian families to serve as informers and collaborators to gain an exit from the Red Zone – replicating a system of control Israel has specialised in for decades.

In pre-genocide Gaza, Israel notoriously achieved the same by tapping phone calls and blackmailing anyone who had a secret – such as their sexual orientation, an affair, or mental health issues. Israeli authorities also often demanded collaboration before they would issue a medical travel permit out of Gaza for the sick or injured.

Its recruitment of informers is primarily designed to fragment Palestinian society, and spread distrust and discord.

Via a system of patronage and privilege, these new “safe communities” will also serve to further incentivise crime gangs to collude with Israel, helping it sustain a civil war in Gaza to make the territory permanently ungovernable – and justify Israel’s refusal to countenance Palestinian statehood.

In any other context, what all of this amounts to would be clear: a protection racket now headed by the US gangster-in-chief.

Living hell

The reality, however, is that Trump’s “peace plan” is never going to be meaningfully realised – and is not intended to be.

Gaza was already one of the most densely populated places on earth. How is its surviving population of two million or so to be crammed into half the space, with no homes and all its hospitals and schools either bombed into rubble or out of reach?

In truth, this is simply a way to justify prolonging a living hell for Gaza’s population under cover of a “peace plan”.

Israel had exhausted world sympathy to the point where western leaders’ complicity in the genocide had become too visible to conceal.

Now rather than having Israeli military officials on air spouting self-evident lies about only targeting Hamas fighters, we will have US officials explaining – with the help of far more savvy public relations teams – how they are struggling under insuperable odds to improve the situation of Palestinians.

Anyone refused entry into the Green Zone will be presented as Hamas or an ally of Hamas. Families in the Red Zone killed with US-supplied bombs will be terrorists by definition. The new “barbarians at the gate”.

The western media will finally be placated, as its genocide-complicit correspondents are ushered into Gaza – but only into the Green Zone. There, they will be guided around model “safe communities”, where they can busy themselves airing footage of afflicted Palestinians fleeing Hamas and offered respite.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of Palestinians will struggle to survive the winter without shelter and significant aid, with no hospitals and no schools for their children. All while being indiscriminately bombed by Israel.

This is the only “peace” Trump is offering.

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