There is not much hope for a long standing peace in the Gaza Strip, Martin Jay writes.
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How much hope can we place in the recently announced ceasefire deal, agreed both by Israel and Hamas, supposedly brokered by U.S. President Donald Trump? Who are the winners and losers? And how much of what we are seeing and reading in western press is the whole truth?
Unfortunately the picture is bleak and there is not much hope for a long-standing peace in the Gaza Strip, largely because the so-called deal is not a ‘peace deal’ as such but more a temporary ceasefire to get out Israeli hostages. Not much more.
Certainly, the 20 point plan has more to it than that but the fact that most of the points are vague and open to interpretation doesn’t bode well for the whole thing to be taken seriously. Perhaps it was never meant to be taken seriously, as I have previously written, it is likely that Trump put this together at the last moment hastily due to the media spotlight that EU leaders were getting and the possibility of a UN plan getting underway.
In reality, the only two winners in the deal are not even countries or states, but individuals. Trump himself will think he is whitewashing himself of the genocide and will hope that being the one who is the architect of the plan itself, it will accelerate his chances of getting a Nobel Peace Prize. This is unlikely though as despite western media dutifully writing up the narrative that it is Trump who is “railroading” the peace deal through, the truth is, in reality, a little different. From the very first day in office, Trump could have stopped the genocide in Gaza, but instead chose to support Netanyahu all the way with numerous arms shipments being signed off by him. For Netanyahu, the political capital to be gleaned by getting 20 hostages alive returned to their families cannot have a price attached to it. And so, broadly speaking, both Trump and Netanyahu will wring their hands when the hostages walk free.
But it is expected that Netanyahu won’t waste any time getting back to business of slaughtering more innocent Palestinians in Gaza once the media attention wanes and he sees that the Europeans start to harp on about a Palestinian state, when they see IDF soldiers outside of the main part of the Gaza Strip. Time and time again history has shown us that it is always Israel which breaks ceasefires, hunts down and murders key Palestinian negotiators and it is always Israel which betrays international law.
Aid is expected to be sent into Gaza during a ceasefire and this will be the first casualty. Netanyahu might let in a bit for a few days but it is only a matter of time before he inevitably closes this supply and reverts back to the egregious policy of starvation. It is also inevitable that Israel will make sporadic attacks which break the ceasefire, which is a trap for Hamas, as, if they retaliate, then Israel can say the ceasefire has been broken entirely by “terrorists” and that of course “Israel has the right to defend itself”.
The hostages exchange might well be the catalyst for the ceasefire to be broken. How long does Trump need a ceasefire to be in place to say to the world that he alone brokered peace both for Gaza and the whole of the Middle East? Perhaps a week. Perhaps two. If the hostages’ bodies cannot be located in 72 hours and exhumed, before handing over the remains to the IDF, then this alone could spark a fresh offensive by Israel who will simply intensify their depraved genocide and catch up on the numbers, killing women and children in tents, or wiping out entire families in their homes as they did barely a couple of hours before MPs in Israel’s parliament finally agreed to the deal in the wee hours of the night.
For Hamas, there really isn’t much in it to accept for the return of a number of Palestinians illegally detained in Israel’s prisons. They know that even if food aid resumes, it will not be for long as Netanyahu’s big plan for the entire region in “Israeli expansion” into Syria, Lebanon, parts of Jordan and Iraq and keeping Palestinians in the Gaza Strip is not part of that, rather than wiping them out entirely in an ethnic cleansing strategy which leaves many thinking of the Nazis and the Holocaust. Don’t place much hope on the 20 point plan by Trump’s people as it was never meant to be taken seriously. “Look, we offered them peace” is what the narrative will be so there had to be something written at least. But in reality it’s not worth the paper it is written on as Hamas have even rejected outright the idea of Tony Blair being an interim PM in the Strip or giving up their weapons. Fake news, Trump might call it, if it hadn’t come from his own shaking hand.
