Groucho Marxism

On September 29, US president Donald Trump announced a plan to address the ongoing Gaza genocide in a press conference at the White House alongside Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The plan calls for an immediate ceasefire, return of hostages, demilitarization of the Gaza Strip, deployment of an international stabilization force, transitional governance by Palestinian technocrats under international supervision, large-scale reconstruction, and a conditional pathway toward acceptance of Palestinian self-determination and recognition of Palestinian statehood. The plan was met with support from many countries around the world. On October 3, in response to the proposal, Hamas agreed to release all remaining hostages in Gaza.

On October 8, Trump announced that Israel and Hamas had reached an agreement and signed the first phase of the deal. In this phase, all Israeli hostages are to be released in exchange for 2,000 Palestinian hostages within 72 hours, and Israel will also withdraw its forces to pre-designated lines within the Gaza Strip. The ceasefire went into effect on October 10. On the face of it there is every reason to welcome these developments. The people of Gaza have lived through unimaginable suffering over the past two years, and anything that will help alleviate this suffering must surely be a good thing. We might even start to wonder if Trump is such a bad guy after all! But scratch the surface a bit and things don’t seem quite so rosy.

The first thing to note is how few hostages were actually being held by Hamas: 20. Yes, you read that right. Israel has apparently perpetrated a genocide resulting in the deaths of around 70,000 Palestinians, of whom at least 20,000 were children, in order to rescue 20 hostages. Listening to the mainstream media talk about this, you’d think Hamas had taken half of Israel hostage! Contrast that with the 3,000+ Palestinians who were being held hostage by Israel. Despite Hamas releasing all the Israeli hostages, at least 1,000 Palestinians hostages will remain in Israeli custody even after the ceasefire. Moreover, it seems likely that Israel will immediately target the 2,000 released hostages for assassination. This highlights the asymmetrical nature of the peace deal.

Then there is the fact that it is not clear at this stage whether Israel will honour the agreement to withdraw its forces to pre-designated lines. There is also no guarantee that Israel will actually cease its onslaught. It seems more likely that the massacre will simply continue unabated. Indeed, top Israeli officials are already talking about resuming hostilities, and Israeli air strikes have been recorded in Gaza since October 10. And these are just the problems with the first phase of the deal. The following phases of Trump’s peace plan (outlined above) have not been committed to by Hamas, and are unlikely to be accepted as they effectively demand complete capitulation to Israel and the US. This will give Israel the perfect pretext it needs to continue the slaughter (if it even needs a pretext).

Leaving aside the details of the peace plan, there is a more general question we need to ask here, which is: why is this deal even necessary in the first place? It is widely agreed that the US government could have stopped the Gaza genocide at any time in the last two years simply by withdrawing its support for Israel. So why didn’t it do that? We can only conclude that it didn’t do that because it didn’t want to. The US government was perfectly happy to see tens of thousands of Palestinians murdered and to see Gaza razed to the ground. It has not just been complicit in the genocide; it has been instrumental in facilitating it. That the US expects the world to be grateful to them for stopping it now, when they could have stopped it any time in the past two years, is risible.

So what’s really going on here? What are Israel and the US actually trying to achieve with this deal? Luckily for us, we don’t need to guess, as Trump is such a buffoon that he invariably says the quiet part out loud. (I think that’s why liberals hate him so much.) In a recent speech pitching the Abraham Accords to nations in the region, Trump said: ‘So I hope everybody’s now joining up. We have no excuses. We don’t have a Gaza, we don’t have Iran as an excuse – that was a good excuse, but we don’t have that anymore.’  Here Trump is referring to the fact that Arab nations were unwilling to normalize relations with Israel whilst the genocide in Gaza was ongoing, or when Israel was attacking Iran. The implication is clear: the aim of this ‘peace deal’ is to further the Abraham Accords, not to end Palestinian suffering.

The US has obviously decided that the ongoing massacre in Gaza is starting to become harmful to its economic interests in the region. Perhaps Israel’s bombing of Qatar, which occurred on September 9, was a red line. The timing certainly seems quite suspicious, with the peace deal being announced less than three weeks later. Note also that Qatar sits geographically right between Bahrain and the UAE, two of the five current signatories of the Abraham Accords. It seems that the true motivation for this peace deal has nothing to do with humanitarian concerns and everything to do with money, power and influence – as is so often the case in our capitalist world.