US President Donald Trump is being lavishly credited with ending Israel’s two-year massacre of Gaza’s population. We are told he persuaded both Netanyahu and Hamas into accepting his “deal.” In truth, Hamas had consented to nearly identical terms more than a year ago. It was Israel that torpedoed the effort—assassinating Hamas negotiator Ismail Haniyya and, under full American cover, resuming its onslaught.
Trump’s much-touted 20-point plan resurrects a century-old pattern of Western-engineered “solutions” that dictate Arab destinies. It is not a peace initiative but a reincarnation of Sykes-Picot¹—drafted in Washington, couched in the idiom of compassion, yet anchored in domination. What has changed is not conscience but calculus. Israel’s unrestrained aggression—its strike on ceasefire talks in Qatar, that killed six members of the negotiating team, while the chief negotiator survived – exposes its ruthless provocations, its crumbling legitimacy—has become a liability for Trump. Even his MAGA faithful, long intoxicated by blind allegiance, now question both the moral and strategic price of this alliance.
Across the West, public outrage has reached a scale unseen in decades. Millions march against Israeli impunity. Governments, cornered by domestic pressure, now tiptoe away from unconditional endorsement. In Asia, Africa, and Latin America, solidarity with Palestine has hardened into near-universal condemnation. Israel’s isolation has a price—and Washington is paying it.
Yet while the guns may fall silent, the occupation remains. The apartheid remains. The suffocating siege, the theft of land, the architecture of control—all endure. What is now celebrated as “peace” is merely an intermission in an unending colonial project.
No American president has ever delivered justice or statehood to Palestinians; Trump’s plan is the emptiest performance yet—a legal vacuum dressed in diplomatic ritual. Its vague formulations ensure Israel’s continued supremacy, while real decisions about Arab futures remain chained to Washington’s will. Regional autocrats play their roles obediently in this familiar choreography of dependence.
The proposal for a so-called Gaza International Transitional Authority—a euphemism for external rule—reveals the old deceit in a new costume. Britain, whose imperial pen once partitioned the region, returns as “mediator” under American command. The descendants of those who once conspired with colonial powers now normalize relations with Israel under U.S. patronage. The circle of betrayal is complete.
This Gaza plan is not a peace accord; it is Sykes-Picot reborn—a political arrangement disguised as humanitarian necessity. It redraws not borders but hierarchies, reaffirming who commands and who complies.
We may never know Gaza’s full toll—already counted in the hundreds of thousands—but the world’s complicity is beyond dispute. Every capital that shipped the bombs, every newsroom that whitewashed the blood, every politician who turned away shares in the stain.
If this ceasefire holds, it may halt the bombing but not the injustice. It may spare lives but sanctify impunity. The architects of Gaza’s ruin will walk unpunished, their crimes cleansed by the rhetoric of diplomacy. This is not peace—it is postponement. The world calls it reconciliation, but the graves whisper otherwise.
¹ Sykes-Picot was a secret treaty. During World War I, the Ottoman Empire was crumbling, and the Allied powers were vying for control of the Middle East. Britain, France, and Czarist Russia negotiated the Sykes-Picot Agreement to divide the Ottoman territories into spheres of influence. The treaty was exposed by the Bolsheviks after they overthrew the Czar in 1917
Javed Akbar is a freelance writer with published works in the Toronto Star and across diverse digital platforms.
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