Translated from GegenStandpunkt 1-2026

Trump’s vision of peace for Gaza is becoming a reality

The Holy Land finally has the chairman it deserves

Shortly after his second inauguration, Trump promises that he will bring peace to the Middle East, and to the Gaza Strip in particular.[1] This is a promise he is also keeping.

1. Yet another 20-point plan for world peace, this time:
“Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict”

In the fall of 2025, Trump presents the region and the world with the ultimate solution to the Middle East’s central conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs, which by his calendar goes back “thousands of years,” as well as everything else involved in it.[2]

Far from making all the customary invocations of the Palestinians’ eternal right to a state of their own or of Israel’s right to security against the impending danger of a Holocaust, the plan simply takes its starting point in the situation that has been created; in the matter of the destruction of the Gaza Strip, up to the point that any life at all is almost impossible there, and in the matter of the decimation of Hamas, up to the point that it is almost incapable of sustaining itself organizationally, technically, and militarily, let alone upholding and pursuing its own political claim to statehood.

– Hamas is therefore being generously allowed to completely surrender. For Hamas as a local authority, this means acknowledging its total defeat, fulfilling every obligation stipulated in the plan, renouncing any further resistance, and giving up any influence over the stages outlined in the Trump plan regarding first a ceasefire and then peace and reconstruction.

– For the remaining individuals who make up the hierarchically structured leadership of Hamas, amnesty is to be granted if they lay down their weapons and refrain from any activities defined as terrorist and obstructive, and also release any Israelis held captive in accordance with the plan’s procedure for exchanging x hostages, living or dead, for y Palestinians who are imprisoned as Hamas members.

– The plan acknowledges the remaining human mass of Arabs living or languishing in the Gaza Strip and informs them that they do not need an absurdly futile struggle for an autonomously won autonomy from Israel, but rather, instead of that, food, water, medical care, electricity, and the like, without any guarantee that these bare necessities will be provided.[3] Insofar as it agrees to this, the international community in the form of the UN and other organizations may, according to the plan, help out, and the funds needed for it should be provided by voluntary donors. The inhabitants of Gaza will not be expelled, but no one is going to force them to stay either.

– And what’s more: The Gaza Strip as such needs a non-political – “apolitical” – reconstruction administration. This is to be a corporate body composed of Palestinians and other experts who are trusted to have no political ambitions whatsoever. This technocratic administration is to be overseen by a Board of Peace, whose charter[4] – adopted later in Davos – contains one provision more than any other, repeated several times: Its “Chairman” is Donald Trump, and he decides everything that matters – from his own succession in which states are allowed to participate, right down to the lifespan of this new institution. And if the Palestinian Authority pulls itself together and implements the reforms demanded of it, it too might be allowed to gradually play a role in some way; the necessary details will come later.

– An International Stabilization Force is supposed to ensure that the peace holds up and that the Palestinians, as they look forward to their bright new future, also get the supervisory force they ultimately need, especially given the defeat of Hamas’s claim to autonomous authority. This force is to be provided by interested states, not least those that, in Trump’s view, have already positively distinguished themselves by supporting America’s peace efforts.

While the plan broadly outlines a few steps regarding a ceasefire, Hamas’s disarmament, the IDF’s withdrawal, etc., it also stipulates that pragmatism must carry the day in all these respects: If there are delays in implementing it here and there – if, for example, militant resistance against Israel flares up again, which the plan simply assumes will force the IDF to delay its withdrawal – then the next steps are to first take place in areas that have already been completely cleared of any opponents.

2. The imperialist content of the 20-point plan: “We’ll own it”

What really gets tempers boiling about Trump’s peace plan is the vision that’s being presented to the world in the form of kitschy graphics and AI-animated video scenes: Gaza as a mix of Mar-a-Lago and Dubai City “on steroids”: cheesy architectural futurism, golf courses for rich fat asses from all over the world, a massive start-up business park – in short, a paradise for capitalistic moneymaking that, even from the outside, looks as nice as the dollars waiting to be made there feel ... But that’s only the comparatively unimportant side – which doesn’t yet exist other than in the form of options and simulations – of the real, world political substance of Trump’s plan. It consists quite simply, but decisively in the fact that it is his – Trump’s – “vision” that is now being declared and made the sole, non-negotiable political perspective for the Gaza Strip. And that, in turn, means – one is reminded that Trump is President of the United States of America – that the USA is declaring all political claims currently being contested with violence on the ground – relating to territory, human material, and broader “security” – to be of relative (in)validity – relative to the claim that the President of the world power is now assuming direct command of the Gaza Strip as well. That is the hard core of the new peace.

Up to now, America has reserved for itself the last “word” in all ongoing violent conflicts, including those in this region of the world, in accordance with its particular strategic priorities for the region and for the American-dominated globe as a whole: from paying heed to a pro-American dissolution of the old Western colonial possessions under the overarching perspective of a front in the world war against Soviet communism, to the exemplary enforcement of a New World Order after its end, up to the global war on terror. And these aforementioned violent conflicts didn’t in the least become the well known protracted history they did because America only took a higher-level, provisory stance toward them, but massively fueled them, particularly by arming its Israeli ally, and repeatedly gave them new parameters in practice through its own military interventions, including large scale wars. The violent situations that the USA significantly helped create and dominate in each case were subsequently translated into international law, primarily in the form of UN resolutions, which were always good for establishing the status of all the others, as either subordinates or insubordinates – not least with regard to the vexing “Palestine question” and the legal fiction of a Palestinian right to statehood, which has been upheld for decades despite all the practical obstruction on the part of Israel.

Looking at the results of this – states that function, states that don’t quite function or are mostly failed, enemy states that still exist, allied states that have not yet achieved final victories and whose never-ending, ever-renewing, unsolicited conflicts bring ever-renewed, unsolicited, costly necessities to America itself... – Trump observes all this and sees only one thing: The USA has let the region slip out of its powerful grasp instead of asserting itself and dominating every aspect of it in regard to every single actor. He therefore does this in exactly the manner befitting his imperialist self-criticism. With last summer’s joint Israeli-American offensive against the last major opponent of American dominance in the region, Iran, Trump demonstrated that the USA stands above all matters of violence in the Middle East and is determined to completely reclaim the region from this perspective, and will accept only this “fact” from now on: its own overwhelming superiority, which can be activated at any time, but whose use is then in principle unnecessary once all those who matter finally understand that they have nothing to oppose US power with – a superiority that is guaranteed to strike unpredictably and with absolute dominance the moment Trump, and he alone, deems it necessary and appropriate to make this clear.[5]

This is the true, brutal starting point for the implementation of Trump’s peace plan for the Gaza Strip. This plan is nothing less than the unvarnished dictate of American hegemony, which applies equally to all – and therefore means quite different things to everyone involved in, or affected by, the ongoing Gaza war.

3. The locals affected by Trump’s takeover in the Holy Land:
Fanatics with a sense of reality

Trump has secured the approval of both warring parties for his peace plan, and he is already celebrating this as the real success – “We have peace in the Middle East.” Since, for him, the main objective has indeed been reached – namely, the formal submission of both warring parties to his peace diktat – he is not bothered by the fact that neither Hamas or Israel shares his jubilation when giving their consent. After all, they have no reason to.

a) Hamas accepts Trump’s peace plan – in order to save itself as a condition for the possibility of a Palestinian state

Hamas is the warring party that agrees to the deal most vocally. The Israeli military apparatus has in fact decisively decimated it as a military and political organization fighting for the right to establish a Palestinian state – depending on the source, nearly 10,000 Hamas fighters have been killed, and numerous leaders executed – and it has permanently destroyed the Gaza Strip as its military and civilian base of operations; its last crucial bargaining chip for survival has been thoroughly discredited in this capacity: its control over Israeli hostages, dead and alive. The somewhat vaguely defined entity known as the “international community,” with its numerous members – some powerful, some powerless – has likewise proven in no way a suitable means for advancing Hamas’s aims and making its audacious and cynical gamble pay off: that a total Israeli war against the Palestinians would once again provide effective and successful support for the “Palestinian cause” in line with Hamas’s position. Only the hated America has proven capable and willing to impose any kind of restraint on the Israeli’s warfare – perhaps even in a way that would create a situation Hamas could address other than through its suicidal struggle for survival against Israeli domination.

At the same time, Trump’s business plan for a finally pacified Holy Land, the Gaza subdivision in specific, demands that Hamas dissolve itself as an organization, disarm, and cede the human foundation of its state-founding ambitions to those who are to then take command. That is asking a lot: For the core of Hamas’s political reason for being and its conviction in its own right to exist is that the race of humans it defines as the Palestinian people absolutely deserves it and has no choice but to need it – against the conflicting claims of Israel, against any internal Palestinian alternative, and so in relation to the rest of the world. The dual certainty that the Palestinians collectively embody the right to an autonomous statehood – one that is going to be realized with Hamas or not at all – has always been the guiding political principle of all its actions and the political substance of its grim determination to do whatever it does to those it claims as its people or knowingly allows to happen to them.[6]

And yet Hamas seems impressed – not just by Israel’s continuing intransigence, by the loss or weakening of key allies, by the calculations of third and fourth powers, but above all by the directness with which Trump makes it clear that the only alternative to accepting his peace plan is the relentless continuation of the annihilation long since begun by Israel. And Hamas actually finds a way to reconcile its claim to Palestine with the brave new MAGA world without simply capitulating: it agrees to the peace plan and even concedes the possibility of voluntarily disarming, but only on condition that this must be part of a negotiated two-state solution. It is willing to carry out the initial steps of the peace plan – provided that Israel, for its part, adheres to its agreed-upon obligations. In doing so, it is counting not only on powers such as Qatar or Turkey remaining interested in it, but also and above all on the fact that Trump’s hostility toward it comes from the same peace-is-when-my-decree-is-law standpoint with which he attacks everything and everyone, and that by following the logic of this standpoint it can rid itself of this hostility or at least mitigate it. For Trump is not a bitter opponent of a Palestinian state – that would be beneath the level from which he views the world and the region and from which he takes them under his control – but rather of the very claim to such a state, which sees itself as resisting submission to America’s global power. So Hamas exchanges the surviving hostages as required, without any propagandistic fanfare and ostentatiously quietly, in a businesslike manner. It hands over the corpses – or the parts of them in its possession – and makes a conspicuously noisy effort to locate the Jewish remains lying in the mountains of rubble it has long controlled only partially or not at all with great effort and heavy equipment, which its Palestinian compatriots, languishing among the same mountains of rubble, could somehow also make quite good use of...

Trump and Hamas are not likely to be friends for long,[7] and Trump well might soon allow Israel – which he unabashedly presents as his regional policy vehicle – to “open the gates of hell.” Yet it is also becoming clear that the storied and courageous state-founding nationalism of the Palestinians – even in its most radical surviving version – is capable of calculatingly adapting itself to America’s superpower unilateralism. So, for all its hostility to Trump, Hamas is making itself part of the new regional balance of power which has its origin and linchpin in MAGA. For Hamas, fighting for Palestine now means simply accepting Trump’s peace, somehow surviving within it, and wresting the survival of its own state-building ambition from the situation, with the combination of brutal adherence to principle and political flexibility that is always part of the repertoire of both genuine and would-be statesmen.

All in all: Trump’s vision of a peaceful coexistence between Israel and the Palestinians under US sovereignty should not fail because of Hamas. Someone else is already taking care of that.

b) Israel agrees to Trump’s peace plan for Gaza – as a new basis for its war against any condition of possibility that relativizes its security, no matter by whom

Israel’s leader ultimately agrees to the peace plan too – albeit far less decisively than Hamas, and only after he and his emissaries have tried in vain to persuade Trump to abandon the plan, and amidst fierce protests from his radical Zionist compatriots and government coalition partners who feel cheated out of their right to a total, final reckoning with everything Palestinian.

For Trump’s 20-points do indeed represent a few decisive gains for Israel, which Netanyahu also does his utmost to gloat over before his disgruntled compatriots: Israel is expressly permitted to station ground troops in the Gaza Strip and remain militarily active there as long as, and wherever, Hamas fighters make their presence felt, since they are by definition a threat to its security. On every issue, the burden of proof regarding compliance or non-compliance with the 20-point agreement is on Hamas; additionally, the peace plan assigns Israel the dual role of being both a party obligated to comply with its stipulations and an authority entitled to assist in supervising them. Above all, however, it is extraordinarily noteworthy what the plan does not include: a Palestinian state is mentioned only in the most non-binding terms possible – and there is no longer any mention whatsoever of any Palestinian ancestral territory or right of return. And the cherished family of nations now appears solely as an accomplice or sponsor in the implementation of Trump’s peace diktat; through sheer omission, it has been summarily dismissed by Trump as any sort of recognized authority on a framework for peace since it has been using it for eight decades to bully brave little Israel from all directions. Israel’s long-serving leader can take credit for the fact that the future of what some incorrigible souls still call “Palestine” will now be determined exclusively between Israel and the US. With Trump’s re-election, Netanyahu’s Trumpist standpoint totally prevails in Washington: it is not internationally recognized law that lends weight to national claims, but rather absolutely superior strength, exercised exclusively autonomously, that establishes the law that everyone must accept. And it can be concluded that Trump’s peace plan comprehensively ratifies the progress that Israel has so far bombed into existence against the Palestinians and in relation to the rest of the world of states.

Yet Netanyahu is still accused of high treason by a significant part of his government partners because of his approval of the 20-points; and he himself goes out of his way to play up how hard it is for him to order his troops to stop their perpetual plowing of the Gaza Strip. Analogous to Hamas, for Israel the grounds for this is its reason of war. It has by no means exhausted itself in the aforementioned advances.

On the one hand, this is about the immediate war aims – the total annihilation of Hamas, that is, of everything Israel defines as Hamas’s personnel and infrastructure, as well as the return of all the hostages. The Israeli leadership has repeatedly made it clear to its American major ally that it cannot, will not, and must not compromise on these objectives. In this context, it has also repeatedly made it clear that it cannot tolerate the realization of these war aims through proxies or within the framework of a peace agreement that serves as a substitute: The realization of the declared primary objective of the war – the destruction of Hamas and, indeed, of any opposition or sentiment hostile to Israel – and the securing of this achievement through the “de-radicalization of the Gaza Strip” must be the work of Israeli force; anything else would be synonymous with, in the words of Israeli politicians, retroactively robbing the Israeli victims of October 7 and of the ongoing war since then of their good national meaning. This is the totally uncompromising standpoint, expressed in terms of victims, that Israel is practicing in this war: It has taken the occasion of Hamas’s “Al-Aqsa Flood” operation to declare that its long-standing practice of permanently and effectively denying the right of the Palestinians to their own state anywhere between the river and the sea – and of systematically sabotaging every possible basis for such a state – amounts in fact to a single compromise that could prove fatal to Israel’s very existence.[8] It has proclaimed the actual and complete annihilation of everything anti-Israeli as the only option possible. The sheer extremism of this claim – a claim that Israeli military officials, who take their operational mandate literally as part of their professional duty, have repeatedly said is impossible to carry out in practice – reveals the nature of Israel’s reason for war: namely, the abstract imperative of self-assertion without compromise. And it is precisely this logic that explains why Israel focuses not only on actual or potential Palestinian opponents, but on its entire Middle Eastern environment: Israel took from the bloody attack by Hamas on October 7 the lesson that the region is teeming with enemies bent on its destruction, and by that very token these enemies have to be destroyed themselves. And this, in turn, has brought the main enemy to the Israeli leadership’s attention, one which the Israeli prime minister long ago reported was behind 95% of all security challenges facing the small, brave, self-defending Jewish state: Iran. As is well known, Israel has acted on this with deadly seriousness: It provoked and waged a war against Iran that it was only capable of and could only do because the USA took it over as its own cause – like Israel’s broader multi-front war across the Middle East.[9] That’s how bitterly seriously the Israeli leadership takes the equation – which it has elevated into an imperative – between the existence of the Jewish state in the Middle East and the annihilation of all Israel’s enemies.

And so – on the other hand – Trump’s insistence on “peace for the Middle East” is not merely an objection to Israel’s reason of war. It also contradicts the fact that this war, and how it is being waged, is Israel’s reason of state. Part of it is that this state defines itself as a Western-bourgeois foreign body within a region composed of pre-modern peoples who function according to customs and their congenial autocrats, and that it derives its right to exist – that is, the unconditional duty to defend itself – from the fact that without it, the Jews there and indeed throughout the world would be left exposed to destruction. This means that it conceives and presents itself as the fundamentally unfinished project of establishing and gathering the Jews on their ancestral land – according to everything the Bible has to say on the matter; this therefore means that it treats the mere presence of Arabs in the heartland west of the Jordan River as the one decisive great danger to itself as a Jewish state. And this also means that, in relation to the rest of its more or less state-like environment, Israel defines and treats its military assertion as the norm and a permanent state of affairs – and therefore insists on the freedom to wage war as the basis of its existence not only against its actual enemies, but against any potential enemy, that is, against everyone else; a freedom that, despite all its internal contradictions, serves as the decisive bond between the people and their rulers.[10] Israel’s Zionist founding principle, which it adheres to with iron resolve as a matter of national interest, dictates that it must not tolerate anything or anyone in its vicinity that could oppose its practices. Any assertion of sovereign power by other powers against Israel is therefore, in and of itself, an attack on Israeli security; conversely, Israel’s security is guaranteed by the total insecurity of all others through war and the threat of war: This is the identity of its existence as practiced – freedom to wage war, expansion of its now-conquered imperialist status, and adherence to its eternal Zionist reason of state. And conversely: to make concessions on the freedom to wage war means, by this logic, to endanger the existence it defines in this way. This is precisely the threat that Israel sees in Trump’s peace diktat, because that’s what it is.

This stirs up the current version of the contradiction that is anyway built into the alliance between the USA and Israel which the two sides are so fond of celebrating as “unique” – and indeed on both sides of this contradiction. Trump insists on the new subjugation of all those directly involved in the Gaza war and all other interested parties under the absolutism of his command; he insists on a novel takeover of the Gaza war, the Gaza Strip, and indeed the entire troubled war-torn region as material for his decrees; these will not tolerate any relativization by other claims to sovereign force – and claims to legitimate recognition. Netanyahu’s Israel gets to experience this in every possible form,[11] and Israel’s Netanyahu must take this into account given that he, for his part, has no intention of budging from the Israeli absolutism which guarantees Israel’s existential security through autonomy in war. And at the same time – this is the other side of the contradiction in this alliance – these two unique allies need each other in a new way for the practical validity of their mutually incompatible intransigencies: Trump, in an unprecedented way, openly uses as his blackmail lever Israel’s willingness to go to war against any actually or potentially affected party; and Israel is, in any case, more dependent than ever on the USA for its updated version of a state existence that can only be guaranteed through permanent regional war.[12]

This combination of a new unpredictability, coupled with the renewed usefulness and indispensability of the great ally, shapes Netanyahu’s approach to Trump’s peace policy.

– So Netanyahu can’t avoid engaging in negotiations on a ceasefire and peace agreement, which he conducts with the aim, on the one hand, of dragging out as long as possible without reaching a result and, on the other hand, of incorporating as much of Israel’s uncompromising security fundamentalism into the peace compromise as possible by drawing broad red lines. In the meantime, a few Hamas negotiators and leaders in Qatar, 1,800 km away, find out what the best possibility is for Israel when they are blown to smithereens by the Israeli Air Force just as they are beginning discussions on the latest status of the negotiations: For Israel, peace is not the end of its war against the Palestinians, but rather a state of affairs in which the Palestinians – along with the hosts of their diplomatic representatives – passively submit to Israeli attacks without putting up a fight or even breaking off diplomatic relations; in short, when they realize once and for all that it is not within their power to determine when or how Israel might finally, if ever, end its war, which has been set to continue indefinitely. Netanyahu takes advantage of the logic which characterizes Trump’s 20-point plan – that Hamas’s guilt is always presumed – just as assiduously as he does Trump’s staunch aversion to the institutions of the old US-led world order, and he repeatedly orders the IDF to strike in the Gaza Strip. He gets rid of several dozen UN aid agencies and NGOs, which he likewise sees as nothing but a challenge to Israel’s total freedom to wage war, thus as an attack on its security, and he otherwise demonstratively exercises the same rigidity in questions of food and other supplies to the Gaza Strip that he practiced during what was then still officially called “wartime.” To be sure, Israel has no choice but to now share military control over the Gaza peace with the USA, which is even forcing it to tolerate the presence and involvement of other powers. But Israel’s political and military leaders view this, just as they have in the past, as a challenge not to let matters rest: Within the CMCC,[13] established primarily by the US, a turf war is breaking out over the authority of the American and other international military and civilian officials present. US military personnel complain that Israel is spying on – even – them within the CMCC; Israel complains that the Americans are passing on classified intelligence about the IDF in the Gaza Strip to Arab CMCC envoys, and so on and so forth.

– Parallel to this, Israel is now increasingly falling back on a number of anti-Hamas militias[14] to secure its own presence in the parts of the Gaza Strip it occupies and to intensify its own hunt for the remaining Hamas presence in the other parts. This is happening alongside – and in some cases contrary to – the agreements reached with the US through the peace plan and other channels, regardless of its cooperation with the US both within and outside the CMCC. This also intends to ensure that “peace for Gaza” stands or falls on whether, and in what way, Israel, in its insatiable will to wage war against any insecurity, can live with it.

– Wherever he deems it necessary and somehow feasible, Netanyahu openly stands up to the world power and its leader: for example, on the question of who holds ultimate authority – apparently defined by both sides as indivisible – over the crucial, jointly developed and operated technical means for a far-reaching strategic invulnerability: Netanyahu prohibits an American company from acquiring a majority stake in a firm crucial to the Iron Dome, explicitly stating that this transfer of economic ownership would constitute an unacceptable infringement of Israeli security interests, that is, denial of Israel’s autonomous control over this element of military dominance.[15]

– And finally Netanyahu is also spreading the message that Israel must also fight, in addition to the seven fronts of its currently underway Middle Eastern war of redemption, on “the eighth front” – the propaganda front. Netanyahu publicly and explicitly calls for intensified Israeli influence on public opinion – not only in regard to the rest of the world, which is increasingly and unfairly casting persecuted little Israel in the role of aggressor, but above all in the USA, in order to interpret and influence the vagueness in Trump’s policies in terms favorable to Israel. This vagueness manifests itself in, among other things, an increasingly fierce dispute within Trump’s MAGA movement. Within it – and generally across the US political landscape – there is, on the one hand, the standpoint that the new definition of American imperialism – now finally unencumbered by any regard for international law or the concerns of other long-standing US partners – absolutely must promote the traditional alliance which has been so beneficial to the projection of American power. On the other hand, the opposing standpoint is evidently gaining popularity, particularly within MAGA ranks, that “America First!” is incompatible with – and that America’s national self-interest has always been incompatible with – the high level of support that this small Middle Eastern ally is granted, and indeed the truly singular degree of influence it exerts over American decision-making. With a new dimension of input, Israel is dedicating itself to the task of influencing this dispute because it rightly recognizes how far from guaranteed the continuation of this alliance is in the specific way it requires and demands as a component of American foreign policy.[16]

– Netanyahu adds to all this the publicly proclaimed perspective that Israel will make itself completely independent of American aid within the next ten years, without having to make any sacrifices in its show of force. The fact that, without America, Israel would have been completely overstretched from day one in the war it has been waging for two and a half years with no end in sight is not an objection, but rather the very reason it wants to declare independence from the USA: Netanyahu and his associates feel the objective contradiction between America’s global superpower and their claim to be a regional superpower as an unbearable dependence on America’s support, which is unique in both quantity and quality. What currently takes the form of an ideal is, among other things, the ability to have both at the same time: the support of the USA minus the ever-lurking danger that dependence might lead to some form of obedience.[17]

Netanyahu, then, treats the peace imposed by Trump as a continuation of the war, employing both the same and modified means. Netanyahu knows that, in doing so, he is not only taking advantage of his buddy’s patience and goodwill, but testing them to the limit; and he is informed of this time and again. He then knows what he must say to ensure that the good mood over there in Washington is not spoiled – and otherwise lets the IDF and the Mossad carry on.[18]

For him, anything else is simply out of the question; anything else would indeed be a defeat, measured by the equation that Israel has painstakingly established under Netanyahu between the IDF’s sustained terror against the Arabs in the Holy Land along with the surrounding region and the security of its existence as a state. This is what Israel must be able to afford; this is what America must swallow.

4. The rest of the interested parties in the world of states: Powerful opportunistic co-creators of Trump’s peace for Gaza and beyond

As is well known, numerous other powers are lining up to participate in this beautiful peace. “Realism” is simply part of business for responsible nationalists – not in spite of, but because they are committed to representing and pursuing their nation’s inalienable right to success.

a) The major Arab and Islamic states,

for their part, see no alternative to Trump’s Gaza plan since, first, it’s an opportunity to drop some form of peace into Israel’s lap – and, second, it’s a plan in which they themselves play a role, which ultimately amounts to the same thing for them as well. For Turkey, a hostile rival with Israel, and other ambitious powers in the Arab-Islamic bloc, it now opens up the previously absolutely unthinkable possibility of having, for example, a presence in Gaza themselves, one possibly involving even real ‘boots on the ground’ – something they never managed to achieve with their various Gaza flotillas, and something that powers like Jordan or the UAE never even dared to attempt, despite the humanitarian missions carried out by their respective militaries during the war and their various mediation offers. From the American perspective, it appears that the key powers on the ground have understood that their power ambitions definitely have no chance in opposition to Trump’s new Middle East; conversely, as an active part of its shaping, however, they gain prospects they could never have achieved on their own against Israel. And if these subaltern powers then at some point violently suppress any Palestinian opposition on their own account and at the same time fund whatever reconstruction efforts get underway on the side – then that is the peace that America is aiming for; there is no prospect for any other peace, for these powers or any others.

b) From the rest of the somewhat relevant world of states,

Trump also gets confirmation that America’s policy for pacifying the Middle Eastern state-forming conflict – which, depending on the calendar, is either 80 or thousands of years old – is both the only viable and expedient option: first, in the form of the acclaim his peace plan receives from a host of Arab and Islamic states, and then again with the Trump Declaration of Enduring Peace and Prosperity, signed by his handpicked trio of Egypt, Turkey, and Qatar. And then, in a move that almost seems of no consequence now, he also has his peace plan rubber-stamped by the UN Security Council. At the behest of the Americans, it drafts a resolution[19] which, even from a formal and philological perspective, introduces a few striking innovations into the prose genre of “UN Security Council resolutions”: The traditionally rather lengthy preamble section, which in some resolutions is longer than the main section and generally serves to incorporate any reservations and conflicting interpretations about the main section into the resolution to be adopted, has been whittled down to essentials: a quotation from Trump’s peace plan and the “historic Trump Declaration for …,” which for its part is nothing but an ode to the Trump peace plan – so that the short preamble in its entirety reads like a White House press release or a statement posted by Trump on his own Truth Social platform. On the other hand, while the preamble does refer in a subordinate clause to earlier, not individually enumerated Security Council resolutions, it is striking that any significance these might have, as somehow binding under international law, has been deleted.[20] And this is definitely more than a small formal detail: in this compact format, Trump announces to the entire family of nations represented in the Security Council, and has it echoed from there, that all those texts in which the violence in Palestine has hitherto been accompanied by progressive legal rulings and subjected to higher reservations are now nothing but scrap paper. Eighty years of international law regarding the Palestine conflict have thus been rendered obsolete – just like that. Instead, the new resolution “juridifies” the USA’s dissatisfaction with the results of 80 years of conflict management that haven’t had any results that are useful for America. The essentially sidelined global political rivals Russia and China acknowledge their marginalization by abstaining, while the others, by voting in favor, go on record that they are fully in step with the MAGA era. Above all, France – a permanent member with veto power which only shortly before had recognized the non-state of Palestine with much fanfare in the run-up to the annual UN General Assembly and brought a number of other states into the anti-Israel camp along with it – has now officially conceded that the Palestinian “statehood” promised even in Resolution 2803 is solely a matter of what the USA decides is useful for itself – or not. Even specifically mentioned UN institutions – aid agencies, the Red Cross, the World Bank – are permitted to make themselves useful for whatever America deems useful because America is so certain of its superiority that it can either repurpose or ignore these vehicles of the old geopolitical definition and administration of the Palestine conflict.

*

In this sense, MAGA is a resounding success with regard to the Gaza war: All rulers – whether mighty or less than mighty, involved or affected – are and see themselves confronted with the fact that they must incorporate into all their own claims and interests, as a premise, America’s novel insistence on appropriating all relations of violence as objects of American supremacy, which by definition will allow no independent sovereignty to stand against it – or risk provoking the danger that Trump will assert his claim against them in a way that they – as Trump is anyway certain of – cannot stand up against.

Footnotes

[1] See, in this regard, the article: “Trump travels to Arabia and proclaims his vision: My peace I give unto you – ‘Let’s Make a Deal!’” in GegenStandpunkt 2-25.

[2] Verbatim, e.g., here: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/9/29/heres-the-full-text-of-trumps-20-point-plan-to-end-israels-war-on-gaza

[3] Regarding the political role of “humanitarian aid” for the Palestinians – both prior to and during the war – and its obstruction by Israel, see the article: “Accompanied by humanitarianism, judged from a legal point of view, disputed on moral grounds: Israel’s Gaza war – a challenge to the powers and moralists of the imperialist world” in GegenStandpunkt 2-2024.

[4] The full text can be found, for example, here: https://www.timesofisrael.com/full-text-charter-of-trumps-board-of-peace/

[5] See, in this regard, the article: “Chronicle of an announced peace: Trump’s 12-day war in the Middle East” in GegenStandpunkt 3-2025.

[6] In October 2023 – when asked during a television interview whether Hamas, in light of Israel’s brutal course of action against the Palestinians in Gaza, ought not to admit to a bloody miscalculation – a Hamas leader said: “We were and are aware of the consequences of our operation on October 7.” And a year later, in view of the by then staggering scale destruction and a death toll in the tens of thousands, he spoke of “tactical losses” for the Palestinians and “strategic losses” for Israel. Nothing beats the clear conscience that a good cause gives you for free.

[7] To be sure, Trump’s team has mastered the human touch in diplomacy that is a hallmark of the new US foreign policy even in its dealings with Hamas, just as Trump does with all the world’s rulers, whether great or small, as he attempts to convince them that his deals are in their best interest and that, in this respect, they are all on the same wavelength. His negotiator, Witkoff, and his diplomatic counterpart from Hamas, al-Hayya, profess that they are, in a sense, also buddies: before the assembled world press, they discover a shared human bond in the fact that they are both fathers of deceased sons, each of whom fell victim to the nationally specific, primary cause of an unnatural, premature death: Witkoff’s son died of an opioid overdose, while al-Hayya’s died from a targeted dose of Israeli aerial ordnance.

[8] On the logic and ending of the hostile coexistence between Israel and “Hamastan” in the Gaza Strip, which Israel maintained with calculated superiority for nearly two decades, see, among other articles, the previously mentioned “Israel’s Gaza War” in 2-2024 of GegenStandpunkt.

[9] In various forms, the Trump administration committed over $10 billion in military aid to Israel for 2025. To put this figure into perspective: Israel’s own defense budget for the 2025/26 fiscal year, approved in March, amounts to approximately $34.5 billion. Not included in this official aid is the military expenditure incurred by the U.S. in the region during 2025, primarily through the deployment of its Air Force and air and missile defense systems to serve as a protective shield for Israel, which, in its own right, runs into the tens of billions. Statistics suggest that the U.S. has borne between two-thirds and three-quarters of the costs of Israel’s war in the Middle East since 2023.

[10] This standpoint finds confirmation for its never finished or resolved need for self-assertion precisely in the course of the actual progress it achieves – not because of the unyielding ethos of its protagonists or the radicalized morality of its people, but on the basis of actual imperialist means of self-assertion. The current Syrian President and ex-terrorist Ahmed al-Sharaa recently articulated this in an interview with an American newspaper: “Back then, they [the Israelis] – by their own admission – occupied the Golan in order to protect Israel’s territory. Now, Israel dictates terms regarding southern Syria in order to protect the Golan. And so, perhaps in the coming years, they will occupy central Syria in order to protect southern Syria. If they continue in this manner, they will eventually reach as far as Munich.”

In a somewhat different manner, Netanyahu clarifies the intrinsic link between a perpetual state of war – and the readiness for it – and the ceaseless project of state-building, framing this as Israel’s very reason of state: In the summer of 2025 – with the looming specter of a “Trump Peace” clearly in view – he allowed himself during an interview to be drawn into a discussion regarding the concept of Eretz Yisrael HaShlema (“Greater Israel” – though translated literally, it actually means “the Whole Land of Israel”), a territory stretching from the Nile to the mouth of the Euphrates in the Persian Gulf; he then declared that he harbors genuinely strong sympathies for this “idea.” This does not constitute a serious announcement of an impending war of territorial conquest, but rather makes it clear that Israel – in a far more abstract sense than merely territorial – sees any peace dictated to it – that is to say, any peace – as a form of constraint.

[11] This became evident in, among other things, Trump’s demonstrative decision not to visit Israel during his Middle East trip – which was conducted with much diplomatic fanfare – and, in a somewhat more significant sense, in the fact that Trump, in the face of intense Israeli objections, announced the delivery of F-35s to Saudi Arabia – a move that would have been out of the question under previous administrations as a consequence of the US pledge to Israel to always uphold the principle of maintaining a military-strategic qualitative edge in Israel’s favor in all arms dealings with other powers in the region.

[12] At the WEF in Davos, Trump publicly spoke to Netanyahu before a global audience about the fact that Israel fights with American superiority – that is, that it subsists on American superiority and should always remain mindful of this: “I told Bibi, ‘Bibi, stop taking credit for the dome. That’s our technology, that’s our stuff.’” Promptly, a public debate erupted in Israel over the veracity of this remark; fact checks are about as beside the point as the debate over whether Trump, in casting doubt on the legitimacy of Denmark’s claim to Greenland, is correct under international law, completely off the mark, or somewhere in between.

[13] Civil-Military Coordination Center

[14] Following Israel’s failed attempts to win over long-established, large family clans which had long been feuding with Hamas – these groups are essentially gangs of bandits and smugglers who, as Israel now officially acknowledges, receive equipment and training from Shin Bet and the Mossad who allow them free rein, under their supervision, in parts of the Gaza Strip for the purpose of enriching themselves and establishing themselves as future alternatives to Hamas. For instance, a Mossad officer openly admitted in an interview that the largest of these militias played a pivotal role in the very acts – namely, looting aid convoys – that Israel has consistently, for propaganda purposes, blamed on Hamas.

[15] See footnote 12 on this.

[16] The most prominent pro-Israel lobbying organization, AIPAC, is now spending increasing sums on campaigns for Senate or gubernatorial seats (and, more recently, the mayoralty of New York City) with the aim of damaging undesirable candidates as early as possible, ideally during the party primaries; Netanyahu publicly declares that Israel intends to use TikTok – acting through billionaires loyal to him – to attack its critics and to steer other portals and platforms shaping contemporary online opinion in a direction favorable to its interests; the pro-Israel ADL boasts of having compiled and maintaining blacklists of critics of Israel, which it intends to use, as opportunities arise, for the purpose of legal prosecution and/or various public campaigns; and so forth.

[17] For instance, like this: Netanyahu states that he wants to phase out U.S. military aid – currently $3.8 billion annually, plus all special aid in the event of extraordinary wartime situations – over the next ten years. Republican Congressman Lindsey Graham, known for his ultra pro-Israel stance, immediately raises the stakes, publicly asks: why wait ten years? We could do this right now. On closer inspection, both men favor a form of cooperation that shifts away from military aid as quasi-unilateral grants subject to certain restrictions and periodic reviews, and moves instead toward a partnership that focuses more on joint research and development. In the scenario currently being floated, the US would actually provide even greater support for advances in Israeli military technology and equipment; however – ideally – this support would be delivered in a way that does not merely constitute aid to another state, but rather, as an inseparable component of that assistance, serves as a means for the US to equip itself with cutting-edge technology in areas such as missile defense, drones, AI, and the like.

[18] On December 13, 2025, the Israeli military killed a Hamas commander via drone – not on the grounds that he posed an imminent threat, but explicitly citing the fact that he appeared on a death list, which was still far from being fully cleared, due to his involvement in October 7. Officially, the USA initiated a review to determine whether a ceasefire violation has occurred; unofficially, according to the news portal Axios, a sharply worded reprimand was delivered.

[19] The text of UN Resolution 2803 is here: https://docs.un.org/en/s/res/2803 (2025)

[20] Traditionally, the UN Security Council’s Middle East-related liturgy has involved citing, in particular, the canonical Resolutions 181 of 1947 and 242 of 1967, along with a few others, as the legally binding texts toward whose implementation efforts must be directed.