Reading Donald Trump’s twenty-point Gaza peace plan is like venturing into the world of the eccentric early-twentieth-century British cartoonist, Heath Robinson, who unwittingly lent his name as a descriptor for any “unnecessarily complex and implausible contrivance.”
There is much in the Trump plan that is implausible, contrived and, as with many Robinson cartoons, more than just a bit absurd. We might applaud the American president for bringing a pause to the slaughter in Gaza and for the return of Israeli hostages. Quite possibly, no one else could have done that right now. Remember, though, it was the second Trump administration which continued to underwrite that slaughter, providing massive amounts of lethal materiel to Israel.
We should certainly applaud the Nobel Peace Prize Committee for not giving this year’s award to the Trump. At a stretch he might be a more credible contender in 2026, though that should depend on what happens with his twenty-point plan.
And the plan is just the problem. At best, it offers a respite in Gaza. It is not a blueprint for peace between Israelis and Palestinians. For two million–plus Gazans it might move the dial of daily hardship from starvation to subsistence. But it overflows with empty assertions, with the term “will be” worked to the point of exhaustion.
Are we meant to be comforted that a “Board of Peace,” under the direction of Trump and Tony Blair, will oversee the creation of “New Gaza”? Trump’s erratic behaviour and Blair’s dubious record as a Middle East peace envoy aside, this still amounts to an “unmistakable colonial framework,” in the words prominent Middle East experts Jeffrey Sachs and Sybil Fares. And there is not a single reference in the plan to the Israeli-occupied West Bank, home to three million Palestinians who are subject to constant harassment from 450,000 Israeli settlers, long aided and abetted by the Netanyahu government. (Another 230,000 Israeli settlers live in East Jerusalem.)
As for “New Gaza,” Trump’s new plan at least populates that devastated territory with Palestinians. Point 12 states: “No one will be forced to leave Gaza.” Those who wish to go will be free to do so and to return. Contrast this with Trump’s remarks in February 2025 that the United States would take “a long-term ownership position” in the territory, expelling Gazans to “a fresh piece of land” in either Jordan or Egypt and creating a “Riviera of the Middle East… something that could be so magnificent.”
Point 19 of the Trump plan deals with Palestinian statehood as follows: “While Gaza redevelopment advances and when the Palestinian Authority reform program is faithfully carried out, the conditions may finally be in place for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood, which we recognise as the aspiration of the Palestinian people.” As ever, statehood is held out as a reward for Palestinian good behaviour. Bad behaviour by others that affects prospects for Palestinian statehood is somehow irrelevant.
And who will judge if and when Palestinians have met their obligations: Donald Trump, with a record of capricious behaviour second to none; Tony Blair, whose lies about the invasion of Iraq in 2003 are a matter of record; and possibly Benjamin Netanyahu, whose life’s mission has been to deny to Palestinians what Israelis regard as a birthright — a state of their own?
The plan’s first point deserves a motherhood award for aspiration: “Gaza will be a deradicalised terror-free zone that does not pose a threat to its neighbours.” How this might happen can be gleaned from point 6, which gives amnesty to Hamas members who commit to peaceful coexistence, and point 13, which excludes Hamas from any role in the governance of Gaza.
The critical question is who will make it happen? The answer, in point 15, is a temporary International Stabilisation Force, or ISF, which will “immediately deploy in Gaza” to train and support vetted Palestinian police in consultation with Jordan and Egypt. The ABC’s Middle East correspondent, Eric Tlozek, has commented that this will be one of the most crucial and difficult parts of the plan, with the makeup, legal status and rules of engagement yet to be defined. He quoted Andreas Krieg from the School of Security at King’s College, London, as saying that without a UN Security Council mandate the legitimacy of such a deployment would be contested and that Arab/Muslim contributors would be wary of being seen as subcontractors for Israel. A potential further complication, of course, is Trump’s poisonous relationship with the UN.
One worthy element of the plan (Point 18) deals with changing “mindsets and narratives,” long recognised as major obstacles to peace-making in the region. Dehumanisation of the other through racist and incendiary rhetoric infects Israelis and Palestinians alike. In his fine book, The Hundred Years War on Palestine, the prominent Palestinian-American scholar Rashid Khalidi wrote of the thorny issue of weaning Israelis from their attachment to inequality and “a reflexive dogma of aggressive nationalism whose tenacious hold will be hard to break.” Palestinians too, he wrote, needed weaning from a pernicious delusion — rooted in the colonial nature of their encounter with Zionism and in its denial of Palestinian peoplehood — that Jewish Israelis are not “real” people.
Israel has pulverised Gaza, killing some 70,000 Palestinians (the majority of them women and children) and Hamas’s top military leadership in the territory. The greater the pulverisation, the greater the formal support for a Palestinian state from countries who previously might have lacked the courage to make the call. By mid-October 2025, when Trump declared the “end” of the Gaza war, 80 per cent of UN members had formally recognised a Palestinian state, the newcomers including Belgium, Canada, France, Portugal, and Britain as well as Australia.
Ami Ayalon, a former leader of the Israeli Labor Party and one-time head of the Israeli internal security agency, Shin Bet, commented recently that the Israeli–Palestinian conflict would not end until “we achieve a political agreement that ends Israel’s occupation and creates two states side by side.” Many now rightly question the viability of a two-state solution but struggle to come up with better idea.
Writing in Foreign Affairs magazine in early 2024 the late Martin Indyk, twice American ambassador to Israel, argued that 7 October had resurrected the “allegedly dead two-state solution.” The explanation, he said, was simple, a lack of possible alternatives: the Hamas solution was the destruction of Israel; the Israeli ultra-right solution was annexation of the West Bank, dismantling of the Palestinian Authority and deportation of Palestinians to other countries; the “conflict management” approach long pursued by Benjamin Netanyahu was aimed at maintaining the status quo indefinitely and the world had “seen how that worked out.” Added to this list was the idea of a binational state, in which Jews would become a minority, thus ending Israel’s status as a Jewish state. None of those alternatives, Indyk wrote, would resolve the conflict — at least not without causing even greater calamities. If the conflict was to be resolved peacefully, “the two-state solution was the only idea left standing.”
Now that Australia has formally recognised a Palestinian state, what will it do to help create it and build the structures of statehood? Are there lessons from Australia’s leading role in the 1990s peace-making in Cambodia — including communications and election management — that might apply to Palestine? Are there NGOs that can marshal important expertise that could help the Palestinians?
In the mid-1990s prominent Australian lawyers, working under the auspices of the Australian International Legal Resources NGO, helped draft guidelines for the operation of the Palestinian legislative council and also helped create a forensic laboratory. Could Australia engage more closely on Palestine with regional countries — including Indonesia, which is already involved in Middle East peace-keeping? Its president, Prabowo Subianto, recently offered another 20,000 troops for UN peace-keeping operations, including in Gaza.
The only certainty in the days ahead is more talk. Much of it will be empty, and posturing won’t bring peace. Perhaps Australia, with its current bid for a non-permanent UN Security Council seat in mind, can at least work to focus the debate on action? •
