Rebranding Occupation

As Israeli and Hamas representatives conduct indirect negotiations in Cairo, shuttled between Egyptian and Qatari mediators, Washington has chosen its moment to reassert ownership of the “peace process.” Donald Trump’s twenty-point plan for Gaza, unveiled with the characteristic mix of theatricality and self-adulation, purports to offer a comprehensive pathway out of a war that has already annihilated much of the Strip. Yet this document, steeped in the language of reconstruction and renewal, is neither novel nor neutral. It is a diplomatic palimpsest - an overwriting of old colonial logics with the ink of modern crisis management. It is, in substance and intent, an exercise in salvaging Israel’s regional standing, rebranding subjugation as reform, and recasting occupation as oversight.

The timing alone betrays its political function. Two years after the Hamas-led attack of October 7 and Israel’s devastating retaliation, the war has reached a point of exhaustion but not resolution. Netanyahu’s government has achieved neither the elimination of Hamas nor the return of all hostages. International patience is thinning, and even Israel’s allies are straining to defend the indefensible. Into this vacuum steps U.S. President Donald Trump, positioning himself as the indispensable dealmaker who can end a genocide his own political tradition helped enable. The symbolism is almost too perfect: a pyromaniac returning to the fire scene, offering to sell the hoses.

The plan’s basic architecture is, on its face, deceptively orderly. Within seventy-two hours of acceptance, all hostages - living and dead - are to be released. In return, Israel will free Palestinian prisoners and remains, and the Israel Defense Forces will begin a phased withdrawal, to be replaced by an “International Stabilisation Force” led by Arab states. Gaza is to be “redeveloped for its people” and “deradicalised,” governed temporarily by a technocratic committee under the supervision of a “Board of Peace” chaired by Trump and overseen by Tony Blair. It is, in short, a colonial trusteeship in the language of managerial reform. That its architects are Blair and Jared Kushner - figures synonymous with occupation and cronyism - renders the performance almost self-parodic.

What the plan promises is not self-determination but administration. Its vision of Gaza is not that of a liberated polity, but of a patient in permanent convalescence - unfit for autonomy, forever supervised by foreign doctors who claim to know what is best. In particular, Tony Blair’s appointment encapsulates this theatre’s moral absurdity. The same man who helped orchestrate the Iraq War and oversaw years of empty “roadmaps” to peace now returns to preside over a humanitarian ruin. One might call it continuity; others would call it pathology.

Even the plan’s apparently humane provisions are laced with contradiction. The clause assuring that “no one will be forced to leave Gaza” sits alongside another inviting those who “wish to depart” to do so. In a territory pulverized by air strikes, deprived of food, water, and electricity, what does “choice” mean? In such circumstances, the distinction between voluntary departure and forced exile collapses entirely. The proposal thus rebrands displacement as agency, exile as freedom, and submission as peace.

Meanwhile, the disarmament of Hamas - a prerequisite for the plan’s implementation - is presented as both a moral imperative and a technical detail, as though resistance were an administrative inconvenience rather than a political fact born of decades of occupation. The document demands that Hamas vanish so that “peace” can materialize, yet offers no mechanism to address the conditions that produced the movement in the first place. It asks the victims to be deradicalized while the aggressor retains the right to determine when, and whether, the occupation is truly over. This is not negotiation; it is ritual humiliation disguised as progress.