Trump's Gaza plan: 'Alternative Safe Communities' are Bantustans

After weeks of silence on Gaza, Trump finally addressed his peace plan by announcing that the Board of Peace members will be revealed early in the new year. It seemed to many like he had lost interest as his campaign for a Nobel Peace Prize had fizzled.

But his minions, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, certainly had not. In fact, the Steve & Jared Show has been all over the Middle East, drumming up support (or beating a dead horse, if you prefer).

Despite their best efforts, the nations they expected to be the backbone of the International Stabilization Force (ISF) – which the US administration announced will be commanded by an American two-star general – have taken a few steps back. They clearly realised how much jeopardy they faced from their participation.

News reports initially offered a number of countries expected to either send troops to pacify Gaza or funding for reconstruction. The only country which actually made a public commitment (of 20,000 troops) was Indonesia. But it too has pulled back according to recent reports.

Azerbaijan, which has been mentioned for months as a likely contributor of security forces has also developed cold feet. Their troops will only be sent in if there is a total halt in fighting.

As for Arab-Muslim leaders, who wants to see their own troops engaged in gunfights with Palestinians in the streets and tunnels of Gaza? As an Egyptian diplomat said: “What will happen if Israel kills a number of soldiers from the force, whether from Egypt or elsewhere? Hell will break loose.”

Without this International Stabilization Force, Trump's deal is dead in the water.

In limbo

Once the hostage exchange is completed (only one body remains in Gaza – likely inaccessible, buried under rubble), the ceasefire is supposed to lead to both the disarming of Hamas and Israeli withdrawal. Neither side is prepared to do that.

Nevertheless, the main culprit is Israel, because it never intended to withdraw in the first place, regardless of the provisions of the plan. Without withdrawal, Hamas will never agree to disarm. That leaves the matter in Trump's hands. Only he can "persuade" Netanyahu (if anyone can) - though whether he actually will is still in question.

Qatar and Egypt highlighted the imperative of such an Israeli redeployment. The Qatari premier recently said: "Now we are at the critical moment […] A ceasefire cannot be completed unless there is a full withdrawal of the Israeli forces (and) there is stability back in Gaza.”

The message hasn't been heard by the IDF, whose chief of staff has spoken of the "yellow line" as "the new border.” Though it is clearly a permeable line given Israeli forces repeatedly shell neighbourhoods outside it and force thousands to abandon their homes. Further, 340 Palestinians have been killed since the ‘ceasefire’ began.

Divide and conquer?

Despite these seemingly insurmountable obstacles, the US State Department and army, along with the IDF COGAT unit are preparing yet another foolhardy scheme. They euphemistically call it the "Alternate Safe Communities" (ASC), that claims to separate Hamas fighters from the rest of the Palestinian people in Gaza.

In reality, the plan is a pacification strategy to divide Gaza into small separate concentration camps under IDF control. It's been likened to the US "strategic hamlet" policy used in Vietnam, whose intent was to separate civilian villagers from the Vietcong insurgents, and so weaken the hold of the latter over the former. Ultimately, it was a "miserable failure," as was so much of US policy there.

The Trump administration appears intent on repeating the mistake.

Does anyone believe that Israel will permit the infrastructure outlined above when it has spent two years obliterating all such infrastructure in Gaza? On the contrary, it wants maximum misery and chaos.

Furthermore, Israel doesn’t want the responsibility of permanently occupying and policing Gaza. It would much rather hand that over to Arab quislings to do its dirty work. Hence the International Stabilization Force.

However, even if Israel did permit such services within these enclaves, there is a question about who would build and fund them. There are certainly companies eager to join the gravy train and win such contracts. But will the wealthy Gulf petro-states pick up the tab? Especially for what are essentially pacification zones, rather than stable communities.

Palestinian Bantustans

There are numerous landmines in this Bantustan scheme, one of the main ones being that the US has been informed by Israeli military in the area that it wouldn’t allow Palestinian civilians to return to the Hamas side of the line.

Again, this would turn these zones into ghettos or prison yards, for all intents and purposes. It is reminiscent of the Nazi concentration camps and ghettos into which they herded hundreds of thousands of Jews, before deporting most of them to death camps like Auschwitz. A State Department official characterised their status as "a place where people are effectively sequestered." Sequestration is, in this case, a euphemism for imprisonment.

There's an element of "magical thinking" in the assumptions of the planners who came up with this proposal, namely, the idea that Palestinians would just accept to move where the IDF controls everything…

Perhaps the biggest deal-breaker is opposition from European and Arab nations. They may be prepared to compromise their commitment to the Palestinians when it conflicts with national self-interest. But Palestinian Bantustans – the fragmentation of the enclave into tiny communities under the thumb of Israeli overseers – is a bridge too far.

This is nothing more than a sanitised version of ethnic cleansing. They will see through the smokescreen of euphemisms and wishful thinking that's gone into this project. It isn't what they signed up for when they endorsed Trump's 20-point peace plan.

The coup de grace for the ASC project is that neither Kushner, Witkoff, nor Israel see any need to consult with the party being forced to participate in this monstrosity. They would assume Palestinians would march like cattle into pens after being vetted by Shin Bet agents and approved for "resettlement."

This entire process of developing and implementing the peace plan has been a comedy of errors. The only ones who fail to get the joke are those who devised it in the first place.

Richard Silverstein writes the Tikun Olam blog and is a freelance journalist specialising in exposing secrets of the Israeli national security state. He campaigns against opacity and the negative impact of Israeli military censorship.

Follow him on Twitter: @richards1052

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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.