On 17 November, the United Nations Security Council voted in favour of a resolution which will progress Donald Trump’s ‘peace’ plan for Gaza. But what has so far been established by the first phase is not the ‘eternal peace’ that Trump touted, but a continuation of the killing at a lower intensity, for now, and a criminal partition of the territory.
Led by the US, and backed by its European lackeys, this plan will serve only to create a new colonial administration in the region. What this amounts to is the UN giving its blessing to the continued occupation and carve up of Palestine. In doing so, they are preparing the way for greater conflicts in the future.
Surprisingly to some, China and Russia indirectly supported it too, by abstaining rather than using their veto powers at the Security Council to sink the resolution. This should come as no surprise. Far from being friends of the Palestinian people, they see it as in their own interests in the region to give Trump a free hand on this question.
No peace
Since the first phase of Trump’s ‘peace’ plan came into effect on 10 October, a state of ceasefire has allegedly been established. For the people of Gaza, however, very little has changed.
Since 10 October, over 300 Palestinians have been killed and 670 injured by IDF soldiers and bombing. On 19 October alone, 45 Palestinians were killed by Israeli air strikes, after accusations that Hamas had killed two IDF soldiers. Just ten days later, another 109 were killed, half of whom were children. At the time of writing, an additional 30 Palestinians across Gaza have been killed by the IDF in the past 24 hours.
Another element of ‘phase one’ was that Israel was to relinquish its blockades on aid coming into Gaza. Estimates say that, if the borders had been opened, just under 20,000 lorries of aid should have passed into Gaza by now, bringing vital food and medical supplies to the starving and sick.
In fact, only around 4,800 have made it into the territory, as Israel has only marginally relaxed its vice-like grip around Gaza. The IDF will take any excuse to deny aid access to Gaza, such as turning back a shipment of tents, on the pretence that the tent poles could be used as weapons.
A ceasefire is clearly the last thing on Netanyahu’s mind. Just two days after the UN vote, Israel bombed southern Lebanon, and later on Beirut; it has doubled down on its control over the Syrian territory that it recently occupied, through a personal visit by Netanyhu himself; and October had the highest recorded rate of Israeli settler attacks in the West Bank since 2006, when records began.
This is what the imperialists call peace! But this is just the beginning.
‘Phase two’
The UN resolution has initiated ‘phase two’. This will establish a ‘Board of Peace’, chaired by Trump himself, which is answerable only to itself, giving it a free hand in Gaza. Policing this will be an ‘International Stabilisation Force’, which will seek to disarm Hamas.
A coalition of various armed forces is supposed to man this force. But who will volunteer for such a task? The USA has made it very clear that it will not commit troops on the ground, as has France and a number of other imperialist powers. Considering the massive anger back home against western imperialism’s backing of Israel’s genocide, putting troops on the ground would be adding fuel to the fire.
Trump’s hope is that the neighbouring Arab regimes will cough up the manpower, but they are unwilling to act so blatantly as the prison wardens for the Palestinians, particularly if it involves engaging in direct combat with Hamas. All of these countries are powder kegs, and the hated regimes being seen as colluding with Israel to police Gaza may just set them off.
Despite the US’ vague and clearly empty allusions to an eventual Palestinian state at some undetermined time in the future, Israel has said in no uncertain terms that it will not allow anything to develop that even remotely resembles such a state.
Israel has also made it clear that they will not allow certain countries to offer their soldiers to man the stabilisation force. Specifically, they named Qatar and particularly Turkey, a rival power with interests in the region.
The next phase of Trump’s peace plan is dependent on the disarming of Hamas – which is itself not an easy task, as Israel itself has discovered over the past two years – via an international force that few, if any, are willing to commit to.
In reality then, this is a sanctification of the status quo. Israel has committed a genocide (as the UN itself stated), and has essentially now received the UN’s blessing.
A new partition
And then there is the ‘yellow line’, a border of yellow concrete blocks around Gaza, to demarcate the line between ‘old’ Gaza – where Hamas currently maintains control – and ‘new’ Gaza, which the IDF will supposedly evacuate as the peace process unfolds.
This boundary completely cuts Gaza City off from the border with Egypt. Israel currently occupies 53 percent of the territory of the Gaza strip, but in the remaining 47 percent lies the vast majority of the remaining two million Palestinians in Gaza, living in a patchwork of tents and bombed out buildings. Before the ink even dried on the document, the IDF pushed beyond the yellow line, deeper into ‘old’ Gaza, to grab more territory.
Israel is already moving forward with ‘reconstruction’ in the area it occupies. Smotrich, the far-right finance minister, has explicitly said that the “war is not over” until Hamas has been destroyed. Earlier this year he defended the ‘right’ to build Israeli settlements in Gaza, which he argued is an “inseparable part of Israel”.
The next steps of Trump’s plan are vague and contingent on the nigh-on-impossible being achieved. With Israel already building on the land that it has occupied, the ‘yellow line’ therefore is increasingly looking like the basis for a more permanent partition.
This has long been the traditional strategy of the Zionist regime: incrementally encroaching upon Palestinian territory, turning the thumbscrews to make life more and more unbearable, to drive the population away.
It is this rotten ‘peace’, overseen by the most powerful imperialist force on the planet, which has been de facto supported by China and Russia through their abstention. Also backing it are the neighbouring Arab regimes. This includes Algeria, which had a vote on the council, as well as Qatar, Egypt, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan, all of whom signed a statement in support of the USA’s resolution. With friends like these, who needs enemies?
However the dust settles, the question of Palestinian self-determination is out of the question as long as the Zionist state exists, backed to the hilt by US imperialism. Bourgeois diplomatic institutions like the UN can offer no respite, all they offer is window dressing to prettify the horrors created by the capitalist system, while preparations are made for new divisions and imperialist interventions.
Only an overthrow of the Zionist regime, and the ejection of all of the imperialist forces who back it in the region, can put a stop to the daily horror without end under capitalism.
