Netanyahu-Trump plan: A blueprint to dismantle Palestinian identity
Since the beginning of its aggression in Gaza, Israel's leadership under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has centred its war narrative on three "prerequisites for peace": destroying Hamas, demilitarising Gaza and de-radicalising Palestinian society.
Whenever Netanyahu outlines these prerequisites, he invokes the aftermath of World War Two as his model. He has explicitly adopted the framework that the Allied forces imposed on Germany: de-Nazification, demilitarisation and reconstruction of the economy after unconditional surrender.
This framing serves a deliberate purpose of disguising the genocide of the indigenous Palestinian population as an international war against "terrorism".
By equating resistance to foreign occupation with Nazi state atrocities, Israel seeks to provide a colonial alibi for its true objective in Gaza - the elimination of Palestinian political identity and aspirations for national liberation.
The comparison also seeks to elevate Israel's colonial goals into an international priority, offering legal and moral cover for its ongoing genocide by presenting Hamas as a regime as irredeemable as the Third Reich.
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But the invocation of World War Two has not been confined to Israel's propaganda war. Just as the United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union determined Germany's future at the Potsdam Conference in 1945, US President Donald Trump and Netanyahu's 20-point plan now seeks to dictate the fate of the Palestinian cause.
War model
The Trump plan unveiled this week builds directly on Netanyahu's prerequisites as a framework for erasing Palestinian claims to indigeneity.
Whereas Nazi Germany was an aggressor state, Palestinians are a colonised population fighting for their physical and political survival. The proposal, therefore, empowers Israel as an occupying state to dismantle their political identity with total impunity.
This racist idea of developing a 'new Palestinian breed' reveals the coloniser’s aim to eliminate and replace the colonised, forcing them to accept their oppressor's superiority
In his July 2024 address to the US Congress, Netanyahu emphasised the importance of demilitarisation and de-radicalisation for creating a "new generation of Palestinians" who would not "hate Jews" and could live in "peace" with Israel.
He held up post-war Germany and Japan as successful models of defeated populations reshaped into stability after unconditional surrender, leading to "decades of peace, prosperity, and security".
This racist idea of developing a "new Palestinian breed", first invoked by US Army General Keith Dayton during his early-2000s project to restructure security forces in the West Bank, reveals the US and Israel's longstanding objectives: an attempt by the coloniser to eliminate and replace the colonised and appropriate their land by forcing them to accept the superiority of their oppressor.
Despite Netanyahu's insistence on likening Palestinians to Nazis and portraying Gaza as post-war Germany, the reality remains that Israel, as a settler-colonial project, treats Palestinians as natives who must be eliminated, either through genocide or subjugation, to make space for the new state.
De-Hamasification
The three "prerequisites for peace", while echoing the de-Nazification programme for propaganda purposes, serve Israel's ongoing project of settler-colonialism.
De-radicalisation means the violent social engineering of Palestinians to give up their claims to the land and their rights to self-determination and sovereignty, following the footsteps of the Palestinian Authority in becoming native informants to the colonisers.
Unlike classic colonialism, which seeks to exploit native labour and resources, settler-colonialism destroys the native's reality in order to replace it with another. Israel will never feel "safe" unless Palestinian national identity is destroyed.
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For this reason, Israel has always viewed any assertion, whether cultural or political, of Palestinian claims as radicalism that must be uprooted.
"De-Hamasification" takes this strategy further, forcing Palestinians to capitulate to the coloniser's imposed reality without any resistance.
While the language of "radical Islam" and "terrorism" helps Israel justify its crimes, "de-Hamasification" signals the need for deeper societal and cultural changes that go beyond crushing armed resistance.
It requires the violent rejection of Palestinian indigeneity, which underpins the right to physically resist occupation in pursuit of liberation.
Since the inception of the Zionist movement, its leaders have invoked western colonial, racist and orientalist rhetoric to justify the need for Israel as an "outpost of civilisation" against "barbarism".
In the past two years, Israeli leaders have utilised this same racist rhetoric against Palestinians to muster western support and justify genocide in Gaza. As recently as Netanyahu's speech at the UN General Assembly, he reiterated that Israel is protecting the West from "radical Islam".
This racist and supremacist rhetoric is not incidental, but rather a consubstantial part of Zionist settler-colonialism. Racial hierarchy is needed to justify the colonisation of the land and the subjugation and extermination of its indigenous population.
Without crystallising the supposed cultural and moral inferiority of Palestinians, ethnic cleansing could not be legitimised as a necessary step towards the creation of a "civilised" nation like Israel.
Colonial continuity
Israel's racial hierarchy was invoked at the most recent Trump-Netanyahu summit, which delved into the details of the 20-point proposal without any empathy for Palestinian suffering or recognition of their political aspirations.
They both talked about Palestinians as sidenotes to Israeli priorities, limiting their wishes to policies that centred on Israeli security.
The key components of the proposal, whether permanent military and security control, total demilitarisation, cultural de-radicalisation or a non-sovereign Palestinian civil administration controlled by western powers, are all designed to erase any political rights for the indigenous population.
In essence, Trump's 20-point proposal can be considered the 21st-century version of the 1917 Balfour Declaration. Trump's words and tone were hardly distinguishable from Arthur Balfour's reference to Palestinians as "non-Jewish communities", relegating them from the owners of the land to mere minorities with no political rights or human dignity.
Reflecting on his Declaration in 1919, the British statesman undermined the will and rights of Palestinians by saying that Zionism, whether "right or wrong, good or bad", was more important to the British Empire than the desires of the Palestinian people. As a result, the Zionist movement embarked on an ethnic cleansing campaign against the indigenous people of Palestine in order to establish their state in 1948.
Today, Trump's "new vision for peace" resembles yet another western colonial intervention to keep Israel as a regional hegemon in order to maintain western political and economic control in the Middle East.
Consequently, Israel will continue its agenda of eliminating Palestinians by mass murdering them, curbing their ability to resist, and erasing their national identity, history, culture, civilisation and dignity.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
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