A Colonial Peace

Part I — Peace and Its Instruments

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(This is the first of two linked articles on the idea of the “colonial peace.” Part I traces how peace—once conceived as a moral ideal—has been co-opted into an instrument of control, turning Gaza’s reconstruction into a program of recolonization. Part II follows the genealogy of this system back to Oslo, where the vocabulary and architecture of this peace were first devised.)

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The aftermath of war often reveals more than the war itself. In Gaza, the return of families to the ruins of their neighborhoods has exposed the limits of force and the failure of a project of population transfer sustained by two years of siege, bombardment, and unconditional U.S. support.

For a settler-colonial state built on expulsion and expansion, this outcome is intolerable. The day after the war is Palestinian—and for Israel, that is a defeat it cannot reconcile.

Israel’s defeat on the ground has not ended the war; it has only changed its form. The bombardment may have paused, but the war continues through reconstruction, governance, and control. Israel and the U.S. will attempt to turn Gaza’s most basic human needs into instruments of coercion—food, medicine, and reconstruction granted as privileges or withheld as punishment. Where force could not impose surrender, a political plan will serve instead.

Reconstruction Market by @NorrieHarman

This plan assumed diplomatic form at the Sharm El-Sheikh Peace Summit this month, which concluded with the Trump Declaration for Enduring Peace and Prosperity. It was presented as a new peace initiative. In reality, it was not a proposal with enforceable terms but a diplomatic declaration—a moral narrative crafted to legitimize what had already been arranged behind the scenes. It provides political cover for the 20-Point Plan for Gaza Reconstruction and Regional Stability, presented by Trump in September, which had faced backlash for its overtly neo-colonial design.

While the 20-Point Plan establishes structures of governance, policing, and economic subordination, the declaration defines how those mechanisms will be sold—as peace, as stability, as reform. Marketed as a Gaza peace plan built on concealed terms of surrender, it revives the central question that every so-called peace initiative since 1947 has been designed to evade: Can there be peace without equality, freedom without sovereignty, or justice without return?

Since the 1947 Partition Plan, every document, conference, and initiative has spoken in the name of peace. But each invocation marked another stage in the domestication of resistance—the end of struggle, not of occupation. Peace has become the language through which domination is refined: the conversion of Palestinian rights into Israeli security guarantees, the disciplining of resistance into compliance, the quiet pacification of a people to keep the master’s order intact.

The Palestinian cause has never been a search for peace but a struggle for freedom and return. The word peace has long been emptied of meaning; it no longer signifies reconciliation or justice. It has become a colonized term—stripped of substance and redeployed to manage subjugation.

What was once a moral ideal has become a linguistic weapon, a word whose very use reveals the persistence of empire. It now circulates detached from the realities of occupation, dispossession, and racial supremacy, legitimizing Israeli domination and the American order that sustains it. The architects of this order speak of peace as an abstraction—divorced from land, rights, and sovereignty. Palestinians—and the wider Arab world—are no longer invited to accept the vocabulary of peace; they are made to repeat it, compelled to embody it, and disciplined for refusing it.

The question is not whether there will be peace, but what kind of peace—and for whom.
—Ghassan Kanafani

The terms of this so-called peace reveal their colonial logic in institutional form. At the economic level, the 20-Point Plan establishes an international supervisory body—publicly named the Board of Peace—to manage all foreign donations, reconstruction contracts, and tender approvals for Gaza. Arab states would provide most of the funding, while the Board—chaired by the U.S. president and including Israel, Egypt, Gulf donors, and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair in an advisory role—would exercise final authority over every decision.

Under the plan, both Israel and the U.S. retain veto authority within the Board, effectively granting them control over every reconstruction payment. Siege enforcement is thus transformed from a military blockade into an economic-administrative system. The 20-Point Plan presents Gaza’s administration as “locally led, internationally supervised”—the formula used by U.S. and Israeli officials to describe external control through the Board of Peace.

A related initiative, circulated in August as the GREAT Trust—the Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration and Transformation Trust—extends this logic from administration to territory. Though not formally part of Trump’s 20-Point Plan, it functions as a financing mechanism designed to attract private investment under the same governance rules. Its structure—foreign trustees, external oversight, conditional access to land—mirrors the plan’s architecture.

The GREAT Trust by @NorrieHarman

The GREAT Trust was conceived as an investment-driven reconstruction vehicle, backed by Gulf capital and U.S. oversight. Framed as economic aid for Palestine, it places Gaza’s reconstruction under the supervision of the sole global power—one whose idea of peace rests on domination through extraction, dependency, privatization, debt, and corporate rule.

Beneath this economic design lies its political counterpart. The draft language of the 20-Point Plan makes all disbursements contingent on compliance with “security and governance benchmarks.” These benchmarks draw directly from Trump’s 2020 Peace to Prosperity plan—his so-called “Deal of the Century,” unveiled and abandoned in the same year after universal rejection but quietly absorbed into every subsequent proposal for conditional Palestinian sovereignty. They require recognition of Israel as a “Jewish state,” renunciation of armed resistance, and adherence to Israeli-defined “counterterrorism” criteria.

Another precondition for the Palestinian Authority to assume any role in Gaza is that it must first accept a series of “institutional reforms” and “alignment with the new governance framework.” These include rewriting the school curriculum to reflect Israel’s version of history, ending support for the families of martyrs and prisoners, disarming Palestinian organizations, renouncing the right of return, recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and formally adopting Israel’s security doctrine.

The Trump Declaration for Enduring Peace and Prosperity speaks of “dismantling extremism,” “ending the normalization of violence,” and “addressing the conditions that enable extremism.” It never names occupation, siege, or apartheid as those conditions. “Dismantle extremism and radicalization in all its forms… no society can flourish when violence and racism is normalized,” words written as though Israel stood outside the moral field they describe. The document is a study in moral inversion—the oppressor making the violence of the oppressed the central problem, sanitizing the structural violence that produced it.

Every accusation in that passage mirrors a defining element of Zionism; what it condemns, it embodies. By invoking “extremism,” “radical ideologies,” and “violence and racism,” the declaration projects Israel’s foundational traits onto Palestinians, transforming Zionism’s racial order into a civilizing mission.

And finally, beneath the political framework lies the psychological one. Its function is disciplinary: to position the U.S. and its allies as moral custodians overseeing the re-education of Palestinians after the war. The framework of “deradicalization” replaces liberation with rehabilitation—it is not an invitation to coexistence but a demand for surrender—the reform of the victim so that the crime may continue unchallenged.

Even the pledge to “address the conditions that enable extremism” and to promote “education, opportunity, and mutual respect” serves the same colonial logic. What is described as education is indoctrination; what is offered as opportunity is containment; what is called mutual respect is the demand to respect the colonizer’s authority—the psychological reconstruction of the colonized to accept the terms of his defeat, all in the name of what is called “lasting peace.”

Beneath its language of reform and reconstruction, the 20-Point Plan functions as a comprehensive system of control—economic, political, and psychological. Through financial dependency, security tutelage, and moral reeducation, it turns Gaza into a laboratory for managed subjugation, where sovereignty is replaced by supervision and resistance redefined as pathology.

These demands are designed to exclude Palestinians from their own future and to turn Gaza into a colonial dependency governed by Western-approved figures who define what it means to be Palestinian—how one may resist, and even how one may remember. The purpose, in the end, is not only to control a territory but to reconstitute a people—to bring Palestinians to the point Netanyahu once described, where they not only cease to resist but come to regret that they ever did.

What Netanyahu envisioned found its language in the Trump Declaration and its machinery in the 20-Point Plan. Together they turned the vocabulary of peace into a system of management. What was spoken as reform became the administration of subjugation—the bureaucratic form of a colonial order that endures by perfecting its means of control.

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The colonial system, after having taken the native’s personality, seeks to remake him into something compatible with the colonial world. It calls this the psychological readjustment of the native.
—Frantz Fanon