In 98 AD, the historian Tacitus, describing the devastation of Britain by the troops of Imperial Rome, wrote: “They make a desert and call it peace.” Nearly 2,000 years later, these bitter words apply to the brutal terms imposed upon the Palestinian population of Gaza by Israel and its imperialist patrons.
US President Donald Trump’s so-called “peace agreement” for Gaza creates an imperialist protectorate that tramples on the rights of the Palestinians and strengthens American control over the energy-rich Middle East. This was laid bare by Trump’s speech to the Israeli Knesset and the subsequent gathering of accomplices to genocide in Egypt hosted by President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi Monday.
In a rambling address lasting more than an hour, Trump spoke with the eloquence of Mafia don Tony Soprano. He bragged to Israeli lawmakers about the power of American weapons to achieve “peace,” called for a pardon on corruption charges for the wanted war criminal Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and vowed that the “historic dawn of a new Middle East” under US dominance had begun. He positively reveled in the genocidal violence overseen by Netanyahu and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), telling his adoring audience that Netanyahu “would call me so many times” asking for weapons and added that the US had supplied “so many that Israel became strong and powerful. That’s what led to peace.” He added, “We gave you all the weapons, and you used them well.”
The Zionist regime used the weapons so “well” that they slaughtered at least 67,000 people, according to official figures, and in reality many tens of thousands more. That they did so with the express intent to exterminate the Palestinians has been demonstrated by countless reports from the UN and other international organisations and the issuing of arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, who infamously designated the Palestinians as “human animals.” Thousands more were killed or maimed in a months-long bombardment of Lebanon, while hundreds of Palestinians have been slaughtered by far-right settlers and the IDF in the West Bank.
Trump’s gangster-style performance was complete when an opposition Israeli politician held up a piece of paper with the timid demand to “recognize Palestine.” He was swiftly thrown out of the chamber, prompting Trump to respond, “That’s very efficient.”
The American imperialist-imposed settlement recognises no rights for the Palestinians remaining in Gaza whatsoever, not even a meaningless verbal commitment to a “Palestinian state.” The Zionist regime will retain a permanent occupation force with control over the borders and the ability to launch bloody onslaughts at a time of its choosing. Israel’s record over the past five decades of systematically violating ceasefires, from Camp David in 1978, to Oslo in 1993, and last November’s “pause” in the genocide, demonstrates that this prospect is not merely hypothetical. It is only a matter of time.
The rhetoric from Trump, the leaders of the European imperialist powers, and the corporate-controlled media about “peace” in the Middle East is doubly fraudulent. In the first place, the Palestinians who have survived two years of genocide have been left to live in ruins. The more than 300,000 returning to Gaza City confront piles of rubble after Israel destroyed three-quarters of the city’s buildings.
Under the Orwellian “Board of Peace,” headed by the American Führer Trump and supported by unindicted war criminal Tony Blair, the Gaza Palestinians will have no rights. They will be subject to the whims of the imperialist powers and their Zionist attack dog, which will police the enclave’s borders and be free at any time to ethnically cleanse or slaughter residents as they see fit.
The parallel between Trump’s intention to oversee the ruthless suppression of the Palestinians in Gaza and deploy brutal state repression against the working class in major American cities in his Operation Dictatorship at home is undeniable. It underlines how unrestrained imperialist barbarism abroad goes hand in hand with the drive to dictatorship domestically.
The agreement sets the stage not for “peace” throughout the region, but even more bloody wars of plunder and imperialist conquest. The Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, are integrating themselves even more fully into a US-led alliance with Israel to topple the Iranian bourgeois-clerical regime. Trump revealed the centrality of “regime change” in Tehran for his administration, noting that the opportunity provided by the Gaza genocide for the US and Israel to strike Iran’s nuclear program earlier this year. “We took a big cloud off the Middle East and off Israel,” he boasted to applause.
Gaza is seen as key to the development of the India-Middle East-Europe trade corridor aimed at sidelining China and Russia in the rapidly escalating scramble among the major powers to redivide the world’s markets and resources. The unseemly rush of the leaders of European imperialism—themselves all complicit in the genocide—to the signing ceremony in Egypt underlines that Germany, France and Britain will play their parts in the coming conflicts under the banner of Gaza’s “reconstruction.”
Even if the agreement holds for a longer period, it provides no basis for the democratic and social aspirations of the Palestinians and oppressed masses throughout the region to be resolved. The idea of a “two-state solution” is absurd, given that the present Israeli state is a creation of imperialist-backed slaughter and the illegal confiscation of Palestinian and Syrian land. The bankruptcy of Zionism’s strategy of securing a national homeland as a safe haven for the Jewish people is plain for all to see, including growing numbers of Jews around the world. The Zionist state can only be maintained through genocide and as a garrison outpost of US imperialism.
Any Palestinian state acknowledged by the imperialist powers and Arab despots will not be worth the paper it is written on, as indicated by Trump’s pledge that Gaza will be “demilitarised” and placed under his personalist diktat as a US protectorate. The expansion of settlements in the West Bank has cut the territory nominally controlled by the Palestinian Authority off from Palestine’s proposed capital, East Jerusalem.
Monday’s signing ceremony could not have provided a more devastating indictment of all the bourgeois nationalist regimes in the region that have sought to cast themselves as opponents, or at least alternatives, to the imperialist powers. In the end, they all sacrificed the rights of the Palestinians in favor of an accommodation with imperialism, making possible the Gaza genocide and hailing the filthy agreement promoted by Trump.
The dirty deal was signed in Sharm el Sheik by Trump on behalf of the US, joined by the leaders of Turkey, Egypt and Qatar. While hypocritically criticizing Israel’s slaughter of the Palestinians, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government continued to supply the Zionist regime with oil from Azerbaijan throughout the genocide and expanded its influence in Syria with the US-backed toppling of the Assad regime. Qatar was bought off with the promise of access to a US military base and participated with other Gulf states in the investment of close to $5 billion in the financial operations of Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
None of the outstanding democratic and social rights of the oppressed masses in the Middle East can be resolved with national programs, whether of the Arab, Iranian, Turkish or Zionist varieties of nationalism. The desperate plight now confronted by the Palestinians, as well as the dead end into which Zionism has maneuvered the Israeli working class, provide in their own ways tragic confirmations of the correctness of this stand.
Each one of myriad “peace” agreements over the course of decades, sanctified by Arab governments and hailed by Palestinian nationalist movements, has only created the basis for further Israeli mass killing and repression.
The tragedy of the Palestinians has been that they are deprived of the support of the working class due to the absence of a revolutionary movement in the advanced countries. The only way to realize the democratic and social rights of the long-suffering masses of the Middle East and establish a genuine basis for peaceful coexistence is through the fight for the perspective of the Permanent Revolution. Arab, Jewish, Iranian, Turkish and Kurdish workers must unite in a common struggle against the imperialist domination of the region and for the creation of the United Socialist States of the Middle East as part of a world socialist federation. In this struggle, their allies are not to be found in the pro-imperialist and corrupt Zionist and Arab ruling classes but in the working class in the imperialist centres of North America and Europe.
Forging this alliance into an independent political and industrial movement of the international working class capable of putting an end to capitalism—the root cause of genocide, imperialist war and all forms of colonial-style oppression—is possible only on the basis of the revolutionary socialist program fought for by the International Committee of the Fourth International and its daily organ, the World Socialist Web Site.