First the good news: A cease fire is at last in place, following one final gesture of contempt by Israel in leveling al-Rantisi, a children's hospital.
And now the bad news: The Trump plan is just one more fake peace crafted by deluded colonial leaders with no input from Palestinians, who continue to be regarded as terrorist scum. Anything remotely approaching national liberation for such beasts remains unthinkable.
According to the Trump 20-point plan, Israel will partially withdraw from Gaza, all Hamas hostages will be released, but Israel will keep the majority of the Palestinians it has abducted.
The long-recognized just demands of the Palestinian people - self-determination, sovereignty, and the right to live in the territories occupied by Israel in 1967 - make no appearance in the Trump Plan, which appears to actually be the Netanyahu Plan.
It can't be a coincidence that this plan was announced by the Narcissist-In-Chief just hours before the Norwegian Nobel committee was scheduled to announce its peace prize winner, which Trump yearned to have be himself, based on the modest assumption that he has personally stopped eight wars around the world. He sees no contradiction in promoting himself as the Prince of Peace while arming Israel, bombing Iran, repeatedly blowing up fishing boats in the Caribbean, threatening to annex Canada and invade Mexico, Greenland, Venezuela, and Panama, and militarily occupying American urban centers (shit-hole cities?) to conquer what he calls the "internal enemy," a category defined to include everyone but his most shameless flatterers.
Thankfully, however, Israel's extermination campaign is finally on hold. But in the same way that the falsely claimed end of the war between Israel and Iran didn't produce peace, but rather, the temporary freezing in place of profound, complex, and dangerous political conflict and rivalry, so the Trump Plan will not end the deeply entrenched hostilities in Palestine. If Trump really desired peace he could have proved that by announcing his terms long ago, sparing Palestine and the world a prolonged genocidal horror show. Even now, he has failed to make evident any credible commitment to achieving it, such as by cutting all financial and military aid to Israel and allowing the ICC to proceed with trying the Netanyahu government for its massive crimes in Gaza, if not throughout the Middle East.
As long as Washington and its Western vassals don't allow Israeli leaders to be brought to account for their crimes, the Holy State will keep "redeeming" Palestinian land via conquest while cleansing it of its rightful inhabitants through assassination and expulsion. That has been Zionism's default setting from the beginning.
The current deal includes a pause in Israeli attacks, the release of Hamas's remaining hostages in exchange for 250 Palestinians serving life sentences in Israeli jails and another 1700 detainees from Gaza taken over the past two years. Netanyahu predicts that the "next phase" of peace will see the Hamas combatants disarmed and Gaza demilitarized, but he remains utterly blind to the much more urgently needed denazification of Israel, as does president Trump, who constantly conflates his own desires, opinions, fantasies, and delusions with verified facts.
Netanyahu, forced to accept his humiliating failure to annihilate Hamas, now has to settle for merely disarming the Islamic militants. If this "can be achieved the easy way," he says, "very well." But "if not," he warns, "it will be achieved the hard way." He makes no mention of the fact that two years of massive Israeli firepower (i.e., the hard way) has come nowhere near producing this outcome. Epic fail.
Palestinian human rights attorney Diana Buttu notes that it is simply repulsive to have to negotiate an end to genocide with those that have been carrying it out. Overwhelming international political pressure should have spared Palestinians this ghastly fate by imposing crippling sanctions on Israel long ago. Palestine solidarity still has a long way to go.
To take one example, there are currently eleven thousand Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails being starved, tortured, and raped. Only 250 are to be freed under the Trump plan. At the same time there are another 1700 from Gaza - doctors, nurses, journalists - captured since October 7, 2023, and thousands more from the West Bank, who face unknown fates. While all eyes have been on Gaza, more than one thousand Palestinians have been killed on the West Bank in the last two years. Only massive and sustained international pressure has any chance of stopping this. Fortunately, we may be seeing its emergence. The Global Sumud Flotilla had some 26,000 volunteers to choose from. The corresponding figure today is said to be 100,000.
But the climb to actual peace will be steep, as Israel continues to have control over the territory of Gaza and every morsel of food that enters it.
Sources:
"Trump: un impasse no es la paz"; "An Impasse Isn't Peace," La Jornada (Spanish), October 9, 2025
"After Gaza Ceasefire, 'Massive Political Pressure' Needed to Prevent Israel from Restarting the War," Democracy Now, October 10, 2025
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