The so-called "peace deal" does not offer peace; it demands surrender. The Trump plan is the manifestation of a colonial logic that believes might makes right.
The psychopathology of the white supremacist colonial mindset renders colonial policy makers operating within that framework incapable of apprehending reality from the standpoint of the colonized. The belief in a Gaza “paradise” for the rich and famous, once Palestinians are paid to leave, or the idea that, after over seven hundred days of a war of extermination, where continued survival is, Palestinians would then surrender, can only be believed by individuals completely afflicted with this psychopathology.
Yet, this is Trump’s 20 Point so-called peace plan, released on September 29th with indicted war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu at his side. It is a proposal with a core demand that Palestinian resistance completely surrender to occupation— and certain annihilation.
But not only does the plan call for the surrender of the armed resistance after turning over all of the Israeli prisoners of war, the plan also calls for the resistance to believe it could trust two outlaw states that have demonstrated no respect for law, agreements, negotiations, or any of the normative principles of diplomacy. Does the Trump administration not understand that when you cajole the resistance into a negotiation process and then you allow Israel to try and murder the negotiating tea,m it does not engender much faith that you can be trusted?
In addition to that fact, the other reality is that we have observed time and time again that agreements struck with Israel were abandoned as soon as Israel secured its short-term objectives.
This is how the agreement is supposed to proceed: First, there would be an immediate ceasefire with the release of all remaining Israeli prisoners within 72 hours of accepting the agreement. Israel will then release Palestinian prisoners, including women and children, who are being detained by the occupation forces.
Then, instead of a full withdrawal of the Israeli occupation forces to pre-October 7th borders, a consistent demand from the resistance, the occupation forces would maintain control of a “buffer zone” in Gaza.
Politically, the occupation would be reestablished by the imposition of a leadership structure made up of Palestinian collaborators. The Plan refers to them as “apolitical” Palestinians that would be overseen by a so-called “Board of Peace” chaired by Donald Trump and former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Longer term governance would be provided by the Palestinian Authority (PA), with security provided by an “International Stabilization Force (ISF)” made up of forces from U.S. vassal states in the Arab world.
This whole scenario reads like something conjured up in the midst of a marijuana induced high.
The 20 Point Plan Dissolves the Collective Right to Resist Colonialism, the Right to Self-Determination and National Independence
The Western media refers to Trump’s ultimatum as an agreement while not recognizing the absurdity of pretending that agreeing to an ultimatum is anything more than a coercive imposition of power by the weaker party. And in the historic specifics of Gaza, it is not only an unfair imposition of power, but it is profoundly immoral because it is being imposed on an indigenous people who have been systematically degraded and dehumanized by an Israeli settler colonial project that sees a historic opportunity to complete the full program of colonial conquest.
To demand complete surrender or else risk physical extermination is an unfathomable choice for an oppressed people, a choice that one would think would be unthinkable in 2025. But yet, here we are.
Yet this devolution to the colonial morality of 19th-century Europe, when the white West was at the apex of its power, is unsustainable in the 21st century. The world has changed, the historic dialectic revealed that the unchallenged power of the colonial capitalist West began to shift at the very moment of the West’s ascendency. Why? Because that ascendency created irreconcilable contradictions that resulted in colonial wars, two global conflicts that consumed the lives of millions, the rise of socialism and decolonial wars of national liberation, and extreme forms of cultural rot in the Western metropoles.
Beginning at the end of the second imperialist war, World War II, collective humanity began to move toward establishing a new world. A world that had at its ethical and moral center principles that were incompatible with the material realities of a world organized in the service of capital and parasitic colonialism in all its forms.
The right to self-determination, to national sovereignty, to people(s)-centered human rights reflected in the provisions of the United Nations, Nuremberg principles, international law, and the spirit of Bandung legitimized the rights of the oppressed, the colonized, to resist and to defeat colonial oppression.
The Palestinian anti-colonial struggle has been erected on this foundation. The decision by Israel and the U.S. to impose the conditions reflected in the U.S. administration’s plan is patently illegitimate and delusional. The U.S. plan severs Gaza from the rest of Palestine and from the broader issue of Palestinian national liberation. A reality that the coterie of Arab and Muslim states that have consistently abandoned the Palestinian liberation movement have once again shamelessly given support to with this frontal attack on Palestinian nationhood.
And while it is understandable that the nations of the U.S./EU/NATO Axis of Domination would lead their support to the gangster regimes in Israel and the U.S., the Russian Federation’s endorsement of the Trump plan should raise serious questions as to why it would support a process that could result in the potential obliteration of the Palestinian project.
The Palestinian people have demonstrated that they will not surrender their dignity even if it means death. So all of the decisions being made by the two criminal states regarding how governance would look, what states would be involved, is almost comical if it were not so serious. With no guarantees or recognition of Palestinian interests, the Palestinian resistance is supposed to just betray their national aspirations and dignity.
What Trump has done is provide further evidence of his criminal complicity in one of the most horrific crimes in human history.
The announcement by the U.S. Administration to support the continuation of the operation in Gaza, an operation that has been defined by most credible human rights organizations and now the United Nations itself, as genocidal, condemns the U.S. as explicitly complicit in the genocide and subject to international justice.
It is that reality that should be the basis for discussion. If the U.S. and its rogue state partner were interested in “peace” they would end the siege, withdraw forces, pay reparations, dismantle the Israeli apartheid system, enforce the right of return and move toward the establishment of a process that had the possibility of peace with justice and self-determination for Palestine within the framework that the Zionists have established themselves with the rejection of the so-called two state solution.
What form that might take and how a post-Jewish ethno-supremacist state might look remains to be seen. Those details are not necessarily our business. Our responsibility, however, is to reject obvious injustice, speak out against the depravity of racist colonialism, and to stand in solidarity with a people struggling for dignity and the right to live.
The Trump plan is a negation of that right. It is no more than a crude public relations stunt for an “American” audience to justify support for the final solution for Israel’s Palestinian problem. A final solution that the perpetrators of this final solution should know very well because they learned it from the best – the white West!
Ajamu Baraka is an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report. He is the Director of the North-South Project for People(s)-Centered Human Rights and serves on the Executive Committee of the U.S. Peace Council and leadership body of the U.S.-based United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC).
“Ethiopia just changed the continent of Africa forever.” - African development economist and electricity activist
"Department of War: What’s new is so old" is the latest from BAR's Poet-in-Residence.
Turning the Caribbean into a US bombing range requires local collaborators. Neocolonial governments have volunteered to play this role, betraying their people's right to peace and sovereignty.
The Africa Climate Summit is a greenwashing front for a new wave of colonialism. Under the guise of "nature-based solutions," corporations like the Gates Foundation are pushing schemes that will turn…
In this series, we ask acclaimed authors to answer five questions about their book. This week’s featured author is Tracie Canada. Canada is the Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of…
