Bernard Spiegal

It’s over one hundred years since the then League of Nations, in 1922, bestowed upon Britain a mandate over Palestine.

Much has come to pass in the intervening years, yet the spirit of the Mandate, and its anchor point, the 1917 Balfour Declaration, is with us still, finding expression in Trump’s so-called Gaza peace plan. These three expressions of Western will and intent – the Declaration, the Mandate, the Trump plan – share a connected rationale: they deny to Palestinians anything resembling meaningful self-determination.

The Balfour Declaration sets both the tone and content of the West’s approach to the Palestine/Israel issue, from 1917, through to Trump’s current plan.

The declaration was in the form of a letter from the UK government to Lord Rosthschild, a prominent Zionist leader and the figurehead of the British Jewish community. The salient sentences are these:

“His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”

A hierarchy of capacities and powers is embedded in the text. Jews get to have ‘a national home’, with the British Government rooting for its side – Zionist Jews.  Palestinians, on the other hand, are granted a lesser entitlement, a mess of pottage comprising only ‘civil and religious rights’, but no commitment to the formation of a Palestinian national homeland. Odd, one may think, for the Palestinians were in Palestine already.

The effect of the Declaration was to deny Palestinians agency in shaping their own future, and to open the door to Western Imperialism, with Zionist Jews acting as the colonising vanguard. There is no need in this article to detail – readers of this blog will know it well enough – the bitter, enduring harvest that Palestinians are, then as now, forced to reap as a consequence of British policy in Mandate Palestine. As British power diminished post-1945, the US picked up the baton of securing Israel’s position and its own wider interests, always to the detriment of the Palestinians.

Enter Trump’s twenty-point peace plan. That it has achieved a ceasefire, must of course be welcomed; indeed, a continuation is devoutly to be wished, but this is by no means guaranteed.

Aside from the ceasefire, Trump’s plan replicates the hierarchy of esteem, rights and capabilities embedded in the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate. Echoing both documents, the twenty-point so-called peace plan grants Palestinians little genuine scope for determining their own future. 

In effect, the plan puts Palestinians in a classroom, to be subjected to various tests marked by a pretentiously named Board of Peace, headed by Trump, with Tony Blair as his lieutenant. The appointed Board of Peace will have the power of ‘oversight and supervision’ over a ‘technocratic, apolitical Palestinian committee’ responsible for running daily services. It is the Board of Peace that ‘will set the framework and handle the funding for the redevelopment of Gaza until such time as the Palestinian Authority has completed its reform programme.’  A reform programme designed in the main by non-Palestinians.

Who is to determine the point at which the PA has ‘completed its reform programme’?  This task presumably resides with the self-appointed Board of Peace. Such a Board takes unto itself the powers of a Governor-General, elected by no-one, responsible to no-one. Trump’s plan strenuously avoids any mention of elections, no doubt for fear of the result.

Politics, political expression and organising, is, without explicitly saying so, banned. The twenty-point plan largely denudes Palestinians of agency in determining their own future.

Hamas is to have no part in the governance of Gaza. All its armaments, and military infrastructure – tunnels, weapon production facilities and so forth must be destroyed. Israel, however, will keep hold of 53% of Gaza until the Israeli hostages are released, and then intends to control the Philadelphia corridor, a strip of land running alongside Gaza’s border with Egypt.

Point nineteen in the twenty-point plan, envisages that:

‘when the PA reform programme is faithfully carried out the conditions may finally be in place for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood, which we recognise as the aspiration of the Palestinian people’.

Note the ‘may’, and the less than concrete ‘aspiration’, along with talk of pathways. Pathways that will prove to be infinitely long and winding, leading nowhere. This ‘aspiration’, according to the plan, is held only by the ‘Palestinian people’, not of the authors of the plan itself – Trump and allies. There is no hint of a commitment to pursuing the objective’ of creating an independent Palestinian state, still less targets and milestones to be achieved as part of a structured process leading to its realisation . Given that Israel is implacably opposed to such an outcome, the airy aspiration will not, under this plan, materialise.

No mention is made of the genocide perpetrated by Israel in Gaza. Neither the Occupied West Bank, nor East Jerusalem are referred to. Given what is happening in the West Bank – ramped-up house demolition; increased Jewish settler violence against Palestinians; destruction of infrastructure; arbitrary arrests; the proliferation of checkpoints that prevent free movement – to many it looks like preparation for Israel to annex the area whether only de facto, which, arguably, is already the case, or de jure. 

And this is the fundamental flaw in the plan – it is essentially a plan waiting to be infringed, this a consequence of its vagaries and anti-Palestinian bias.  It is, however, unlikely to collapse in its entirety.  Too many of those signed-up to it have an interest in keeping some semblance of the plan alive.  At this point, it’s not possible to say whether the plan ultimately advances or limits progress. Progress here defined as Palestinians securing meaningful progress towards achieving self-determination.

Netanyahu’s current coalition, but also Israeli opinion, is opposed to any form of meaningful Palestinian self-determination. If history is any guide, Netanyahu will do anything and everything to prevent such an outcome. This means the plan, which takes a light-touch approach to Israel, in effect incentivises it to create pretexts for ‘targeted’ incursions into Gaza as a response to alleged Palestinian infringements. Palestinians are being set up to fail tests that they had no part in devising.