I shared today with Danny Davis my views on the October 7 attacks, views I have held since before that day. This is important because the right of the

I shared today with Danny Davis my views on the October 7 attacks, views I have held since before that day. This is important because the right of the Palestinians to resist occupation is the most cogent and sincere understanding missing from US discussions on Israel-Palestine. Likewise, the claim of Israeli self-defense, as they carry out occupation, apartheid and ethnic cleansing throughout Palestine, is the most damaging, unjustified and incorrect assertion by American officials and journalists. As long as this warped understanding of the foundational aspects of the Israeli-Palestine relationship of occupier and occupied is misunderstood and misrepresented, a political solution will remain impossible.

So, to your point exactly, what did people expect the Palestinians to do? And under international law, and I would add also as well, natural law, people have a right to resist. And so while I agree with you about the attacks on October 7th that killed hundreds of civilians being war crimes and reprehensible, as well as strategically counterproductive, the attacks by the Palestinians on the Israeli military and security forces, the people that were keeping them in what was effectively a concentration camp, were justified.

I don’t believe in this current peace plan or process for Gaza. If it goes forward and it holds, it is nothing more than an American-Israeli subjugation of Gaza. It will be an occupation that may have international colors with a British war criminal as its colonial governor, with foreign proxy soldiers under his command, but the occupation’s purpose will be to realize as much as possible of the US and Israeli visions for Gaza, whether that be Trump’s towers or settlers’ caravans. If the plan fails, immediately or after some time, it will certainly be a failure as part of Israeli intentions. Without a doubt, the case is ready-made for Western politicians and media to apologize for a restart of Israeli military action, with the blame placed upon the Palestinians.

Either way, the plan failing or succeeding, I think we’ll see a continued push of Palestinians from their homes in northern Gaza. It’s important to remember that this time last year, Israel was carrying out what it called The General’s Plan, a massive military operation to cleanse the northern half of Gaza through massacre, destruction and starvation. I was in Palestine in November of 2024, just a short distance from that operation.

The Israelis were largely successful in that ethnic cleansing campaign, having to abandon it and allow the Palestinians to return to their homes in northern Gaza as part of the January-March 2025 ceasefire. That ceasefire had a great deal to do with President Trump’s inauguration, and once the benefits of the inauguration ceasefire had expired for Trump and his administration, the Israelis resumed their genocide and ethnic cleansing.

We see the Israelis again having to halt their campaign to eradicate Palestinians from the north of Gaza to appease Donald Trump, this time not for his inauguration but quite likely for the Nobel Peace Prize. The Nobel Peace Prize will be awarded at the end of this week. Yes, it is fantastical, an absurd satire, that the President of the United States would muscle the Israelis to end their genocide to win a trophy, but that is the reality in which we live.

If Trump doesn’t win the Nobel, the peace plan presumably becomes terminal; perhaps a decent interval will be allowed for appearances, or maybe the Israelis will go fully back to their genocide immediately. The continued Israeli pursuit of the eradication of Palestinians from Gaza may be tempered by the greed of the Americans, a greed of the Americans that is more akin to Gordon Gekko than to that of tales of a 3,000-year-old magical real estate agent in the sky. If Trump/Witkoff/Kushner really do see riches and wealth in Gaza, then maybe they can hold the Israelis off from all-out genocide while still allowing for substantial ethnic cleansing; ethnic cleansing being necessary to realize the full profit of the Trump Riveria plan.

Regardless, for the Palestinians in Gaza, the consequences may be similar whether the deal holds or fails. The Israelis have invested too much in Gaza to let go of their gains. October 7 gave the Israelis a once-in-a-decade opportunity to finish what was started in 1948 and continued in 1967. The Palestinians forced from northern Gaza over the last months will be kept in the south. Those half a million or so who may still be in the north will face a repeat of 2024’s The General’s Plan, which was essentially abandon your homes and flee south or be killed by the IDF’s weapons or starvation.

Trump’s 20 Point Plan has enough of both general vagueness and specific guarantees for Israeli security to allow for a northern Gaza that remains largely depopulated, with the remaining population trapped in a free fire zone blockaded from aid. The 20 Point Plan uses the phrase terror-free zones. My understanding is that it will be the Israelis who decide when a neighborhood is terror-free. I assume that status will be met when all are dead or have fled, and there is not one building left standing. Any large pockets of people left in northern Gaza will be corralled in concentration camps where technology, privatized military forces and greed will intersect not only to imprison but to track, immiserate and reduce those who remain.

For a detailed discussion on what these camps might look like, please watch my interview with Dan Cohen and read his accompanying report from last year (note that the January-March 2025 ceasefire delayed this Israeli plan for Gaza).

The southern half of Gaza will be a hellscape as well. I don’t envision the Israelis and the Americans, or their proxy International Stabilization Force, letting the million-plus Palestinians sheltering in the 14 square kilometer al-Mawasi neighborhood ever leave it. It’s very telling that the “peacekeeping forces” will be under the command of the American and Israeli installed viceroy, rather than being UN blue helmets authorized by the Security Council. The cities and towns outside of al-Mawsi will face a similar fate to that of northern Gaza. Effectively, we’ll see concentration camps throughout Gaza, both northern and southern, a ghetto in al-Mawsi and desolation throughout. This they will call peace.

Upon the ruins of Gaza, they will build their New Gaza. What percent Trump high-rises and what percent Israeli housing settlements I don’t know. There will be some form of governance within the Palestinian areas, but they will be disconnected from one another, cut off and divided by apartheid walls and roads, as in the West Bank, but reinforced by foreign mercenaries. In some Palestinian areas, again, in reality, camps and ghettos, the resistance will be in charge. These areas will be starved and under constant attack by the IDF or ISF. Other areas may be under the control of Israeli backed gangs or other collaborationists, 21st-century kapos. Food, water, medicine, housing and materials will continue to be limited or withheld as ongoing acts of war. I doubt there will be anything that resembles Gaza-wide Palestinian governance, except in image and name, and available to be photographed when Tony Blair visits from his five-star suite in Jerusalem.

The end goal, again, whether Trump’s plan is enacted or the Israelis continue with their Swords of Iron ethnic cleansing and genocide campaign into a 3rd, 4th or 5th year, hinges on the Israeli and American dream that some destination for the exodus of the Palestinians in Gaza will be realized either in nearby Sinai or a distant land.

Over all of this will be the narrative of New Gaza*,* with no shortage of American journalists writing and speaking to its aspirations, reconstruction and possibilities. The templates exist. American media simply need to refer to the legion of stories filed for nearly two decades about the brave new neo-liberal paradises sure to arise in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, et al. For example, all The New York Times will have to do is replace the word “Libya” with “Gaza” and they can rerun their October 29, 2011, article, Western Companies See Prospects for Business in Libya.

Alongside the propaganda will be the censorship. The Ellisons’ purchase of TikTok and Paramount-CBS will be repeated in acquisitions, mergers, takeovers and buyouts of large and small media platforms. The US government will threaten, regulate and delicense those who can’t be bought – how long before Google decides it’s best for their business to censor on YouTube those who report the truth on Palestine and promote those who follow the official zionist narrative? If those efforts don’t work, Trump’s National Security Policy Memorandum #7 will jail and financially ruin individuals and destroy organizations.

Naturally, the Palestinians will be blamed for either the deal’s failure or its inability to be executed. I discussed the history of blaming the Palestinians for not accepting bad deals last week with Michael Ferris on his Coffee and a Mike Podcast:

Many questions come from this understanding of what the next phase of the genocide in Gaza may look like. Here are some:

  • Will the Americans make their real estate fortunes or get frustrated and give up?

  • What role do the Gulf States play? [spoiler: not a good one]

  • If the Trump Riviera plan proceeds, how much land will the Israeli settlers receive? You can imagine the conflict that will come from competing American and Israeli greed.

  • How many Palestinians can be killed daily, weekly, monthly, annually, as part of the New Gaza occupation scheme that won’t offend the Europeans and will allow the European-Israeli relationship to return to normalcy?

  • Will there ever be enough pressure or inducement to find a place of exile for the Palestinians in Gaza? I believe Trump believes so, whether it be Joe Biden’s plan to finance a city in the Sinai or Netanyahu’s plan to send them off on ships to other countries, or something unforeseen.

  • What happens when the Palestinian resistance kills occupying ISF soldiers? I can tell you what will happen if those soldiers are Emiratis or Saudis…

  • How long until a Gaza wide collaborationist Palestinian government is formed by the occupation in an attempt to maintain control and, eventually, provide pretext and cover for the foreign ISF withdrawal?

  • What losses and costs are necessary to force the Israelis to withdraw and return to a pre-Oct 7 form of siege and blockade of Gaza? Having once evacuated Gaza before, notably as a consequence of Palestinian resistance, is there any foreseeable political power in Israel that could force settlers and the IDF to leave Gaza for a second time?

I hope I am wrong about Gaza, but I defer back to what I said about hope at the beginning of the January 2025 ceasefire.

This all makes me think of the awful truth of those long ago words about nations by Thuciydes: The strong do as they can and the weak suffer as they must.

This first appeared on Matthew Hoh’s Substack page.

The post Whither Gaza? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

From CounterPunch.org via this RSS feed