PSC response to US President Donald Trump’s ’20 point plan’ for Gaza

PSC condemns US President Donald Trump’s ‘20 point plan’ for Gaza, which should be understood as a continuation of Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people rather than a plan to end it. 

Israel’s genocide has been armed and supported by the US and other Western powers, including Britain, following decades of complicity in Israel’s system of apartheid and occupation. Western arms sales to Israel have continued even as it became clear that Israel was deploying those very weapons to bomb hospitals, schools, shelters and homes, and to target medical workers, journalists and children. Trump’s plan is born out of this context, and the context of Israel’s continued violation of almost every international law and norm imaginable, include the Genocide Convention, as confirmed in the UN Commission of Inquiry report earlier this month. 

The Trump plan is presented as carrying promises of humanitarian relief and dangles the spectre of a prosperous and peaceful future. In reality, it is a mechanism to entrench colonial rule over the Palestinian people. The dystopian proposal for a ‘Board of Peace’ echoes the recent US ‘Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’ which weaponised aid in service of Israel’s interests and led to continued massacres of Palestinians seeking food. The Board would be overseen by Trump himself along with the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and is a blueprint for direct Western involvement in Israel’s colonial rule over the Palestinian people. Blair is already widely despised and rightly mistrusted because of his role in the invasion and occupation of Iraq and the profiteering that ensued in the aftermath. 

It is not an oversight that Palestinians were not meaningfully consulted in the development of the plan, nor do they play any significant role in it aside from as the subjects of colonial rule or as the mid-level administrators of it. Despite the sleight of hand within the ‘20 points’, this plan is not a move towards Palestinian self-determination, but rather a huge step backwards. 

Trump’s plan also makes no mention of accountability or justice for the crimes committed against the Palestinian people. On the contrary, in the press conference announcing the plan, Netanyahu condemned attempts to hold Israel to account in the ICC and ICJ. This on top of the Trump administration’s ongoing incitement against the ICC, including recently sanctioning four Palestinian human rights organisations who have submitted evidence to the ICC. Rather than opening the way towards accountability, this plan forecloses pathways to justice for the Palestinian people. 

Lastly, Trump’s plan makes no mention of a need to end Israel’s deepening apartheid in the rest of historic Palestine, including the escalation of settler and military led ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. Since October 2023, nearly 40 entire Palestinian communities have been forcibly displaced in the West Bank and tens of thousands are impacted by horrific settler attacks and military incursions into villages, towns and refugee camps. Nor does it account for the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes, a right which has come under unrelenting attack by Israel and the US government. 

The plan should be seen for what it is: a further attempt to fragment, disenfranchise and erase the Palestinian people, and a distraction from the core issues of genocide and apartheid at the very moment when those in power are finally starting to recognise that fact and the obligations that extend from it. 

In Britain this week, Labour Party conference voted to accept the findings of the UN Independent Commission of Inquiry, recognise the reality of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and called on the British government to take meaningful action to end its complicity with Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people. The government must impose comprehensive sanctions on Israel including a complete end to all arms trade and all other trade that aids or assists Israel’s violations of international law. It is measures like these, rooted in accountability and respect for international law that show the true pathway to a just peace.