Palestine is now the conscience of the world. No deal will change that

What US President Donald Trump unveiled in Washington this week was not a peace plan, but a parody of one; a deal proclaimed as a breakthrough, yet negotiated between an American enabler and an Israeli perpetrator - with the very people whose fate it decides erased from the stage. 

Trump sat beaming beside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, thanking him for “agreeing” to a plan he had written himself, while Palestinians were nowhere in the picture. No Hamas, no Palestinian Authority - not even a token presence to lend the charade a hint of credibility.

It continues the same colonial logic that birthed the Abraham Accords: strike deals over Palestine without Palestinians. Celebrate “peace” while ignoring occupation, blockade and ethnic cleansing. Parrot the language of reconciliation while systematically excluding the only people who have the right to speak for themselves.

This deal is not negotiation; it is imposition. It is surrender dressed up as statesmanship. 

Netanyahu has assassinated or attempted to kill negotiators before, from Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh to those targeted in Doha as they sat to discuss Trump’s draft deal. His policy has always been clear: eliminate the negotiators, eliminate the negotiations, and then stand beside Washington to announce a plan crafted by genocide partners.

To dignify this spectacle, a host of Arab and Muslim leaders were summoned - not to defend Palestinians, but to pressure them. Their assigned role is to serve as Trump and Netanyahu’s cover; their duty is not to shield Palestine, but to shove it towards submission. 

Netanyahu himself crowed in astonishment: “Who could believe it?” - that Muslim regimes would provide the fig leaf for Israel’s diktat.

Tide of public opinion

Strip away the theatre, and the plan is thin gruel. There’s one concrete item: the return of hostages. Everything else is smoke. No guarantees of withdrawal, no binding commitments - only vague promises, while Israeli troops remain entrenched. 

What Trump offered Netanyahu was not compromise, but victory: the very victory he failed to achieve by force, after two years of bombs and massacres.

Israel failed to crush Gaza. It failed to bring its hostages home by war. It failed to break Palestinian will. Trump’s deal is an attempt to turn defeat into triumph; to conjure through diplomacy what could not be won on the battlefield.

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But Israel is not triumphant; it is isolated. At the United Nations, Netanyahu stood at the podium while 77 delegations walked out, leaving him to declaim to empty chairs. Polls across Europe and the US show public opinion tilting decisively against Israel, with younger generations leading the shift. The tide of global solidarity with Palestine is swelling, and nothing terrifies Washington and Tel Aviv more.

That is the true aim of this deal: to break that tide. To smother the momentum of boycotts, protests and a rising global conscience. To replace Palestinian agency with an imposed guardianship, a “Board of Peace” chaired by Trump and overseen by Tony Blair - a man whose colonial delusions and blood-soaked record in Iraq disqualify him from administering a schoolyard, let alone the future of Gaza.

History will not be kind to this moment. A ceasefire plan that excludes the occupied is not a peace plan. It is a colonial diktat

This is not peace. It is the Gaza Humiliation Foundation writ large, the same machinery of external control, dressed up in humanitarian jargon. And the Muslim rulers who sit beside Netanyahu - from the Emiratis who whispered with him as the world turned away at the UN, to those now parading behind Trump’s podium - are not partners in peace. They are accomplices in surrender.

As Egypt’s former UN delegate Motaz Khalil put it, this is nothing but a “surrender plan”. It silences Palestinians, strips them of representation, and hands Netanyahu the absolute victory he promised and failed to win.

History will not be kind to this moment. A ceasefire plan that excludes the occupied is not a peace plan. It is a colonial diktat - the language of mandate and tutelage revived for the 21st century. It is the same conceit that promised away Palestinian land in their absence, without their consent, in the Balfour Declaration of 1917. Mandates, protectorates, trusteeships - all the euphemisms of empire are recycled to deny Palestinians their voice.

Trump and Netanyahu can draft as many plans as they please, but outside their conference rooms, the world is shifting. Millions march, boycotts deepen, public opinion tilts. The tide is turning, and no paper agreement can stem it. Palestine has become the conscience of the world - and that cannot be negotiated away.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.