Trump and Netanyahu’s so-called peace plan for Gaza is not only vile. It is also absurd. It is hardly a plan. It is definitely not about peace, and not really about Gaza, either.

That much is obvious, independently of the question whether the Palestinian Resistance will reject or – for its own reasons – accept or try to alter this attempted diktat. That is something only Palestinians can decide. None of the above, or below, is meant to offer what would be deeply condescending advice.

For starters, the Trump-Netanyahu Scheme is no real plan since it has more holes than specific content. All of it favors Israel; the specific content mostly serves to crush the Palestinians and their Resistance. For instance, Hamas has to go – no matter what its Palestinian voters think. But Israel’s genocidal government will stay – no matter what its Palestinian victims think, or anyone else, really.

Palestinian victims of the Israeli genocide must be “deradicalized,” while the Israeli perpetrators and their Western accomplices get to decide when they have been brainwashed enough. But that absurdity is, of course, only to be expected in an ultimatum scheme devised without any Palestinian input.

The racist double standards that our media make us mistake for normality never fail: “Nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine!” they’ve hollered at us for years. “Nothing for the Palestinians and definitely without the Palestinians!” is what we have been trained to take for granted.

The Trump-Netanyahu proposal calls for a deadline of 72 hours for the release of all remaining Israeli hostages and captives (including those, who, as captured soldiers, are not hostages) held by the Palestinian Resistance.

But this is only a vague starting point. There is no deadline for the release of Palestinian political prisoners and hostages held by Israel. Likewise, there is no specific timeframe for the charade of empowering the Palestinian Authority (which most Palestinians criticize as collaborationist). Nor is there a specific, actionable timetable for the withdrawal of Israel’s genocidal killing machine.

There is much more that is wrong with the Trump-Netanyahu scheme. Its faults include obvious inequities and massive incongruities.  Last but not least, descriptions of the plan obfuscate its very likely real purpose: namely, to serve as yet another pretext for even more genocide and ethnic cleansing, while perversely blaming the Palestinian Resistance.

Others have offered detailed critiques already, for instance human rights expert and UN dissident Craig Mokhiber, Sima Itayim at The Cradle, Ali Abunimah at The Electronic Intifada, and legal scholar Nimer Sultany. What is clear by any standards is that this scheme has been designed to favor the Gaza Genocide perpetrators over the victims to such an extent that it does not even add up to a serious undertaking on its own vicious terms.

The Trump-Netanyahu diktat is not about peace because there has not been a war. What has happened, in bloody reality, is a genocide committed by Israel and its de facto Western allies, that is, accomplices and co-perpetrators, met by desperate and heroic resistance of the victims who have stood almost alone. Gaza Genocide deniers who have twisted their capacious, warped minds into four-dimensional pretzels to think of Israeli conduct as “war” must also believe that the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 was a battle in a “German-Jewish War”—which also makes them Holocaust deniers, pure and simple. The truth is that only wars end, ideally, with peace; genocide must end with punishment.

And before punishment, there would have to be not peace but, actually, war, genuine and, yes, just war: for what a genocide requires morally and legally is not a “peace” plan but an end, if need be, imposed by lethal armed intervention against the perpetrators. A “peace plan” that comes with an explicit blank check (yet another one) to “finish the job” for the perpetrators in case the victims keep resisting – or, in effect, the perpetrators just feel like it – is such an obvious and total perversion that its common acceptance only proves (once again) that the world of the Gaza Genocide is not only evil but profoundly insane.

Indeed, since the end of the Cold War, there has never been a clearer, more compelling case for outside military intervention than the Gaza Genocide. This is not hyperbole, but a factual and, if anything, overly cautious assessment. It would be more precise to say that Israel’s Gaza Genocide is – and has long been – the clearest case for such military intervention. It is no less compelling than any other—and clearly more compelling than most.

Let’s set aside for a moment the sinister history of its abuse and consider a short but authoritative summary of the doctrine of the “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P). Since 2005, it has, at least officially, been widely accepted – for better and for worse – by the international community as represented in the United Nations General Assembly.

On the website of the UN’s Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect, you will find this defined as embodying “a political commitment to end the worst forms of violence and persecution.”  Its purpose is not to “mitigate,” “fight,” or “prosecute,” but “end.”

What, then, are the forms of violence that must cease to exist? We are told: “genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity.” In other words, what Israel does, all the time, every day, every hour, every minute – while we all watch, many helplessly, far too many others still with dumb approval or vicarious, sadistic glee.

Finally, this Trump-Netanyahu project is not really about peace. Nor is it really a plan. And it is not really about – and certainly not for – Gaza, either. What the scheme really tries to make safe – or even safer – is the perpetrators of the crime. It starts at the top with Israeli genocider-in-chief (and internationally wanted criminal) and de facto American co-ruler Benjamin Netanyahu. And it continues all the way down to the last willing executioner, in and out of uniform, and accomplice

That may appear counter-intuitive. After all, Israel and its American and Western co-perpetrators seem to have done – to paraphrase a notorious Trumpism – “so much winning,” that they hardly need help.

They murder and mass murder to their dark hearts’ content. Not “only” in Gaza but the West Bank as well. And, really, any place they please, from Beirut, Damascus, Tehran, and Sanaa, to all those crime scenes where their cowardly killers and terrorists stay covert. They have devastated not “only” countless human lives and far-flung lands but the very ideas of basic decency, elementary ethics, sane reason, and, last but not least, the law and the truth. Clearly, we live in a world bent out of shape by an evil that seems triumphant.

Regarding Gaza alone, the genociders have already “accomplished” two years of proudly and loudly announced mass murder relayed in, essentially, real time to the whole world as never before. In this aspect at least, the Gaza Genocide is already a superlative version of the crime: no other genocide has been so public and committed with such open glee and nation-wide celebration. Call that the “uniqueness” of the Israeli way of genociding, if you wish to dabble in the same pseudo-scholastic pedantries that have helped so much to pervert the memory of the Holocaust into a weapon wielded by Zionist genociders.

The number of victims of the Gaza Genocide is certain to be much higher than the extremely conservative, yet already horrifying count provided by the Gaza Health Ministry (over 66,000 killed, over 168,000 injured, as of 29 September 2025). A contribution to The Lancet, realistically including indirect forms of genocidal violence, estimated deaths alone at 186,000 “or even more” by February 2024, that is, more than one-and-a-half years ago. We must assume that by now, Israel and its accomplices have murdered hundreds of thousands, by bullets and bombs, siege and starvation, deprivation and disease.

Again, this is also not the place to detail any further the absolute devastation inflicted by Israel and its allies. Only so much: There is a somewhat ostentatious term German intellectuals love to use for their country’s very own Holocaust and sometimes, when they feel like being a bit risqué, for the Allied bombing of German cities: “Zivilisationsbruch” – literally, a “rupture of civilization.”

Gaza is now a wasteland of toxic rubble produced by a merciless starvation siege and the explosive power of multiple Hiroshima bombs brought to bear on a territory the size of, roughly, Philadelphia or Detroit, but with a population density (before the mass murder, that is) almost equal to that of Manhattan.

This man-made desert features a handful of militarized death traps masquerading as “food distribution centers” that resemble the “showers” at Auschwitz in that their real function is to add (yet more) murder. Those who feel uncomfortable about or are simply afraid of such obvious analogies need to learn to complain to those who create their reality, on the ground in Gaza.

Gaza is not a place for life anymore; it is a deliberately created realm of extermination and death. The survivors, for now, are chased through this hellscape in a never-ending, sadistic merry-go-round of expulsions interspersed with ceaseless massacres.

This is not even a “rupture of civilization.” Indeed, some would call it peak “Western civilization.” It is a rupture of the human and an eruption of what the atheist Norman Finkelstein has rightly been at a loss to call anything other but “satanic.”

In terms of breaking records of evil, then, Israel and its co-perpetrators have triumphed. They have surpassed many past standards and set some of their own. Yet nothing is eternal: no states, and no states of impunity either. There are signs of discomfort, not yet panic but an erosion of self-confidence, spreading among some of the accomplices and even perpetrators of the Gaza Genocide. This is not evidence of a conscience, but of an awareness that three things have happened.

While committing a genocide, Israel has been stalled by the Palestinian Resistance, whose heroism is second to none in history. It has not been able to achieve its real aim (not “war” aims – see above), namely the complete ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip. Even the Trump-Netanyahu Scheme reflects as much, conceding (for now) that the Palestinian survivors of the mass murder can stay in what is left of Gaza.

This may well turn out to be a lie, of course. We are dealing with two countries, the US and Israel, which have no inhibitions against breaking agreements, whether spoken or written. They assassinate those they invite to negotiate with them, and they bomb even their so-called allies when they feel like it, as both the Qataris and Germans should know. Neither the US nor Israel deserve any trust.

And yet, we are far from open calls for total expulsion (euphemized, of course, as “resettlement,” in worst Nazi style) and the building of a “Gaza Riviera” on entirely “Palestinian-free” land. That is the direct consequence not of Israeli magnanimity or the good will of international mercenaries, such as Tony “Scourge of Iraq” Blair but of the Palestinians’ armed struggle.

Second, it is true that demands for legal accountability for the genocide have preponderantly not prevailed, despite diverse efforts to bring perpetrators and accomplices to justice, including those undertaken by the International Criminal Court, the Hind Rajab Foundation, the Global Legal Action Network. Those braving intimidation, harassment, sabotage, and worse to pursue punishment for the criminals of the Gaza Genocide and justice for its victims will be remembered for having lived up to their humanity in these dark times. But as of now, the traditional de facto impunity of Israel and those serving it has mostly held. That is why, among other things, Israel is also engaging in brazen piracy (again), while Western states (again) signally fail to protect even their own citizens.

Yet what will also become clear in retrospect is that Israel has already failed to prevent the search for justice and accountability from continuing and gathering even more momentum in the future. There is no reason for wishful thinking: As with most genocides, including the Nazi Holocaust, all too many criminals will escape the punishment they deserve – if that is even something that can be meted out in this world.

But, for a very uncomfortable moment, imagine yourself in the place of, for instance, a dual Israeli-EU citizen who has murdered, raped, and plundered in Gaza; a German or British, for instance, member of government, bureaucrat, or media talking head, who is highly suspect of complicity by the letter of international law and precedent (say, the Rwanda Genocide “Media Trial”), or – “who knows?” as Trump would say, even those perpetrators and accomplices feeling especially safe in the USA and Israel. None of them can be entirely confident anymore that their come-uppance will forever remain unimaginable.

Especially as, point number three, Israel is losing its nefarious hold over public opinion virtually everywhere, including, crucially in the US. It is true that today’s genociders hope they will succeed in making us forget once they are done, even if only after a phase of “prolonged isolation” as even Netanyahu admits.

It is in this context that the Trump-Netanyahu Scheme also serves as part of a broader strategy of preparing the ground for a great forgetting whenever Israel should deign to finally wrap up this phase of its ongoing crimes against the Palestinians and many others, too. Do not recall, say, Keir Starmer, the Israel flunkey who went public explicitly lying that Israel has a right to starve Gaza and then has helped Israel to commit its slaughter with arms and intelligence, at least. Instead remember him as the prime minister who recognized a Palestinian state. And while you are at it, also, please, fail to notice that those diplomatic acts, as now staged by not only the UK but also France, Australia and other Western Johnny-Come-Lately’s are so shot through with hedging, double speak, and hypocrisy that they really amount to recognizing a concentration camp, not a state.

Whatever happens next, the Gaza Genocide has already happened, even if direct killing were to finally stop tomorrow. What we are seeing now are attempts to condition us for sighing with relief instead of remembering. We are trained already not to forgive, but to forget that anything that could require (but certainly never deserve) forgiving has occurred. And all of that in return for a Trumpian “deal” with more than one devil that punishes the victims of the Gaza Genocide, rewards its perpetrators and accomplices, and cements Israel’s power and impunity. And if the Trump-Netanyahu Scheme will not be implemented, then the genocide – we have been promised already – will simply continue, while the victim-blaming will be dialed up to eleven.

Do not forget, do not forgive.

Tarik Cyril Amar (@TarikCyrilAmar), is an historian from Germany currently at Koç University, Istanbul, and author of The Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv. A Borderland City between Stalinists, Nazis, and Nationalists.