Trump and Netanyahu’s Gaza plan isn’t peace; it’s occupation with better branding. A blueprint for dispossession disguised as diplomacy.

Picture Shelley’s Ozymandias; that shattered tyrant’s face half-buried in desert sand, monument to hubris and how every empire carries the seeds of its inevitable decay. Now picture Gaza. Same shattered visage, same tale of power gone barking mad. Psycho. Except Gaza’s ruins aren’t ancient history gathering poetic dust. They’re lived, they’re brutal, and they’re unfolding right now, while the world watches a “peace plan” that’s really just occupation with better branding.

Call it peace if you must. Netanyahu and Trump certainly do. But this Gaza plan isn’t diplomacy; it’s a cynical performance staged for a war crime-report-fatigued, moral compass-missing, shell-shocked international audience that’s learned to mistake management of atrocity for resolution of it. We’re watching the birth of what you might call Uber-Israel: Nietzsche’s Übermensch, reimagined not as humanity’s creative evolution, but as raw power unbound by law, empathy, or shame. A superman without the philosophy. Just the will to dominate, wrapped in the rhetoric of liberation.

The plan reads like satire, except an entire people is dying. Lie broken by incalculable suffering. Starvation. Gaza becomes a “de-radicalised, terror-free zone”; which is to say, depopulated of political will. Hamas, the democratically elected government (inconvenient fact, that), gets stripped of all authority. Israeli forces maintain a permanent “security perimeter,” which is occupation by another name. A “Board of Peace” chaired by Trump—Trump!—appoints police and military forces that serve Israeli interests. Hostages get released, eventually. Thousands of Palestinian prisoners get freed, maybe. International aid promises reconstruction, but only under conditions that entrench Israeli control forever.

It’s Orwell meets real estate development. War is peace. Occupation is security. Dispossession is reconstruction.

The numbers tell their own horror story. Since late 2023, over 66,000 Palestinians have died; three percent of Gaza’s entire population. It beggars belief. Three percent. Residential buildings, schools, hospitals, clinics: bombed relentlessly. More than 90% of homes damaged or destroyed. Hundreds of doctors, nurses, emergency responders dead. Over 60 journalists killed, many targeted while reporting. Gaza’s health system isn’t broken; it’s been systematically, sadistically, demolished. This is genocide by siege, bombardment and cynically calculated attrition, dressed up in the language of counterterrorism.

Netanyahu’s accepted the plan “with caveats,” which is diplomatic double-speak for “I’ll take what serves me and ignore the rest.” His government’s split. Some hardliners think even this charade concedes too much to Palestinian humanity. Others are driven mad by the Likud’s campaign of moral panic.

Netanyahu himself has categorically rejected Palestinian statehood. His declaration that “the Palestinian Authority is out” isn’t a negotiating position. It’s the plan’s actual purpose: permanent Israeli control with an international stamp of approval. Besides, like Trump, he needs to stay out of prison. Like the Mako, Hammerhead or the Great White Shark, the duo need to move forward or they suffocate.

Then there’s Trump’s contribution to The Theatre of the Absurd. He’s called this plan the greatest achievement in Middle Eastern diplomacy. He’s promised to “make Gaza the Riviera of the Middle East.” The Riviera. While bodies are still being pulled from rubble. While children starve. While what’s left of Gaza’s hospitals, schools, apartments and all of its infrastructure smoulders.

It’s like something from Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanours; that moment when you realise the murderer gets away with it because the powerful write their own morality, their own justice, their own reality. Except Allen’s film knew it was depicting moral catastrophe. Trump thinks he’s selling luxury waterfront development. The fake SunTan King thinks he’s pitching a condo development. “That’s all 24-karat gold,” he brags of his décor. “That’s why it just beams. I just felt it was important for this office to take on a look that was appropriate. It’s more representative of what it should be.”

But when you mistake gilded vulgarity for virtue, atrocity for strategy, and self-interest for statecraft, you’re not just redecorating the Oval Office. You’re re-writing the script so that the guilty don’t just walk free; they take a bow, sell tickets, and break ground on the waterfront view.

The plan is textbook Übermensch: power beyond conventional morality, operating outside empathy or law, reshaping the world through sheer will. But Nietzsche envisioned the superman as creator of new values. This? This is just destruction calling itself renewal. Violence calling itself peace. Ethnic cleansing calling itself security.

And the international community? Complicit doesn’t begin to cover it.

The United Nations speaks carefully. The International Criminal Court issues warrants nobody enforces. The European Union releases statements calibrated for maximum meaning and minimum consequence. Australia and other Western governments join the chorus of concern; that peculiar diplomatic register that sounds like action but requires none. Concern. Monitoring the situation. Calling for restraint. Another nothing burger. All the things you do when you’ve decided other priorities matter more than genocide.

Watch how it works. The ICC issues arrest warrants for Netanyahu. Countries pledge to uphold international law. Then Netanyahu visits, and suddenly there’s legal ambiguity, diplomatic complexity, strategic considerations. The warrant exists in that special international law space-time continuum where words mean everything and nothing simultaneously.

Humanitarian organizations do what they can under blockades and security restrictions. They provide relief but can’t provide hope, because hope requires belief in change and change requires a political will nobody’s willing to exercise. Aid flows into reconstruction projects designed and controlled by Israel and its partners. The whole apparatus manages Gaza as a failed state under permanent siege; a dystopia maintained by international indifference and strategic realpolitik.

The World Bank publishes economic updates. Médecins Sans Frontières documents health care collapse. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs tracks the catastrophe in real time. Everyone’s watching. Everyone’s documenting. Nobody’s stopping it.

This isn’t a peace plan. It’s a blueprint for entrenching occupation and calling it stability. For managing ethnic cleansing and calling it security. For weaponising the very concept of peace to justify ongoing war in slow motion.

Hamas is outlawed. Palestinian political aspirations are dismissed as extremism. Palestinians remain prisoners in their own land, watched by foreign forces, denied self-determination, stripped of basic rights. The international community treats this as pragmatic compromise rather than systematic oppression.

Shelley understood that tyranny, however mighty, crumbles eventually. The sands cover everything. But Gaza’s people aren’t waiting for poetic justice centuries hence. They’re living the consequences of this tyranny daily. Their children are dying daily. Their futures are being erased daily.

The question isn’t whether this statue will eventually fall. All statues fall. The question is what we do while it’s still standing, while it’s still crushing people beneath it.

Will we be distant witnesses celebrating broken statues from safe remove? Or will we raise our voices while it still matters, while Palestinians are still here to hear them?

Because here’s what Trump and Netanyahu and the whole bloody international chorus don’t seem to understand, or don’t care to understand: there is no peace without justice. There’s no security built on dispossession. There’s no stability achieved through permanent occupation. There’s only the management of atrocity until it becomes so normalized we forget to call it what it is.

Until Palestinians gain genuine freedom; not managed autonomy, not supervised reconstruction, not conditional rights, but actual self-determination; there will be no peace. Only the echo of oppression. Only the machinery of occupation running on international indifference and carefully worded statements of concern.

Ozymandias demanded we look on his works and despair. Gaza demands we look on ours and act.

The sands will cover these ruins eventually. The question is whether we’ll have done anything to prevent them being made in the first place, or whether we’ll have been the audience that applauded politely while the demolition continued.

Choose wisely. History’s watching, but history’s a shit referee; it records everything and stops nothing. Palestinians don’t need historical vindication. They need to survive the present.

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