A Colonial Peace — Part I

Trump’s Gaza Plan and the Pacification of a People

Reconstruction Market — by Norman Harman

In Gaza, families returning to the ruins of their neighborhoods have defeated Israel’s project of expulsion, sustained by two years of siege, bombardment, and unconditional US military, diplomatic, and moral support. For the settler-colonial state of Israel, built on expulsion and expansion, that defeat is intolerable—and so the war has not ended. It has only changed its form. Israel and the US are turning food, medicine, and reconstruction into instruments of coercion—granted as privileges, withheld as punishment. Where force has been unable to impose surrender, a political plan will serve instead.

This political plan assumed diplomatic form on October 13, 2025, at Sharm El-Sheikh, where the Peace Summit produced the Trump Declaration for Enduring Peace and Prosperity. Its sponsors offered the declaration as a new peace initiative. It was nothing of the kind: a declaration without enforceable terms, a moral narrative crafted to legitimize what had already been decided, the 20-Point Plan for Gaza Reconstruction and Regional Stability, unveiled by Trump in September 2025 and denounced from the first for its overtly neo-colonial design.

The 20-Point Plan supplies the machinery of governance, policing, and economic subordination; the declaration supplies the vocabulary of peace, stability, and reform. What is marketed as a Gaza peace plan rests on concealed terms of surrender.

Every document, conference, and initiative since the 1947 UN Partition Plan has spoken in the name of peace. The plan itself gave 56 percent of Palestine to European Jewish settlers who, through decades of British-backed coercion, purchase, and legal manipulation, had failed to acquire even 7 percent of it. But each invocation of peace marked another stage in the domestication of the Palestinian cause—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 a colonized term—emptied of meaning, redeployed to manage subjugation. It now circulates detached from occupation, dispossession, and racial supremacy—a word in the service of Israeli domination and the US order that sustains it. Palestinians are no longer invited to accept the vocabulary of peace, nor is the wider Arab world. They are made to repeat it, compelled to embody it, and disciplined for refusing it.

When asked in 1970 why the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) would not join peace talks with Israel, its spokesman, the Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani, answered, “You don’t mean peace talks exactly. You mean capitulation, surrender.” He refused the word for what it demanded: the colonizer already holds the land, and the colonized hold only their claim to it—the one concession the talks exist to extract. Two years later, Israel assassinated Kanafani with a car bomb in Beirut. His refusal left one question: what kind of peace, and for whom? The plan now on the table answers it: a colonial peace, for the colonizer.

The 20-Point Plan establishes an international supervisory body, the Board of Peace, to manage all foreign donations, reconstruction contracts, and tender approvals for Gaza. The plan names the Board’s chairman—the US president—and a single member, former British prime minister Tony Blair. It leaves the rest unnamed. Arab states are to provide most of the funding; the Board will exercise final authority over every decision.

That authority runs through the US president’s chairmanship, while Israel retains control over Gaza’s crossings. Between them, no payment is disbursed and no shipment enters without their consent. The plan thus converts the siege from a military blockade into an economic-administrative system. Gaza’s administration, the plan promises, will be the work of a “technocratic, apolitical” Palestinian committee under the Board’s “oversight and supervision”—administration in Palestinian hands, authority in the masters’.

The plan’s design first appeared in a prospectus called The GREAT* Trust (Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration and Transformation), which circulated in Washington, DC in August. The Trust was drawn up by Israeli businessmen, with financial modeling from the Boston Consulting Group, the firm where Netanyahu worked in the 1970s. It proposed a foreign trusteeship over Gaza until a “reformed and deradicalized Palestinian Polity” is ready to govern. In the plan, the trusteeship returns as the Board of Peace, and the investors’ vocabulary returns as governance: foreign trustees, external oversight, conditional access to land. Framed as economic aid for Palestine and courting Gulf capital, the Trust makes reconstruction an investment vehicle of a US order whose idea of peace rests on extraction, dependency, privatization, debt, and corporate rule.

Gaza’s funding, the plan rules, stays in the Board’s hands “until such time as the Palestinian Authority has completed its reform program.” The reform program is defined by reference to Trump’s 2020 Peace to Prosperity plan—his “Deal of the Century,” unveiled and abandoned in the same year, rejected by Palestinians and the Arab League alike, yet quietly absorbed into every subsequent proposal for conditional Palestinian sovereignty. The Peace to Prosperity plan’s terms require recognition of Israel as “the nation state of the Jewish people,” renunciation of armed resistance, and adherence to Israeli-defined “counterterrorism” criteria. Should Hamas refuse, the 20-Point Plan is explicit: aid and reconstruction proceed only in “terror-free areas” handed over to international forces. Relief advances exactly as far as submission does.

The program, as spelled out by those proposals, demands rewriting the school curriculum to reflect Israel’s version of history, ending support for the families of Palestinian martyrs and prisoners, renouncing the right of return, and recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Only then may the Palestinian Authority assume a role in Gaza—a role bought with the renunciation of the cause itself.

The signatories of the 2025 Trump Declaration for Enduring Peace and Prosperity pronounce themselves united in their “determination to dismantle extremism and radicalization in all its forms,” and insist that “no society can flourish when violence and racism is normalized.” The declaration never names dispossession, ethnic cleansing, occupation, siege, or apartheid as the conditions that produce the “extremism” it vows to dismantle.

Every word of the declaration is written as though Israel stood outside the moral field it describes. This is the oldest maneuver of colonial apologetics: making the violence of the oppressed the central problem while sanitizing the structural violence that engenders it. By invoking “extremism,” “radical ideologies,” and “violence and racism,” the declaration projects Israel’s foundational traits onto Palestinians and recasts Zionism’s racial supremacy as a civilizing mission. The mission embodies everything the declaration condemns.

Every civilizing mission needs a civilizing curriculum. The Kenyan novelist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, writing of the colonial school, described the sequence now prepared for Gaza: “the night of the sword and the bullet was followed by the morning of the chalk and the blackboard.” The declaration positions the US and its allies as moral custodians overseeing the re-education of Palestinians. The curriculum decides what it means to be Palestinian—how one may resist, and even how one may remember. The framework of “deradicalization” replaces liberation with rehabilitation—it is not an invitation to coexistence but a demand for repentance.

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 duty to respect the colonizer’s authority—the psychological reconstruction of the colonized to accept the terms of his defeat, so that the crime may continue unchallenged, all in the name of “lasting peace.”

The purpose, in the end, is to reconstitute a people. It is written into the name of the GREAT Trust, which promises the “Reconstitution” of Gaza. Reconstruction is the pretext; the people are the project. Netanyahu published the doctrine under his own name in December 2023, writing in The Wall Street Journal that “Palestinian society must be deradicalized”—its schools, its sermons, its civil society remade—and stipulating that “[only then can] Gaza be rebuilt.” The project’s endpoint is a people who not only cease to resist, but come to regret that they ever did. What he prescribed in print has found its language in the Trump Declaration and its instruments in the 20-Point Plan. Together they have turned the vocabulary of peace into a system of management—and what was spoken of as reform has become the administration of subjugation, the bureaucratic form of a colonial order that endures by perfecting its machinery of control.

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(This is the first of two linked articles on the “colonial peace.” Part I traces how peace passed from moral ideal to instrument of control, turning Gaza’s reconstruction into colonization by other means. Part II follows this system back to the 1993 Oslo Accords, where its vocabulary and architecture were first devised.)

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