The initiative to end the war in Gaza unveiled by US President Donald Trump at a news conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is effectively a joint US-Israeli ultimatum to Hamas.
There is almost nothing required of Israel independent of its own judgment, except the release of Palestinian detainees – contingent on the return of Israeli captives. Everything else, including what areas of Gaza it will evacuate and when is up to the Israelis. And Israel will retain a large new “security barrier”.
The ultimatum is effectively an instrument of surrender by Hamas. But with pressure mounting even from Turkey and Qatar, not to mention the Palestinian people, Hamas might agree or, in the Israeli manner, reply “yes, but”.
Hamas can probably get away with requesting clarification of many of the ultimatum’s vague or ambiguous provisions.
That opacity is most evident regarding Israel’s least favourite topic, Palestinian statehood. Washington acceded to the requirement, mainly by Gulf states, to include this dreaded phrase.
Point 19 allows that after undefined reforms of the Palestinian Authority are “faithfully carried out”, then “conditions may finally be in place for Palestinian self-determination and statehood”. But this is acknowledged only as “the aspiration of the Palestinian people”, not a right or even shared goal. That comes close to characterising it as a self-delusion.
The agreement concludes by promising that Washington “will establish a dialogue between Israel and the Palestinians” – strikingly avoiding mentioning their sole legitimate representative, the Palestine Liberation Organisation – “to agree on a political horizon for peaceful and prosperous co-existence”. This wording appears to suggest that there are pathways to peaceful co-existence that do not involve the aspirational “Palestinian self-determination and statehood”. That juxtaposition is obvious and dripping with menacing significance.
Still, Mr Trump reportedly recently assured Arab leaders he has forbidden Israel from annexing any additional territory in the occupied West Bank.
Much in the agreement would greatly benefit the long-suffering Palestinians of Gaza, if not their national movement. It promises an immediate end of the war and a vigorous programme of aid and reconstruction.
It rules out mass expulsion, which Israeli extremists, including within the cabinet, have consistently advocated. And it insists that Palestinians who leave Gaza will be allowed to freely return.
Humanitarian aid will resume, operated by appropriate UN and other established organisations rather than the nefarious Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, at whose few distribution centres more than a thousand Palestinians were shot and killed by Israeli soldiers and US mercenaries.
There is, however, a strong whiff of old-fashioned imperialism about this vision. Gaza will be ruled by a “technocratic, apolitical Palestinian committee” with “oversight and supervision” by a new “Board of Peace” chaired by Mr Trump and including former British prime minister Tony Blair, among others to be determined. This body will “set the framework and handle the funding for the redevelopment of Gaza”, until the PA has completed the unspecified major reforms, apparently to the satisfaction of the “Board of Peace”.
This framework envisages a significant role for experts from “the thriving modern miracle cities in the Middle East”, an obvious reference to Gulf Arab countries. The US and Israel apparently expect Gaza reconstruction and the rapid development of a policing “International Stabilisation Force” to be funded, and possibly even manned, by these countries, along with Egypt and Jordan.
Yet all these countries have made it clear that they would only get involved in post-conflict stabilisation in Gaza, even funding reconstruction, at the invitation of the PA, and in conjunction with a credible diplomatic framework that produces irreversible steps towards the establishment of a Palestinian state. Nothing of the kind arises from this text.
By assuring Palestinians that they will not be expelled from Gaza or prevented from returning to it only if Hamas accepts this proposal, there is the implicit threat that if it does not, that may indeed be their fate. That’s probably not what Mr Trump has in mind when he says Israel has his complete support to “finish the job” if Hamas does not accept the ultimatum.
But what it might entail is almost impossible to imagine, given the existing scale of death and destruction inflicted on Gaza over the past two years. But right-wing Israelis, including powerful members of Mr Netanyahu’s cabinet, and possibly even the Prime Minister himself, have evidently realised that the only way to ensure a Hamas-free Gaza is to depopulate the territory of Palestinians.
Hamas is a political brand-name, not a list of people, infrastructure or equipment that can be destroyed, thereby achieving its elimination. As long as a significant population of Palestinians remains in Gaza, there is every likelihood that some of them will continue to identify as Hamas, and the organisation will therefore survive – quite possibly strong enough to play a role in any political future of the Strip.
These Israelis are confronting the fact that the only way to achieve the otherwise quixotic goal of eliminating Hamas altogether in Gaza is to remove all, or at least most, of the Palestinians there. Egypt has made it clear that it cannot be bribed or bullied into changing its policy, which dates back to the early 1950s, of refusing to permit any displacement of Palestinians from Gaza into Egypt.
Israel is systematically rendering Gaza functionally uninhabitable, thereby potentially forcing its residents to beg for sanctuary. Israel is already guilt-tripping the international community about accepting batches of new Palestinian refugees.
Palestinians might be expelled person by person, family by family. Israel is even reportedly negotiating with the world’s poorest countries such as South Sudan over how much they would charge per head to accept Palestinians from Gaza as refugees.
The new ultimatum would, if nothing else, take that catastrophe off the table, since a “voluntary migration” solution by Israel to the conundrum in which it has enmeshed itself is scandalously immoral.
Yet given the genocidal levels of devastation and civilian death already inflicted on the Palestinians of Gaza, what Mr Trump or, far worse, Mr Netanyahu might imagine would constitute “finishing the job” is bloodcurdling.
Having dragged more than two million innocent Palestinians into this nightmare, Hamas has no right to simply and flatly say “no” to the first real chance to bring it to a functional conclusion.
