US plan for Gaza branded as “colonial”
US President Donald Trump’s 20-point Gaza peace plan would appear to return Gaza to the pre-October 2023 conditions, but it has been met with skepticism from some analysts, with one even calling it “colonial,” the Middle East Eye reported on October 1st.
According to the plan, Palestinians will have no role in the governing of Gaza, and a so-called “Board of Peace” overseen by Trump and ex-British Prime Minister Tony Blair would rule over as a supposedly apolitical committee of Palestinians and international experts.
Other figures reportedly considered for the board include the billionaire Marc Rowan, who owns one of the largest private equity firms in the US, Egyptian billionaire Naguib Sawiris, and Aryeh Lightstone, the chief executive of the Abraham Accords Peace Institute.
Lightstone was a senior adviser to David Friedman, who was a strong advocate for Israel’s illegal settlement expansions during the time he served as US ambassador to Israel from 2017 to 2021.
Hamas, which has governed the Gaza Strip since 2007, will be required to disarm and leave the Gaza Strip, and there are no guarantees that the Occupied West Bank will not be completely annexed by Israel.
Dylan Williams, Vice President for Government Affairs at the Center for International Policy (CIP) said: “It really does seem like the typical American approach over decades to making peace in the Middle East, which is to cook up a plan with Israel and then present it to the Palestinians as a fait accompli… any counterproposals by a Palestinian party are immediately characterised as rejection, obstructionism.”
This sentiment was echoed by Mahjoob Zweiri, a nonresident senior fellow at the Middle East Council on Global Affairs, who said: “The proposal basically ends the question of Palestinian representation.”
Zweiri said that Arab and Muslim leaders must “insist on the Palestinian Authority – all of them, even those who are not really in favour – they insist on the Palestinian Authority to stay, to remain, to reform it. But the way how things were put yesterday… basically it’s putting the whole Palestinian representation at risk”.
He added: “This is what Netanyahu wanted for the last 20 years – a solution where there is no Palestinian representation, where there is no address to go to when it comes to the Palestinians.”
The plan did not outline any viable alternative for Palestinian representation, which Ines Abdel Razek, the co-director of the Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy (PIPD), described as “pure colonial thinking.”
Razek also said: “The entire thinking around the ‘Board of Peace’ and Trump and Tony Blair… these foreign entities just controlling Gaza is completely antithetical to and against the very Palestinian fundamental right to self-determination… This is literally a plan to basically say Gaza is no more Palestinian.”
Middle East Eye, Maghrebi.org
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