By Wesam Bahrani
TEHRAN – U.S. President Donald Trump’s plan to effectively govern the Gaza Strip raises more questions than answers.
What Gaza faces today is not an ideal Palestinian national choice, nor a fully-fledged path. Palestinians have endured more than two years of genocidal war by the Zionist regime, backed by its Western allies. Amid a harsh winter and a heinous blockade, living conditions remain the same.
However, despite the scale of destruction, the occupying Israeli regime failed to achieve any of its stated war objectives, despite widespread and unseen military force in modern history.
What, then, makes Trump’s attempt to take control of and govern the tiny coastal Strip any less challenging than what the occupying Israeli regime could not accomplish over more than two years?
As the truce approaches the second phase, the United States has reportedly sent invitations, at a cost of $1 billion, to at least 60 world leaders to join a body Washington has framed as the “Gaza board of peace.”
It remains unclear whether any countries have accepted the invitation. The conditions stipulate that Trump will have veto power over who participates, when and where meetings are held, and how votes are conducted. He will also have the final say on all decisions made by the board.
Talk of peace, stability, and reconstruction is glossed over by the main actors involved. These include figures from the Trump administration, such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio, White House Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, and Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, real estate tycoon Jared Kushner.
This brings forth key questions that cannot be overlooked and should serve as benchmarks for popular and national oversight.
Who holds the real decision-making power? Is the transitional phase bound by a set timeline and a clear roadmap? Or is it open-ended without a political horizon, which threatens to turn “crisis management” into a permanent substitute for its “resolution”?
Does this arrangement pave the way for the political, governmental, and geographical reunification of the Palestinian homeland? Does it open the door to restoring a political international process that leads to the establishment of a Palestinian state, or does it entrench geographic and political separation?
Firstly, Kushner has long envisioned transforming the Gaza Strip into a Riviera of real estate projects, speaking openly about such plans long before Trump publicly entertained them.
His role as the U.S. president’s adviser raises the question of whether this vision represents a family business model extended to other tycoons.
Secondly, Palestinians would be the last to benefit from such a Riviera project. The Gaza genocide has left Palestinians struggling to purchase a grain of wheat, let alone invest in real estate.
How this mission would be accomplished is another matter entirely. Palestinian resistance factions inflicted heavy casualties and damage on the Israeli regime’s occupation forces, among the most advanced in the region.
Would the Palestinian resistance, whose manpower has increased, allow a coastal Riviera for billionaires to be built at the expense of tens of thousands of Palestinian women and children killed and maimed by Zionist regime forces?
As things stand, Israeli occupation forces have withdrawn to the eastern and southern parts of Gaza, behind the so-called “yellow line.” The regime’s forces are not occupying the coast, where Kushner and Trump have set their sights for long-term financial revenue.
It is difficult to imagine another military force entering Gaza to secure such projects. The United States will certainly not put boots on the ground after its Vietnam-like experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq. There is little doubt, however, that the U.S. administration has held meetings on how such a plan might be enforced.
Under Trump’s vision, a global assembly chaired by the U.S. President would take control of Gaza. No Palestinian would sit on this committee. Even participating countries could later be excluded at Trump’s discretion.
Washington has also announced the creation of additional bodies with far less authority. At the bottom of this hierarchy sits a technocratic committee composed of Palestinians.
This mirrors a proposal Hamas had already put forward, which included a path toward disarmament for ten years in return for a full withdrawal of the Israeli regime’s occupation from the Gaza Strip alongside sovereignty for the enclave.
Furthermore, Hamas officially declared, both directly and through mediators, that it would not participate in this committee to form a governing body of Palestinian technocrats. If the objective of the Zionist regime was to eliminate Hamas, the resistance faction had effectively offered an alternative.
Hamas presented this plan after two years of resisting the genocidal war by the Zionist regime that failed to achieve its stated objective.
Under Trump’s plan, however, the so-called “executive board”, which nominally includes Palestinian governance through technocrats supported by all Palestinian bodies, though Hamas itself would play no role, is the weakest body within the U.S. president’s structure.
On one hand, there is a pressing Palestinian need to reorganize priorities. Survival is a prerequisite for any political path. Therefore, the first priority is to stabilize the people in their land. The second is to seize any realistic opportunity to improve the living conditions in Gaza, cultivate hope, and strengthen the will to fight for national rights in a community exhausted by genocidal war and siege.
The third priority is to protect Palestinian national identity as the unifying cause, at a moment when this identity is being intentionally marginalized and dismantled.
On the other hand, the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is also a wanted international fugitive by the ICC, regularly visits Washington. He has met Trump more times than any other world leader by a wide margin.
This strongly suggests that America and its proxy in West Asia, the Zionist regime, have no intention of pursuing stability, reconstruction, or peace for Palestinians in Gaza.
In essence, Palestinians have no voice in this process, not just in Gaza. Palestinian officials across the political spectrum had expressed staunch opposition to any role for Tony Blair in Gaza’s future. Despite this, the former British prime minister is set to sit alongside Trump and Kushner at the very top of the U.S. president’s board.
Since the truce went into effect on October 10, the occupying Israeli regime has killed hundreds of Palestinian civilians.
As the eighth newborn child dies of hypothermia this winter in Gaza, amid the trickle of aid and medicine permitted by the occupying regime, its fascist ministers have made their intentions clear.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir have threatened to collapse the Netanyahu government unless Palestinians are ethnically expelled from Gaza.
This paves the way for illegal settlements in Gaza and the illegal Trump real estate project for the enclave.
It is difficult to ignore that the core of the Zionist project remains unchanged: control of the land and the expulsion of its population, even if the tools and titles have shifted.
After resisting a genocidal regime for over two years, it is also difficult to imagine Palestinian resistance forces allowing such a war crime to proceed without resisting militarily.
It is even harder to believe they would raise a white flag and grant the occupying Israeli regime or the United States the green light to gamble with their dignity. This is especially true following all the death and destruction Gaza has endured.
How this phase is managed and how serious the international community is in ensuring its success will determine its outcome.
No comments:
Post a Comment