Israeli soldiers carry the coffin of Israeli soldier-hostage Daniel Peretz during his funeral procession in Mount Herzel in Jerusalem on Wednesday. Peretz was kidnapped by Hamas on October 7, 2023, from Kibbutz Nachal Oz and killed in captivity. His body was returned during the cease-fire deal on Monday. Photo by Abir Sultan/EPA
U.S. President Donald Trump’s success in imposing a cease-fire in the Gaza war signaled the emergence of a new regional order — a reshaped Middle East where peace and security are imposed to secure economic prosperity.
But the core of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains largely ignored, according to Palestinians and western political analysts.
Trump appeared confident at the Israeli Knesset on Monday as he declared the “historic dawn of a new Middle East” — one that would bring “eternal” peace and shared prosperity to the embattled region.
It wasn’t the first time the Middle East had been promised a brighter future to become a region free of war, suffering and tragedy.
However, repeated failures to resolve the 75-year conflict between Israel and the Palestinians have continued to plunge the region into an endless cycle of war. Trump’s new peace plan risks meeting the same fate.
While he deserved credit for forcing a cease-fire for the two-year war in Gaza, the U.S. president fell short of addressing Palestinian concerns about their historical rights, national aspirations and the future.
Instead, he approached Gaza’s reconstruction as a real estate project, sidestepping the core issue: the long-awaited comprehensive settlement and just peace between Israel and the Palestinians.
Kristian P. Alexander, a senior fellow and lead researcher at UAE’s Rabdan Security and Defense Institute, said that the peace envisioned in the Trump plan is one secured through overwhelming force and diplomatic leverage, not by mutual political agreement. It aligned with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s “peace through strength” doctrine.
“It is emphatically a peace for the sake of economic prosperity, with the promise of large-scale reconstruction in Gaza and economic investment in the West Bank,” he told UPI.
He added that the plan’s emphasis on demilitarization, reconstruction and creating a tax-free, startup-friendly zone in Gaza “suggests an attempt to bypass the political-territorial conflict by focusing on tangible economic benefits,” based on the underlying assumption that “prosperity can dampen political fervor and lead to de-radicalization.”
Trump’s 20-point plan leaves the door open for the establishment of a Palestinian state, referring to “a credible pathway” to Palestinian self-determination and statehood — but only “when the conditions may finally be in place.” However, Netanyahu already has rejected such a state.
“It is a major vulnerability. … A peace that delivers economic relief, but denies a viable, independent state, as internationally understood, is unlikely to endure,” Alexander said.
Without genuine sovereignty over borders, airspace, water and security, the Palestinian economy will remain fundamentally dependent on, and vulnerable to, Israeli control, he said.
For Palestinians, the conflict is about decades of Israeli military occupation and settlement expansion, as well as the struggle for human and political rights, self-determination, justice, freedom and the right to live on their own land.
According to Dalal Iriqat, associate professor of diplomacy, conflict resolution and strategic planning at the Arab American University Palestine, Trump never mentioned the two-state solution, focusing instead on “his vision and dreams” of a prosperous Middle East and lasting peace.
“But we all know that there can be no peace and stability without justice,” Iriqat told UPI in a telephone interview from Ramallah in the West Bank. “As long as the Palestinian people do not recover their political rights, the conflict will not end.”
Moreover, she said Israel should be held accountable and punished for “all the crimes” it has committed against the Palestinian people, including what she called the recent “genocide” in Gaza, where more than 67,000 people were killed during the war, and its continued “apartheid” policies.
Growing international recognition of a Palestinian state— spearheaded by Saudi Arabia and France — along with Israel’s unprecedented isolation and declining global standing, as Western public opinion shifts due to its conduct in the Gaza war, may help alter Trump’s plan, she said.
“Such recognitions should not remain symbolic, but must translate into concrete actions,” Iriqat said, emphasizing the need to seize the current momentum and maintain international pressure on Israel.
That should include sanctions, boycotts of goods and institutions, and halting trade and diplomatic ties, as well as stopping arms exports and ending West Bank annexation plans -to pressure Israel to comply with international law and respect Palestinian rights.
“If the world expects the Palestinian people to continue living under [Israeli] occupation in this barbaric way without any reaction, that would be abnormal,” Iriqat said.
Ultimately, an economic peace that solidifies the occupation and annexation of Palestinian land in the West Bank will be widely rejected, “fostering resentment that will inevitably resurface as violence,” Alexander warned.
With Gaza reduced to rubble and slated to be supervised by a “Board of Peace” chaired by Trump, Israeli settlements and accelerated plans to seize more Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank have made the two-state solution questionable.
Already living in the West Bank — home to 2.7 million Palestinians — is a daily struggle. And the spread of Israeli settlements has effectively fragmented Palestinian towns and cities, cutting them off from one another.
Shuruq As’ad, a journalist and mother of two, expects even “much more difficult times” ahead for the West Bank.
“I need to think a hundred times before going anywhere, even if it’s just for work and only 10 minutes from my home,” As’ad told UPI. “I am afraid of moving or visiting anyone.”
She described the kind of life she leads, surrounded by “700,000 Israeli settlers protected by the Army, right-wing armed gangs who attack and shoot, and Israeli soldiers who storm our houses, close roads and erect checkpoints without reason.”
To her, the most important thing is that the “killings, genocide and displacement” in Gaza have stopped. She said now is the time to grieve, search for loved ones, rebuild and recover — and then see what happens.
As a third-generation Palestinian descendant of the Nakba — the mass expulsion of Palestinians in 1947 to 1949 to establish Israel, As’ad wants to live without fear — free from what she calls the “apartheid-Zionist” project.
“I have the right to live in Palestine with dignity and to enjoy civil rights like any Israeli,” she said.
Resisting the region’s new order may prove even more costly, given the devastating consequences of the wars in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria.
“The message is clear: armed opposition will be met with overwhelming force, and the resulting ‘peace’ will be defined by the security requirements of the U.S. and Israel,” Alexander said.
Iran, which refused to join the “Peace Summit” at Egypt’s Sharm el-Sheikh on Monday, will not be spared.
Alexander said the goal was not to integrate an already weakened Iran as it is, but “to force a collapse of its regional policy — or, ideally for some in Washington and Tel Aviv, a change in its regime.”
However, the long-term success of Trump’s peace plan — and the new U.S.-backed security and economic order– is questionable if the political and territorial core of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is not credibly addressed with a clear path to a sovereign state, Alexander said.
