No chance Gaza peace plan will last

With two years of war having passed into the bloodied history of modern times, celebrations were seen on both sides of the northern frontier as the ‘historic’ Gaza peace plan was foisted on Palestine by an American-led international order.

This plan is likely to bite the dust like previous ones including the January agreement which was violated by Israel after just two months. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will try to subvert the agreement (finalised for the first phase only) to hold on to power with the Israeli Supreme Court waiting in the wings to oust him from office.

In fact, Trump while signing the first phase plan stated that he couldn’t guarantee that Israel would not attack Hamas again if they tried to regroup while the Israeli defence minister Israel Katz has given orders to the IDF to hunt down Hamas militants once the dust settled on the Peace Plan.

The first phase of the peace plan is done, and 20 living hostages were released from Hamas’s captivity while Israel delivered on its agreement to free nearly 2000 Palestinian militants and civilians. A grand ceremony jointly hosted by Egypt and USA on 13 October at the Egyptian resort town of Sharm al-Sheikh brought a galaxy of some twenty odd world leaders from the western world as well as the region to applaud the statesmanship of the US president.

For the latter it has been a godsend as the Nobel Peace Prize for this year went to the Venezuelan Opposition leader Maria Corina Machado who in turn dedicated the prize to Trump for his “untiring efforts for peace”. Machado is a disturbing choice given that she has not only supported the genocidal actions of Netanyahu in Gaza but also asked the latter for support to fight President Nicolas Maduro under the guise of bringing back democracy to Venezuela.

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It is important to note that neither the UN which is mandated to administer Gaza nor the Palestine Authority which is supposedly governing West Bank were in any way consulted on the peace plan.

For instance, Navi Pillay, the former Chair of the UN Commission for Human Rights, the body that had found Israel responsible for committing genocide (subsequently taken by South Africa to the International Court of Justice), claimed that Palestine was not a party to the plan.

The second phase of the plan dealing with the disarmament of Hamas and future governance of Gaza is in limbo as Hamas has not agreed to the subsequent phases of the plan. This suits the Far-Right Likud party headed by Netanyahu well as it will probably attribute all ensuing problems to the intransigence of Hamas.

It is not surprising to understand the position which the resistance group has taken in the face of all obstacles and having lost sizeable men and arms besides its image within the Arab bloc. With 67,000 plus innocent lives lost, women and children murdered, maimed, raped and starved to death and with hospitals, schools, community centres bombed, food and medical supplies weaponised, homes destroyed with nowhere to go, what could have been their options?

As Franz Fanon, the celebrated author of the decolonisation primer The Wretched of the Earth, says, “Decolonisation is truly the creation of new men. But this creation owes nothing of its legitimacy to any supernatural power; the thing which has been colonised becomes man during the same process by which it frees itself”.

Hamas has thought fit not to surrender the right of the Palestinian people to speak for themselves, for their self-determination and sovereignty. The legitimacy of Hamas derives from its mandate to govern Gaza since its victory in the 2006 elections no matter whether or not

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The Western powers who now clamour to recognise the State of Palestine think of it as a terrorist group.

While India had given its all-out support to the peace plan-PM Modi congratulated both PM Netanyahu and President Trump several times on Oct 9 - Gaza or Hamas has been conspicuously absent in Delhi’s political thinking. India, it needs to be noted, has not declared Hamas as a terrorist group, not until now.

Then why does the mention of Gaza in the public space or civil society conversations ring alarm bells? India, it may be noted, had been one of the first non-Arab countries to recognise the PLO in 1974 and Palestine as a State in 1998 in line with its principled position on de-colonisation. And having been the leader of the Nonaligned group to take up the cause of self-determination and abolition of apartheid to the UN as far back as 1946.

Writing in the Harijan in November 1938, Gandhiji had said, “My sympathy for Jews does not blind me to the requirements of justice. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs”. India had opposed the UN Resolution 181 which laid the ground for the UN Partition Plan of 1947.

Contrast it with the present-day pattern of India’s voting in support of the “two-nation theory” on the floor of the UN along with 153 member nations when it has been been an uncomfortable proposition for Delhi even after several resolutions calling out Israel’s genocidal actions and proposing an immediate ceasefire in Gaza were vetoed.

While ‘Palestine’ may have become taboo in public discourse, this position amounts to denying history and the long tradition of India’s support to the Palestinian cause.

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The Trump Peace Plan, a cleverly manipulated instrument of surrender for the Hamas leaves little room for any kind of Palestinian autonomy now or in future nor any scope for its participation in post-conflict reconstruction.

The plan has been critiqued for its vagueness, and top-down imposition by the global rules-based order clique in cahoots with global capitalism with the ideological sustenance of far-right evangelism and pro-Zionist support.

Thus, soon after the Peace Summit and withdrawal of IDF from the proximate periphery of Gaza, militants released out of Israeli prison have publicly slaughtered scores of so-called infidels. With food aid having been halted, chaos has ruled the Gaza landscape again.

Peace is extremely fragile, the deftly crafted scheme under the Trump imprimatur so readily endorsed by Arab nations driven by their own plans have come to naught with Palestinian resistance showing no sign of dying out even after all the atrocities committed on them over the last two years. These atrocities are an unjust retribution for the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October 2023.

Peace imposed by force can never withstand the increasing challenge of just demands for a homeland. This the global order needs to recognise.

(Dr. Malay Mishra is a retired diplomat and political analyst. Views are personal). (Syndicate: The Billion Press) (e-mail: editor@thebillionpress.org)