Trump’s quick fixes to the Middle East conflict reward violence, leaving Palestinians’ historic grievances unresolved.
“Peace is not a plaster for a wound; it is the remedy for the illness.” (The author)
Can a single paper halt fire, blood, and exile? More than a century after Balfour redrew the map, setting the Middle East ablaze, US President Donald Trump unveiled yet another blueprint for Palestine.
Yet despite being trumplified as a masterstroke of diplomacy, the US 20-point Gaza plan may prove little more than a soiled bandage on a centuries-old wound.
The framework promulgated by the US president on 29 September 2025 is an all-encompassing package enforced through an ultimatum, fundamentally unbalanced, and reliant on a partial, self-appointed mediator – the US under Trump – to execute it.
As if that were not dire enough, one hard question casts its shadow over the high-profile peace ploy: Why does the so-called “solution” merely patch symptoms, leaving the deep, complex root causes of the Israel-Palestine conflict untouched?
A daring but ruinous nationalist revival
Many Arabs view the Balfour Declaration of 1917 – brief yet momentous – and the creation of Israel on Arab land in 1948 as a grave injustice, a foundational grievance at the heart of the Middle East conflict.
For nationalist Arabs, resurrecting Israel from the ashes as a historical enactment of a Biblical script is a reckless fantasy and lunatic undertaking – as audacious and seemingly impossible as if Italy tried to reclaim Egypt for a new Roman Empire, or putative Hittite heirs demanded Anatolian land to rebuild their ancient kingdom.
On a metaphysical plane, critics may take issue with Israel’s self-conception as the “chosen people”, a stark assertion of ethnic exceptionalism and supremacy. In Israel’s view, its divine calling and mandate confer legitimacy and license, sanctioning the seizure of neighboring lands and the subjugation – or even annihilation – of their peoples under a rigid, uncompromising, and unforgiving Old Testament code.
At once a source of profound inspiration for some and a matter of searing contention for others, Israel’s improbable rebirth stands as a showcase to the world that zealous trailblazers – modern-day activists – can, as it were, soar to the stars through sheer will, audacity, and endurance, even as critics decry their perceived recklessness.
Inside a language bubble for the first native speaker of Ivrit
To plumb the depths of nationalist zeal, consider Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (1858–1922), who revived and modernized Biblical Hebrew, giving rise to its contemporary form, Ivrit. For perspective, imagine recreating Latin, to be spoken across Italy and all former Roman territories.
Ben-Yehuda coined modern Hebrew words by reviving Biblical roots, broadening and repurposing ancient terms for contemporary life. Take rechev (רכב) as an illustration: Once the Biblical word for “chariot,” it now denotes any vehicle, most commonly a car – a striking testament to the linguist’s ingenuity.
In a strikingly radical and ethically contentious experiment to forge the first native speaker of Ivrit – an undertaking modern child-welfare authorities would almost certainly brand abuse – the lexicographer went so far as to isolate his son, Itamar Ben-Avi (1882–1943), from the outside world linguistically.
He sealed the boy in a “language bubble”, cutting him off from the living tongues of his surroundings – Yiddish, Ladino, Arabic, and Russian – determined that his Hebrew remain pure, unsullied by foreign sound.
According to family lore, Itamar, who would later become a Zionist activist himself, grew up with no toys bearing foreign inscriptions and no books in any other language – allowed only Hebrew materials created or adapted by his father. The “guinea pig” was so completely immersed that he genuinely believed, until about age four, that Hebrew was the universe’s only tongue.
The ultimate vindication of his father’s method came when Itamar, on his first play date, discovered he could not converse with a single peer – for Hebrew then survived only in liturgy and learning.
Balfour’s gamble – a single stroke, an epoch of strife
Outside forces stoked the daring Zionist dream of Israel’s revival, while paying only lip service to the Arab majority in the Holy Land.
The Balfour Declaration, a 67-word letter from Britain’s Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Jewish banker Walter Rothschild in 1917, was the first great-power endorsement of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, only vaguely nodding to the rights of “non-Jewish communities”.
In the crucible of World War I, it was a self-serving, opportunistic move by the “Perfidious Albion” as part of a global chess game – not an act of moral integrity – and it set the Middle East ablaze for generations.
In 1917, Arabs made up roughly 90 percent of the Holy Land’s population, while Jews were a small minority concentrated in a few towns – a stark imbalance that Britain’s pledge to Zionism would upend.
Under Britain’s postwar mandate, the commitments of the Balfour Declaration were woven into official policy, accelerating Jewish immigration and institution-building, and in turn fomenting Arab resentment and revolt – a predictable fallout the British had conveniently ignored.
What gave the document its fateful weight was not only Britain’s imperial clout but also its calculated, perilous ambiguity – a seed that would grow into a devastating, intractable conflict lasting more than a century.
Paradoxically, Britain, wielding its imperial pen, promised two irreconcilable visions without providing a path to harmony: It claimed to champion both Jewish national aspirations and the rights of the Arab majority, yet it offered no mechanism to reconcile the contradiction it had engendered.
In hindsight, the declaration was both a birth certificate for Israel and a time bomb for Palestine – a letter of promise, over a century of ashes.
Al-Nakba – a defining memory that endures
The Zionist project may intrigue academics as an audacious experiment in political and social engineering, but for Palestinians, it unfolds as a saga of unending loss and humiliation.
After the Balfour Declaration, the sense of injustice only deepened with the proclamation of the State of Israel on 14 May 1948, a watershed that reshaped the Middle East and sent reverberations far beyond its borders.
The ensuing expulsion and dispossession of Palestinian Arabs marks a moral rupture, leaving an indelible scar on Israel’s founding triumph. The campaign of ethnic cleansing has since become a defining element of the Palestinian national narrative, remembered collectively as al-Nakba (“the catastrophe”).
In 1948, roughly 700,000 Palestinians were expelled by Jewish forces, and over 400 villages were depopulated or destroyed. Among the bloodiest and most controversial atrocities carried out by the Haganah, the main Zionist paramilitary organization, was the massacre of the peaceful villagers of Tantura on 22–23 May 1948 – shockingly, after the village had already surrendered. The surviving women and children were expelled, part of the broader ethnic cleansing of the Nakba.
In the decades that followed the cataclysm of 1948, Jewish nationalists, acting with impunity, intensified what critics condemn as the violent, Apartheid-style oppression of the Palestinian people.
Examples include the 1967 Six-Day War, during which Israel occupied the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the Golan Heights; the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, causing thousands of civilian deaths and displacements; the 2008–09 Gaza War (“Operation Cast Lead”), in which over 1,400 Palestinians, many of them civilians, were killed; the 2014 Gaza War (“Operation Protective Edge”), which devastated Gaza and left over 2,100 Palestinians dead; and the continuing blockade of Gaza since 2007, which has created a severe humanitarian crisis.
In the occupied West Bank, countless Palestinian homes have been bulldozed and olive groves uprooted to make way for Jewish settlements – deemed illegal under international law; communities are perennially hemmed in by checkpoints and curfews, and battered by raids.
By 2025, some 350 Israeli settlements and outposts in East Jerusalem and the West Bank are housing roughly 700,000 Jewish settlers, many of whom have perpetrated repeated acts of hideous violence against Palestinians. Nearly 7 million Palestinian refugees remain displaced worldwide, their plight a testament to the enduring legacy of dispossession and statelessness.
What began as the Nakba in 1948 – a sweeping catastrophe of massacres, displacement, and dispossession – has come to symbolize, for Palestinians, decades of systemic oppression and unchecked occupation that continue to this day. The UN’s 1975 declaration equating Zionism with racism and racial discrimination stands as a rare formal acknowledgment of this enduring injustice, etched into history.
The past under siege – applying cancel culture to history
Surveying the long arc of history, Palestinian nationalists, including Hamas – a proscribed terrorist group in many countries, though not designated as such by the likes of Russia, China, and Turkey – regard the 7 October 2023 incursion into Israel as a desperate, attention-grabbing act of resistance, however indefensible the killing of civilians is from any objective standpoint.
According to their narrative, the Gaza war did not begin with Hamas’ actions, but must be understood against decades of Israeli aggression. To ignore this prehistory, critics contend, amounts to a form of cancel culture applied to history: laying all blame on Hamas while obscuring the accountability of other parties, most notably Israel and the United States.
The narrative pattern mirrors those accounts of the Ukraine conflict that assign all responsibility to Moscow. Yet, from Russia’s perspective, the egregious strife did not begin with its Special Military Operation on 24 February 2022 at 5:30 a.m. Moscow Time, but is the culmination of Ukraine’s broader, turbulent history with Russia – two parties who have danced atop a volcano on the brink of eruption – exacerbated by Western intervention.
The perils of powder peg mediation and conditions for true peace
For any Gaza peace plan to be viable, it must confront the root causes of the Middle East conflict. Yet the much-lauded US blueprint of 29 September 2025 addresses only symptoms, arguably rewarding Israel’s disproportionate attacks on Gaza. Critics may contend that Israeli military action far exceeds what is permissible even under an eye-for-an-eye code.
An intriguing aside: What many fail to appreciate today is that the lex talionis (“law of retaliation”) transcends a mere call for vengeance. Traceable to the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi (c. 1755–1750 B.C.) and religiously codified in the Old Testament, it marked a milestone in legal thought. Its principle of proportionate justice stands in stark contrast to the arbitrary, excessive punishments that epitomize tyranny.
So why only symptoms, not root causes? The peace plan’s band-aid nature stems from a strategic calculus: Israel, backed by the US, has a vested interest in maintaining dominance over a powerless Palestine. The metus hostilis (“fear of the enemy”) conveniently unites the Israeli populace, quells dissent, and keeps politicians in power.
Viewed in this light, the US peace plan reads as a nefarious ruse to safeguard Israel’s sovereignty and prosperity at the expense of its neighbors, entrenching dominance gained through regional war – and in doing so, it legitimizes and rewards aggression.
True peace, however, is no mere bandage but a cure – healing the disease, not just the wound. Beyond what I term “powder-keg pacts”, a lasting solution would require an independent Palestinian state with a robust army and guaranteed international security assistance, the return of all refugees, total redress from Israel for the destruction it wrought, and a new narrative unshackled from the constraints of historical cancel culture. Obviously, a tall order.
Notably, under the first point of the US peace plan, Gaza is to become a “deradicalized, terror-free zone”, safe for its neighbors. Yet true, lasting peace demands that Israel’s leadership and society purge themselves of their own radical extremism.
Ultra-nationalist elements within the Israeli government, whom critics may denounce as perpetrators of hideous state terrorism, have set a brutal example: On 9 October 2023, then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, notorious for genocidal rhetoric, labeled Palestinians “human animals” while cutting off over two million people from water, food, medicine, electricity, and fuel.
For years, Palestinian victims of settler violence in the West Bank have suffered not only bullets and beatings but the slow, haunting agony of denied medical aid –wounded civilians left to bleed as settlers and soldiers blocked ambulances for hours, turning the withholding of life-saving care into a methodical, tormenting instrument of death.
True peace cannot be decreed; it must be forged – patiently, painfully, and above all, justly. It is never proclaimed from a podium; it is built at a table. It demands deep, systematic, and equitable negotiation – one in which every stakeholder, even those whose participation may be arduous or outright unpalatable, has a seat at the table and an equal voice in the discussion. Anything less is performance, not progress.
Yet the US Gaza peace plan was chiefly conceived by Washington and Tel Aviv, and unveiled exclusively by the strategic duo, with Palestinians, including Hamas – a pivotal party to the conflict, acting as Israel’s direct and unavoidable counterpart – systematically barred from the process at every stage, from start to finish.
In an irony almost theatrical, Hamas reportedly first gained access to the US peace plan only after the framework had been paraded before the world at the White House on 29 September 2025 – a troubling signal about process and intent. The message could not have been clearer: Peace, apparently, is something to be presented, not pursued.
In its truest sense, peace requires more than ceremony; it cannot be choreographed for cameras. It is not a declaration but a discipline, requiring parity of intent: All sides must not only aspire to concord but be prepared to confront and resolve the deep, structural, and psychological roots of a perilous imbroglio that continue to thwart reconciliation and harmony.
The resolve for genuine, firmly rooted and enduring reconciliation often arises when all sides realize, in a sober and candid reckoning, that they stand to gain more from a negotiated settlement than from war, especially in the shadow of a seemingly unbreakable stalemate.
Moreover, outside assistance is desirable, with the negotiation process ideally shepherded by a dedicated, skilled, seasoned, and scrupulously honest broker – one untainted by global or regional rivalries and capable of commanding respect on all sides.
Such a position demands not power alone, but impartiality. In contrast to the US, a broker riddled with conflicts of interest and operating on powder kegs, Russia, by all measures, is well placed to credibly and effectively fulfill the role in this fraught moment.
Amid Israel’s prevailing nationalism – where opposition to the Gaza war often stems not from concern for Palestinian civilians but for the fate of Israeli hostages and soldiers – the chances of enlightened negotiation appear vanishingly slim.
Since the US peace plan trespasses the red lines not only of Hamas but of the Palestinian people as a whole – denying even their sacred right to self-defense – this tragic conflict is unlikely to subside.
On the contrary, it threatens to blaze into infernal flames that mere policy parchment, without decisive action, cannot contain.
In the envenomed void created by the absence of a far-reaching, comprehensive peace accord and genuine reconciliation, an unreformed, emboldened Israel will intensify its onslaught on Palestine and the wider region. It will act with renewed impunity enjoying the blessing and support of its formidable New World patron.
The cycle of vengeance, left unbroken, will rage on until the fire consumes all who feed it: For every Palestinian warrior who falls, a multitude of others will rise – more embittered, more rancorous, and fiercer still.
Such dynamics prove that Israel’s quest to eradicate its Palestinian adversaries, now marshalled under the banner of Hamas, remains a quixotic delusion. The truth is this: Eradicating numbers avails nothing if the cause and spirit live on in a resolute remnant.
Powder-keg detente fails the stress test: Even if an uneasy truce were declared, the conflict would flare again under pressure unless its psychological roots were eradicated: a biased, rigid, and unyielding Old Testament mindset, anchored in ethnic supremacy, driving an exceptionalist, expansionist Israel, unchecked by any meaningful external restraint.
True peace can only take hold once the seemingly warped, anachronistic mental disposition is replaced by a bold, uplifting, and systemically embedded vision of coexistence, brought to life and reinforced through concrete, tangible action on the ground.
Enlightened cognoscenti may argue that the demeaning OT mindset is now superseded by the ennobling Christian ethos of love and forgiveness. They might also view the domineering mental paradigm as glaringly out of place in today’s era of multiracial diversity, performative morality, and ostentatious empathy.
Ultimately, powder keg peace is only balm and buff. In light of this truth, a stark paradox emerges: Given the US Gaza plan’s glaring bias toward Israel and its slim chances of full implementation, why do so many world leaders, across political, ethnic, and religious divides, cheer on the ill-conceived and hideous blueprint that risks inflaming the very conflict it claims to resolve?
[Part 3 of a series on the 20-point Gaza peace plan. To be continued. Previous columns in the series:
• Part 1, published on 1 October 2025: Prof. Schlevogt’s Compass No. 27: Unraveling the Gaza peace ploy – Vital questions buried by hype;
• Part 2, published on 2 October 2025: Prof. Schlevogt’s Compass No. 28: The self-coronation of Trump – Peace or puppet show in Gaza?]
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