The Trump-led peace initiative may be effectively dead by the time you read this, and even if it has not been formally interred, rest assured that Israel will use this deal — as it has so many others — simply to provide cover under which to continue its agenda of killing and dispossessing Palestinians and stealing their land, a process that has continued more or less uninterrupted since Jewish settlers first began arriving in historic Palestine as refugees in the early 1900s.
It will be what it always has been: a creeping coup, a slow strangulation and swallowing, with Israel setting impossible conditions on the negotiation table and then changing goalposts while all the while claiming victimhood. In the meantime, they work to create conditions on the ground that ensure any settlement is in their favour; they create a desolation and call it peace.
Consider the trajectory: in 1918, the Jewish population in Palestine was 56,000. In 1922, it had increased to 88,000. By 1939, out of a total population of about 1.5 million, Jews numbered 445,000. This period was also marked by increasing attacks on Palestinians by increasingly well-trained and well-armed Zionist terror groups that would later be incorporated into the Israeli army and whose leaders would become Israeli heads of state.
Then, in the fateful year of 1947, the UNGA passed Resolution 181, which granted 55% of the land of historic Palestine to Jews who, at that time, only made up 33% of the population and comprised mostly of European immigrants who had no link or claim to the land.
Despite the allocation, many Zionist leaders rejected the 1947 UN plan, seeking all of Palestine. Others accepted it strategically, aiming to eventually take full control. Ben Gurion stated in letters that the Jewish state was just the beginning, planning to expand by abolishing partition after forming a strong army. Chaim Weizmann believed partition was only temporary, expecting further expansion in 20–25 years.
The game plan never changed: in 1993 and 1995, the Oslo Accords were signed, leading to the establishment of the Palestinian Authority for limited self-rule in parts of the West Bank and Gaza as an ‘interim’ step towards a two-state solution.
While Israel agreed on paper, on the ground, Jewish settlements tripled from 110,000 in 1993 to over 400,000 by 2000. Years later a smirking Netanyahu was seen explaining how he sabotaged the agreement by exploiting a loophole in the language: the withdrawal text left Israel ‘military sites’ untouched and because the definition of 'military sites' was never made clear; he simply designated the entire Jordan valley as a ‘security zone’ and claimed that this was thus not covered in the agreement.
Similarly, the Wye River memorandum in 1998 saw Israel commit to a 13% further withdrawal from the West Bank, but in practice, only 1% of the land was transferred, and settlements and outposts continued to be established.
The same fate befell the 2000 Camp David summit, where, just after the end of the summit, Israel increased military operations in PA areas, and Ariel Sharon’s provocative visit to the Al-Aqsa Mosque sparked the second intifada.
The list of such violations from then till now is long and painful, but the one consistent factor is that Israel wages war under the cover of peace.
Israel does this simply because it can. Israel does this because in the past, they have gotten away with it each and every time. Israel does this because… why shouldn’t they? After all, the United States is there with its veto to shield it from even the most benign of UNSC resolutions, let alone sanctions. After all, Israel’s war machine is constantly supplied with the latest killing machines in Western arsenals, and its lobbies and media proxies have — until now — ensured they are insulated from critique and censure.
Moreover, Israel is surrounded by states that either have no capability to stop it or no interest in doing so. This, too, is the result of decades of planning, destabilisation, and the co-opting of would-be opponents.
Consider that in 1982, Oded Yinon wrote ‘A strategy for Israel in the 1980s’ in which a clear plan is laid out for fragmenting the surrounding Arab states on the basis of sectarian and ethnic divisions, creating a brittle mosaic of statelets and enclaves that could never challenge Israel. We only have to see the map of the Middle East today to see how effective this strategy has been: Iraq and Libya lie divided and decimated. Lebanon is toothless, and Hezbollah is being pitted against its government. Syria has been defanged and is not only without an effective military but is also de facto divided into statelets. The Yinon plan laid all this out, and Israel achieved its goals. The rest, then, are either cowed or co-opted, intent on appeasing the wolf at the door in the hope that it will eat them last.
Why then should Israel not strike Qatar, as much of an overreach as that may seem? Why shouldn’t Israel feel as if it has won? In the minds of Zionists, it does not matter if the world protests their actions or if the very name of Israel is now a byword for atrocity and genocide. What does that really matter when they have achieved their objectives on the ground?
And if Gaza is to be a mass grave, then that too is nothing new; all of Israel is built on the bones of Palestinians: when Israeli beachgoers party at the Dor beach next to Kibbutz Nasholim, they are in fact dancing on the mass graves of Palestinians massacred when this was the Arab village of Tantura. Tel Aviv’s Jaffa district is also built on another mass grave, as are so many ‘Israeli’ towns which were once Palestinian. All of them have been erased, renamed, and rebuilt.
Every effort has been made to eradicate any trace of what came before. It is not just the inhabitants who were killed; their very memory was excised. History itself was murdered because, after all, a people with no past can have no future.
But what will Israel’s future be? Certainly, their intention is to make people forget the genocide ever happened, and they should feel a degree of confidence given how many times this strategy has succeeded in the past.
Will it succeed again? This time, there is some small hope that things will be different. This time, the world has seen genocide live-streamed on their phones. This time, millions across the world, and especially in the Western world, have taken to the streets and are still not only protesting but taking direct action — and suffering the consequences. This time, we see a split in world Jewry as well, with many young American Jews joining in and often leading the protests, and we have seen many of these, old and young, repudiate the ideology of Zionism as well.
In the USA, the strongest and most significant supporter of Israel, we now see politicians and public figures alike who are no longer afraid to call out Israel and the pernicious influence of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and other Israeli lobbies. Even in Germany, arguably the most pro-Israel European country, recent polls tell us that 62% of German voters — across party lines — now firmly believe that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Even in the deepest pits of despair, we cannot help but acknowledge that none of this would have been possible a scant two years ago.
Israel is pushing back; having identified social media as a key battleground, efforts are on to skew it in Israel’s favour with TikTok, a key offender as per Netanyahu, being forcibly sold to an American consortium with a strong representation of pro-Israel billionaires such as Larry Ellison, who is the single biggest private donor to the IDF. TikTok’s new hate speech manager Erica Mindell is, in fact, an ex-Israeli forces instructor, and her role will be — you guessed it — moderating ‘anti-semitic’ content.
And so, the war for the hearts and souls of the world will continue, and for all the massive protests and immense pain, we have not seen Western governments significantly budge on Israel in any proportional or meaningful way. As for the Muslim world, with a few notable exceptions, it is too busy begging for scraps from the Master’s table. And so Gaza is not just a graveyard for the Palestinians, it is also where Western values and Muslim honour lie buried
Zarrar Khuhro is a Pakistani journalist who co-hosts a talk show and has written for several local and international publications. He posts on X ZarrarKhuhro
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