Eurasia Press & News
On 29th September 2025, the US president Donald Trump, alongside the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, proposed a new plan to resolve the crisis in Gaza. As part of the president’s plan, a “Board of Peace” constituting a hand-picked technocracy led by the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair is set to oversee the demilitarization and reconstruction of Gaza.
The plan has also garnered the support of many Arab and Muslim states, including Pakistan, who have hailed it as a ‘game changer.’ What is absent from the peace plan, nevertheless, are the voices of Gazans themselves, who insist on preserving their sovereignty by keeping a national armed force capable of protecting their territory.
As Gaza sits on the ruins of its destruction, the question remains: is Trump’s peace plan truly a visionary plan for a lasting peace in the region deserving of a Nobel Peace Prize or just another trick from the good old playbook of white settler colonialism to erase a people from their native land?
The choice of Tony Blair, a white British man with a legacy derailed by the accusations of crimes against humanity, giving cover to Israeli expansion in the West Bank, and self-aggrandizement through murky consultancies with Middle East dictators and no personal connection to Palestine or the wider region, to oversee the reconstruction of Gaza suggests the latter to be the case.
However, aside from his disastrous incompetency as a premier, what Tony Blair truly lacks to oversee reconstruction in Gaza is popular credibility. Though he might boast close relations with Arab dictators, who are themselves the silent culprits of the Gaza genocide, his appeal to the people of region has long waned since his fateful decision to invade Iraq.
Moreover, the sole focus of the plan on economic reconstruction rather than preserving the political rights of Palestinians for statehood and dignity as equal members of the global family of nation-states is not by accident but by design. It is an attempt to whitewash and cripple the Palestinian struggle for any meaningful self-determination. The plan to demilitarize Gaza is a first step towards just that. If it wasn’t for the military prowess of Hamas along with its sophisticated web underground tunnels, Israel’s troubles in Gaza would have been quickly over.
It was the military strength of Hamas that prolonged the conflict enough to garner international attention and support that culminated in the recognition of Palestinian state by major western powers including France, Australia, Canada, and the UK. This fact is not lost on many policymakers in both Israel and the United States. Hence, the plan to demilitarize.
Without a strong Palestinian state capable of defending itself, the people of Gaza will eventually have to resort to the proposed International Stabilization Force (ISF), a transnational volunteer force handpicked by Trump and Blair, to ensure that Israel respectfully carries out the terms of the peace plan that it agrees to. Though the US and its Western allies may reassure the people of Gaza by providing guarantees that Israel will respect the sanctity of the pact, the long history of Israeli disregard for international norms and Trump’s green light to Israel to carry out an attack on Qatar, a major US ally, presents a precedent that suggests that the US and Israeli policy is more aligned with the realist principles of power projection rather than mutual coexistence and respect for all.
The guarantees of the US president, therefore, hold no significant weight, and people of Gaza would have to rely on themselves to carve out the best deal that ensures not just economic reconstruction but also their political survival.
Right after assuming office, US President Donald Trump started the largest deportation operation in US history, primarily targeting immigrants from Latin America, the Middle East, and Afghanistan. However, the administration did have enough room for White South Africans, whom they claimed were oppressed under the Black majority in the country. The populist success of the administration at home appealed to Evangelicals, Zionists, and White supremacists in both Europe and Israel.
In Europe, this translated into an ascendant far-right filled with racist rhetoric, Islamophobia, and xenophobia, and in Israel, it emboldened the far-right to capitalize on these grievances to demonize Muslims in general and Palestinians in particular in order to legitimize their mass expulsion.
These trends suggest that Trump’s peace plan is not really a peace plan at all but a strategic attempt to disarm Gaza to establish the decisive hegemony of Israel in the region. What will follow will be the slow and painful process of relocation of people of Gaza or of making their lives so miserable that they leave on their own volition. This plan, though more humane than the one suggested earlier by Trump involving mass expulsions, has a stark resemblance to the early white settler colonialism in the Americas and Australia that drove natives out of their land in order to create Lebensraum for the white people.
The fate of the people of Gaza, it seems, therefore, depends less on their own ability to secure a deal and more on the mercy of the powerful. Despite the atrocities committed by Israel, history suggests that it rarely occurs to the powerful to take justice into account, as history is much more forgiving to the powerful than to the weak. After Israel wins, it will be business as usual, and like many other timeless lessons of history, this fact is also not lost on Israel’s political establishment.
