By Sachithanandam Sathananthan –

(Continued from part I) –Counter-revolutionary strategy I: Trump’s Comprehensive Plan

The Palestinian people’s steadfastness compelled strategists in Washington to shift to a counter-revolutionary approach: they initiated peace talks, in the guise of a 20-Point “President Donald J. Trump’s Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict” on 29 September 2025. The Plan is the most recent one; there was the 1978 Camp David Agreement and the 1993 Oslo Accords, to mention but a few earlier counter-revolutionary manoeuvres crafted by the Washington-Tel Aviv axis to neutralise the Palestinian Resistance.

Hamas, backed by important Palestinian organisations: the PIJ (Palestinian Islamic Jihad), PFLP (Peoples Front for the Liberation of Palestine) and the political PNI (Palestinian National Initiative), skilfully responded to Trump’s Plan by offering to engage in talks with Israel. Trump and his Washington coterie enabling Israel’s Gaza genocide rebranded themselves as “mediators” and fabricated credibility by persuading three politicians each from Egypt, Qatar and Turkiye to join them to provide a semblance of neutrality and oversee the exchange between the delegations from Hamas and Tel Aviv.

The two sides held indirect talks through the four “mediators” in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt and inked the 9 October 6-Point “Implementation Steps toward Trump’s Proposal for a Comprehensive End of Gaza War”. The 29 September “Comprehensive Plan” itself apparently was not the subject of negotiations, perhaps because its Clause 19 arbitrarily diluted the Palestinians’ inalienable right of self-determination and statehood to a mere “aspiration”, unacceptable to Hamas.

The two parties agreed on a Truce for the limited “Steps” largely to exchange captives, open five border crossings into Gaza, allow the entry of UN aid convoys and to extend the Israeli military’s control up to the imaginary “Yellow Line” drawn by Tel Aviv within Gaza. The Line cordons off more than half, about 53% of Gaza, including most of the agricultural land, to the east of the Line, under Israeli control. The rest, mostly barren coastal sand dunes to the west, are left for Palestinians.

Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, laid bare the ruse behind Israel’s Yellow Line; he confirmed, “there will be Jewish settlements in Gaza”. The Knesset’s “far-right politicians”, supposedly without Netanyahu’s approval, took a “symbolic step of giving preliminary approval” to extend Israeli law in the illegally Occupied West Bank.

A visibly rattled US Vice President J.D. Vance played down the illegal move to annex the territory; he branded it a “very stupid political stunt”. Trump, who moved the US Embassy to West Jerusalem, cautioned that Israel would lose “all support” from the US if it tried to annex the West Bank. Their bravado has little effect given that US Imperialism crucially depends on, and is inextricably bound to, Gen. Alexander Haig’s celebrated unsinkable aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean – Israel – in order to project West’s power and repress anti-West Arab Nationalism in the strategically important energy-rich West Asia (“Middle East”, to former colonialists and current neo-colonialists).

With characteristic hyperbole Trump, apparently alluding to the “Implementation Steps”, aggrandised during his 13 October address to the Israeli Knesset that the Truce signalled “the end of a war” and marked the beginning of “the golden age of the Middle East”. That, he proudly proclaimed, has been made possible by Washington’s military assistance to Tel Aviv — “we’ve given a lot [of weapons] to Israel” – and coupled with “its willingness to use it” against Palestinians “ultimately led to peace.” He emphasized: “Peace through strength…that’s what it’s all about,”

He is oblivious to the irony that the Palestinians’ iron-willed successful defence of their homeland – their strength – left Washington no option but to float Trump’s “Comprehensive Plan”.

Counter-revolutionary strategy II: the Trump Declaration

From Israel Trump flew to Egypt on the same day to co-chair, with the Egyptian President, a conference confidently titled “Sharm el-Sheikh Summit for Peace: Agreement to End the War in Gaza”.

The representatives of Israel and Hamas were conspicuous by their absence; that immediately discredited the peace-making credentials of the “Summit”.

Nevertheless Trump staged his Kabuki political theatre. Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, US President Donald J. Trump, Turkiye’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Qatar’s Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani signed “The Trump Declaration for Enduring Peace and Prosperity of 13 October 2025”. The “Declaration” – little more than a 2-page long string of platitudes about peace and tolerance – is silent on the 9 October “Implementation Steps” and the consequent Truce agreed between the Palestinian Resistance and Israel.

Wading through the confused press coverage, the representatives from participating countries (27), international organizations (3) and, inexplicably, the head of FiFA apparently endorsed the “Trump Declaration”. They committed to “a sustainable ceasefire between Israel and Hamas,” seemingly pledging to build on the 9 October “Implementation Steps” without explicitly acknowledging Hamas’ vital contribution to the Truce, obviously to avoid burnishing the Palestinians’ commitment to peace.

President Trump further embellished this Kabuki theatre. He threatened, in Mafia-fashion, to “violently” disarm the group, a condition not mandated by the terms of the “Implementation Steps” and an outcome the combined US-NATO-Israeli power has failed to achieve since the Hamas emerged as Gaza’s governing authority in 2007.

He made no corresponding demand that Israel ends its illegal occupation of Palestine.

A day after the “summit” the Israeli Army “killed at least nine Palestinians” barely hours after the exchange of captives allegedly because they crossed the imaginary Yellow Line; and Tel Aviv arbitrarily curtailed the flow of UN aid into Gaza by half, to 300 trucks daily, and unilaterally announced 154 freed Palestinians would be forced into exile.

Unsurprisingly the West’s mainstream media, complicit in the Gaza genocide, systematically obfuscated Israel’s continuing genocide as “ceasefire violations” or merely as “testing the ceasefire”.

Hamas’ leaders have judiciously ignored Trump’s threats and sidestepped Jewish Zionism’s gratuitous provocations. On their part, they not only abided by the Truce but also offered to transfer the Gaza administration to “a temporary committee of independent Palestinian figures”.

Tel Aviv, on the other hand, has persisted in its fundamentalist drive to validate Biblical prophecy. UN experts said Israel “committed at least 393 violations, killing 339 Palestinians, including more than 70 children, and injuring over 871 others,” up to 24 November; the 28 October airstrikes killed “at least 104 Palestinians.”

UNSC Resolution 2803

The UNSC Resolution 2803 of 17 November gave legal force to the counter-revolutionary strategy intrinsic to Trump’s “Comprehensive Plan” (Annex 1 of 2803). The Resolution vested legal personality on the Plan’s Board of Peace (BoP), conceived and headed by Trump and assisted by Tony Blair, the former UK Prime Minister tainted by war crimes allegations for the illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The Resolution authorised the creation of the BoP’s military wing, an International Stabilization Force (ISF), controlled directly by Trump. The ISF would be the Board’s counter-revolutionary teeth, tasked to “demilitarise” Gaza, to isolate and disarm Hamas and other Palestinian Resistance Movements. The BoP’s accountability is limited to submitting progress reports every 6 months to the UNSC.

In short, the Security Council handed over the administration of Gaza to Washington and London, the co-enablers of the tragedy.

The Resolution supplements Trump’s February 2025 proposal to forcibly relocate Palestinians out of Gaza, in his oily words, to “a beautiful area with homes and safety and they can live out their lives in peace and harmony” – translation: more Palestinian concentration camps in US Imperialism’s West Asian vassals. (One cannot but be reminded of the “preferred transport” the German Nazis provided Jews on their way to the gas chambers.)

Ignoring Netanyahu’s visible discomfort at the thought of losing Gaza, Trump, a quintessential real estate salesman, elaborated that the US would “own” and build it into “the Riviera of the Middle East” that could be “magnificent”.

In reality the “property” would be re-developed of course by Trump’s Modern Orthodox Jewish son-in-law Jared Kushner’s investment company Infinity Partners, espousing the vision of “Peace to Prosperity”.

Hamas scorned the “international guardianship mechanism” – a throw back to European colonialism’s odious Mandates – the Resolution seeks to foist on the Palestinians; and the Organisation flatly rejected demilitarisation until the Palestine Question is settled.

On his part Netanyahu, on 21 November, dismissed a Palestinian State imputed by the Resolution. Since Israel has not abandoned its imperial goal of carving out a Greater Israel, Tel Aviv will of necessity pursue the destruction of Palestinians with or without justifications and block a sustained ceasefire and shatter Infinity Partners’ investment plans for a Riviera.

Perhaps Trump is banking on the combined force of the ISF and Israeli military delivering the Final Solution and then stabilising Gaza sufficiently for the lucrative re-development.

Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who had noted that the “Palestinian issue isn’t resolved” by the 13 October “summit”, nevertheless stayed Russia’s hand; Russia abstained (as did China) during the UNSC vote adopting the Resolution.

The abstentions by Moscow and Beijing have been widely criticised for allowing the UNSC’s “resolution from hell” to pass, for failing the Palestinians. Such assessments, though prima facie valid, ignore the fact that UNSC Resolutions whether adopted or not have done little to deter either Israel’s settler-colonialism or its subcontractor-ship for US Imperialism while Washington and its vassals – UK and EU – bankroll and protect Tel Aviv’s depravity with scant regard for International Law.

Nevertheless, it is legitimate to speculate on their strategy.

Have Beijing and Moscow allowed the Resolution to go through on the gamble that the contradictions between Trump’s personal (and familial) business ambitions and Imperialism’s structural imperatives – expressed as the power struggle within the US Deep State between the “doves” and “hawks” – would weakens Trump’s hand?

Or, given the cruelty of geo-politics, have the two arranged a back room quid-pro-quo deal with Washington for letting the Resolution pass?

Would the Palestinian Resistance obligingly throw in the towel? Time will tell.

Christian Evangelist backlash

An unintended but welcome consequence of October 7 has deeply unsettled sections of the Christian Evangelists or Christian Zionists within Trump’s MAGA base. They had virulently bolstered Israel for many decades, taken in by the western mainstream media’s 7-decades long narrative grounded in the Washington-Tel Aviv propaganda: that the conflict is a religious one between Jews and Muslims or an ethnic clash between Israelis and Arabs or both. The religious and ethnic impulses are not without their relevance.

However, the global attention Hamas’ Resistance focussed on the carnage in Gaza inevitably brought into sharp relief the destruction of ancient Christian churches, far older than the US, in Occupied Palestine. The Palestine Church Affairs Committee has confirmed the 1948 Nakba displaced 90,000 Palestinian Christians and forced the closure of 30 churches. The Committee concluded: “Israel’s colonial policies of ethnic cleansing, apartheid and genocide” have virtually decimated the Christian population in historic Palestine, most of whom trace their lineage back to the dawn of the Christian Era

The Israeli forces bombed the Holy Family Church, the last standing Catholic Church in the West Bank in July 2025, and killed and injured Christians who took shelter. The tragedy has “particularly distressed” millions of US Evangelical Christians; and they are further troubled by a fire allegedly “set by [Jewish] settlers next to the ruins of the fifth-century Church of St George”.

Among conservative US influencers Charlie Kirk is perhaps the first to raise the alarm; he publicly challenged Israel’s ethnic cleansing (of Christians) in Occupied Palestine and paid with his life.

From there it was but a short step for most Evangelists to conclude that Zionism’s fundamentalist project to carve out a mono-ethnic Jewish State aims to liquidate not only Muslims Palestinians but Christian Palestinians too.

The social media news of the ethnic cleansing of Christian Palestinians swiftly cut through the Washington-Tel Aviv disinformation. The former Trump advisor and prominent MAGA activist, Steve Bannon, has called for a “three-state solution” consisting of Muslim Palestine, Israel and a “Christian State” for Palestinian Christians who comprise about 2% of the population in Israel and Occupied Palestine, reduced from about 12% in 1948 and steadily falling.

A parallel development is the growing disillusionment among the MAGA base over the Epstein Affair, the systematic abuse and often rape of poor, Christian, white, underage girls by powerful and influential members of the US Power Elite.

The resulting moral crisis confronting the Believers has opened up deep fissures among the Evangelicals and turned widely popular influencers within them against Israel and, by extension, against the Trump administration for continuing to enable and fund the Israel’s genocide of Arab Christians.

Among them, a journalist and actor John Fugelsang rehashed the 1960s Liberation Theology; he asserted the “Christian Nationalists” erred by deviating from Jesus’ message of love and compassion for the downtrodden and by endorsing the Church’s questionable, if not unchristian, alignment with the State. He seems unaware that the official religion and the teachings of Jesus are two sides of the same coin. The religious institution legitimised oppression while its foot soldiers – the clergy – conditioned the oppressed to turn the other cheek, to submit rather than revolt. An African nationalist captured the essence of the duplicity: in the beginning they had the Book and we had the Land; now we have their Book and they have our Land.

The right-wing influencers’ opposition to Israel, so far, is limited to vehemently censuring Tel Aviv’s control of US government policy through the AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee). They hold AIPAC directly responsible for Washington criminalising widespread protests by students and others against the Gaza genocide by qualifying the Right of Free Speech in blatant violation of the First Amendment, justified by untenably conflating anti-Israel with anti-Semitism.

The podcaster Tucker Carlson apologised to Muslims for West’s Islamophobia; another, Nick Fuentes, fumed that Jews hate everything Christian and disparaged MAGA to mean MIGA (Make Israel Great Again). A Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green and political commentator Candace Owen eviscerated Trump over the Epstein Files, said to reveal the extent of Tel Aviv’s bribery and blackmail of most members of the US political class.

So Trump adroitly “discovered” the Nigerian Christians whom, he alleged in early November 2025, are being killed in “very large numbers” by radical Islamic groups. He preened as a Christian Soldier and threatened to send US forces “Guns-a-blazing” to rescue the “cherished” Black Christians.

His evangelical urge to rescue Nigerian Christians fortuitously “coincided” with Nigeria’s decision late last year (2024) to transact its energy sales in non-dollar currencies that sent shock waves through Washington; it evoked memories of Libyan Prime Minister Col. Muammar Gaddafi’s attempt to establish a pan-African currency (he was eliminated by the CIA).

Whether or not the Evangelical Base would buy into Trump’s self-serving crusader avatar and restrain their insistence on accountability for enabling the Gaza genocide and complicity in the Epstein Affair remains to be seen.

End.

*The author is an independent scholar who read for the Ph.D. degree at the University of Cambridge. He was Visiting Research Scholar at the Jawaharlal Nehru University School of International Studies and taught World History at Karachi University’s Institute of Business Administration. He is an award-winning filmmaker.email: commentaries.ss@gmail.com