Editorial: A ‘final solution’ for Gaza

Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu conferred in the White House on Monday and came out with a 21-point plan to play out their end game in Gaza. It fits like a glove to a much-touted dictum of the far-right world that these two men inhabit: Democracy is two wolves and a lamb deciding what’s for dinner. Gaza, the lamb, has no choice but to agree to become a “deradicalised” enclave that “poses no threat to its neighbours.” That is perfect coinage for the post-truth world. After subjecting the strip to indiscriminate bombing for two years, killing 68,000 non-combatants of whom at least 29,000 were children or women, teasing a starving population with a trickle of food, Israel has appointed itself the victim while the “threat” emanates from the starving people of a flattened deathscape.

As per Trump’s latest morbid proposal, Hamas has 72 hours, counting from the moment Israel agreed to it, to accept the offer or brace up for the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) to “finish the job” in Gaza. Hamas fighters have the choice either to lay down their arms and accept an amnesty or take safe passage to a receiving country. Hamas must release all its hostages, alive or dead, in return for which Israel will release 250 Palestinians serving life sentences in its prisons plus 1,700 Gazans detained after October 7, 2023.

If both sides agree to the proposal, IDF will withdraw from its present line of operations to allow for hostage release. Military operations and aerial bombardment will cease until all of Israel’s conditions are met. IDF will then open food and medical aid channels to Gaza, and aid agencies will be allowed to operate unhindered. There is implied admission in the draft plan that Netanyahu has so far used starvation as leverage by applying a chokehold on humanitarian aid. That must count as a war crime. The lack of any safeguards in this plan to stop Israel from continuing to use such methods corrupts any hope for true peace in Gaza in the months ahead.

As per the Trump plan, the UN will be limited to the role of supervising aid delivery. Only agencies not identified with either party to the conflict will be allowed to operate. With Amnesty, UNRWA, UNHCR, and Oxfam openly accusing Israel of carrying out a genocide, Netanyahu can be expected to wield a broad brush on what counts as a non-partisan organisation.

The plan does not also call upon the UN to do any heavy lifting during the transition. Instead, Gaza’s governance will pass to a “technocratic and apolitical” nominally Palestinian committee that will be supervised by a transitional “Board of Peace,” headed, lo and behold, by Trump himself. Also, that old Iraq warmonger Tony Blair makes a stunning reappearance here. He will be the front man of this body which will “set the framework and handle the funding for the redevelopment of Gaza”.

The sudden materialisation of the neoliberal former PM of the UK, and his mandate of executing what is explicitly called “a Trump economic development plan” indicates that this is the unfurling of the ‘Gaza riviera’ plan the American President has mused about months ago. The vision it raises, of an oceanfront paradise arising from the gravesite of a thousand hungry children, will supply the motif for the times to come.