[News] Trump is turning Gaza into a brutal colonial protection racket

[Anti-Imperialist News]

middleeasteye.net
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/trump-turning-gaza-brutal-colonial-protection-racket>
Trump is turning Gaza into a brutal colonial protection racket
Jonathan Cook
November 21, 2025
------------------------------

The West has spent two years partnering Israel
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/israel> in its campaign of wanton
destruction in Gaza
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/topics/israel-genocide-gaza>.

Now the United States <https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/us> - with
the permission of a cowed United Nations Security Council - has appointed
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/how-un-resolution-creates-new-foreign-mandate-over-palestinians>
Donald Trump to preside over the ruins.

Like a Roman emperor, the US president will be able to dictate
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/un-resolution-gaza-codifies-illegal-trusteeship-over-palestinians-says-expert>
the fate of Gaza’s people with a simple gesture. Whatever he decides -
whether the thumb turns up or down - it will be called "peace".

Trump’s most likely side-kick in this depraved charade will be Tony Blair
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/breakdown-tony-blairs-bizarre-proposal-run-gaza>,
the former British prime minister. He won
<https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/tony-blair-trump-gaza-deal-hamish-falconer-b2852110.html>
his war-crime spurs more than 20 years ago, when he joined one of Trump’s
predecessors, George W Bush, in launching an illegal invasion of Iraq
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/iraq>and a subsequent,
catastrophic occupation that left that country in ruins too.

Satire cannot do justice to this moment.

The eradication of Gaza could be achieved only with the complete hollowing
out of international law - the legal global order that was established many
decades ago to prevent a third world war and the horrors of the Holocaust.

Marking the demise of that era, the Security Council voted
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/full-text-us-resolution-gaza-approved-un-security-council>
13-0 this week to endorse Trump’s "peace plan"
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/full-text-us-resolution-gaza-approved-un-security-council>for
Gaza, with only Russia and China daring to abstain.

The dissenting representatives of the crumbling legal order - from the
judges of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to Francesca Albanese
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/users/francesca-albanese>, the UN’s legal
expert for the occupied territories - have been isolated, vilified and
sanctioned
<https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/trump-administration-imposes-new-sanctions-four-icc-judges-prosecutors-2025-08-20/>
by the Trump administration
<https://www.state.gov/releases/2025/07/sanctioning-lawfare-that-targets-u-s-and-israeli-persons>.
No one appears to be willing to come to their defence.

Quite the contrary. Germany
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/germany>, whose own genocidal
rampage across Europe more than 80 years ago once left it a pariah state
and drove the creation of the new legal order, now confidently leads the
way in flouting those very rules.

UN Resolution 2803 makes Trump the debauched feudal overlord of Gaza

It has resumed <https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clygdj9w23po> supplying
Israel with the weapons it needs to continue the slaughter, justifying the
decision on the grounds that Israel is murdering fewer Palestinians during
Trump's duplicitous "ceasefire".

On Wednesday, Israel broke the ceasefire once again, killing more than 30
people in a series of air strikes, including 20 women and children.

Even the current "peace" allows Israel to occupy some 58 percent of Gaza in
a depopulated "Green Zone", effectively partitioning
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/14/us-military-plan-divided-gaza-green-zone>
the territory for the forseeable future. Daily, Israel bombs families
sheltering in the wreckage of the enclave’s interior, declared a "Red
Zone". And Israel continues to block
<https://x.com/SkyNews/status/1990177406150185185>the entry of food and
medicines, including the temporary housing needed as winter rains deluge
the territory.

Is this what, 19 years ago, Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s secretary of state,
meant when she spoke of the coming, painful "birth pangs of a new Middle
East"
<https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2006/7/22/rice-sees-bombs-as-birth-pangs>.

Now, it seems, they have arrived in full force - and the region has never
looked more terrifying.
A joint US-Israeli occupation

UN Resolution 2803 makes Trump the debauched feudal overlord of Gaza. His
lackeys on a so-called "Board of Peace"
<https://edition.cnn.com/2025/11/17/middleeast/us-gaza-israel-un-vote-intl-latam>
will "include the most powerful and respected Leaders throughout the
World", according to Trump.

They will have sovereign power over the enclave’s ruins for at least the
next two years - and undoubtedly long beyond that. The Board will decide
how Gaza is governed, what constitutes its borders, how or whether it is
rebuilt, and what economic life is permitted.

<https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/how-un-resolution-creates-new-foreign-mandate-over-palestinians>

How the UN Gaza resolution creates new foreign ‘mandate’ over Palestinians

Read More »
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/how-un-resolution-creates-new-foreign-mandate-over-palestinians>

In effect, oversight of the system of colonial control and abuse Israel has
exercised over the territory since the late 1960s - which the International
Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/icj-clears-fog-hiding-western-support-israel-rogue-state>
illegal last year - will be transferred to the United States, with the
Security Council’s blessing.

This is now formally a joint US-Israeli occupation.

The US that now holds Gaza’s fate in its hands is the same US that has
spent the past two years arming Israel.

Those weapons made possible the levelling of Gaza, the ethnic cleansing of
2 million people from their homes, and a mass slaughter identified by every
major human rights group and international legal body as a genocide.

Trump’s "peace plan" is the international order’s equivalent of putting a
convicted serial child abuser in charge of a primary school.

There will be no UN peacekeeping force in Gaza to try to protect its
people. That would too readily expose the masquerade of Trump’s version of
"peace".

The UN force in Lebanon <https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/lebanon>,
Unifil, has reported
<https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/lebanese-army-feeling-us-israeli-151028715.html>
thousands of Israeli violations of a supposed year-old "ceasefire" there.
Israel is not just bombing Lebanese families
<https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/2025-11-19/ty-article/thirteen-killed-in-israeli-strike-on-palestinian-refugee-camp-in-lebanon/0000019a-99d6-dd6e-a5fa-fbf65e320000>,
but this week shot <https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/11/1166378> at Unifil
peacekeepers too.

Rather, the Board - meaning Trump and the Pentagon - will supervise an
"International Stabilisation Force" (ISF) in Gaza, supposedly to be in
place by January.
Disarming Hamas

Last year the ICJ ruled
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/recognition-palestine-repeat-wests-oslo-peace-fraud>
that Israel must end its occupation and pull out of all Palestinian
territories "as rapidly as possible", including Gaza. Apparently in line
with that ruling, Britain <https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/uk> and
France <https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/france> led a handful of
other western states in recognising a Palestinian state
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/explainers/palestine-statehood-countries>a
few months ago.

But in supporting UN Resolution 2308, both have, entirely predictably,
reneged on their promise. Although at the insistence of Arab states, the
resolution makes a vague nod
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/18/one-of-the-oddest-un-resolutions-in-history-seeks-to-solidify-shaky-gaza-ceasefire-into-an-enduring-peace>
to a possible "pathway" to statehood, the "Board of Peace" - that is, the
US and Israel - gets to decide when, or if, that actually happens.

Trump’s 'peace plan' is the international order’s equivalent of putting a
convicted serial child abuser in charge of a primary school

A precondition is that Mahmoud Abbas
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/tags/mahmoud-abbas>’ supine Palestinian
Authority
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/explainers/what-palestinian-authority-and-why-does-it-matter>
(PA) submits to an undefined "reform programme". The PA already serves as
Israel’s reliable security sub-contractor in the Occupied West Bank, having
turned itself into a modern-day Vichy regime.

It was the PA’s endorsement
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/18/un-resolution-gaza-trump-plan-palestinian-foreign-minister-hamas>of
Trump’s "peace plan" that gave Russia and China the cover to abstain at the
Security Council rather than scuttle the resolution with their vetoes.

The reality is that nothing the PA can do - even colluding in its own
evisceration - will make Israel view it as a suitable Palestinian
government. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyhau reiterated
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/live-blog/live-blog-update/netanyahu-rejects-palestinian-state-after-us-backed-plan-sparks-far>as
much this week, shortly after the resolution was passed, saying he would
never allow a Palestinian state.

Instead, Israel will simply stay on in Gaza. It is not required to withdraw
until the multinational force is deployed and the Israeli military agrees
that it has enforced "demilitarisation milestones" in the enclave. Yet it
is hard to imagine who will be willing to take on disarming Hamas.

Trump has ruled out
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/14/us-military-plan-divided-gaza-green-zone>
deploying US soldiers or funding Gaza’s reconstruction. "The US has been
very clear they want to set the vision and not pay for it," a diplomatic
source told the Guardian.

The US regional military command, Centcom, initially drew up plans for
thousands of British, French and German soldiers to form the core of the
ISF, according to documents seen by the paper. A source described the plans
as "delusional".

No European state will wish to risk its soldiers in the Gaza hellscape,
caught between Hamas’ battle-hardened guerrilla fighters and an Israeli
military continuing to treat much of the enclave as an effective free-fire
zone.

Instead, the White House is reported to have approached Egypt
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/egypt>, Indonesia, Azerbaijan,
Qatar <https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/qatar>, Turkey
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/turkey> and the United Arab
Emirates <https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/uae>.

But Arab and Muslim states, having already sickened their publics by mutely
colluding in the genocide, are unlikely to want to be seen being dragged
into disarming the only practical resistance to that genocide.

Astonishingly, it was left to Hamas to remind the world of what
international law actually requires. In a statement
<https://archive.vn/oS70e> after the UN vote, the group noted: “Assigning
the international force [ISF] with tasks and roles inside the Gaza Strip,
including disarming the resistance, strips it of its neutrality, and turns
it into a party to the conflict in favour of the occupation.”

In the meantime, Israel will continue to fill the breach unhindered.
Ties to crime gangs

In fact, the ISF is a consolidation of Israel’s long-running campaign to
oust the UN from any role in monitoring its illegal occupation of Palestine.

In that sense, it is a continuation of the same sham cooked up earlier this
year by Israel and the US in establishing the "Gaza Humanitarian Foundation"
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/gaza-humanitarian-foundation-israels-new-model-weaponised-aid>
(GHF). That "charity", staffed by mercenaries, forcibly replaced UN aid
agencies that for decades had been responsible for distributing food.

<https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/un-resolution-gaza-codifies-illegal-trusteeship-over-palestinians-says-expert>

UN resolution on Gaza imposes 'illegal trusteeship' over Palestinians: Top
legal expert

Read More »
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/un-resolution-gaza-codifies-illegal-trusteeship-over-palestinians-says-expert>

The Foundation’s handful of "aid hubs" rapidly became killing grounds
<https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/videos/cy8k8045nx9o>, with starving
Palestinians lured into these traps like mice seeking cheese. More than
2,600 desperate Palestinians were gunned down in its queues, and at least
19,000 wounded.

UG Solutions, the military subcontractor
<https://arabcenterdc.org/resource/who-profits-us-corporations-and-the-whitewashing-of-israels-genocide-in-gaza/>that
supplied mercenaries for the GHF, is recruiting again - this time, one of
its officials told
<https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/gaza-ghf-ug-solutions-aid-massacres-mercenaries-ceasefire-trump>Drop
Site News, "in support of humanitarian aid delivery and possible technical
assistance to the International Security [Stabilisation] Force".

Previously, UG Solutions was found to have hired
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/far-right-islamophobic-bike-gang-hired-guard-gaza-aid-centres>
members of an anti-Muslim US biker gang to serve as security guards in
Gaza.

The job of the ISF will not be to keep Israel’s genocidal army in check. It
will be to "disarm" all Palestinian resistance to Israel’s continuing - and
now Security Council-approved - illegal occupation of Gaza.

While the international community is dragooned into helping Israel crush
resistance to its criminal occupation, Israel will be given cover to
further cultivate ties to Palestinian crime gangs
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/%3Ciframe%20width=%22951%22%20height=%22596%22%20src=%22https://www.youtube.com/embed/tRxaf91WXT0%22%20title=%22Inside%20Gaza's%20criminal%20gang%20backed%20by%20Israel%22%20frameborder=%220%22%20allow=%22accelerometer;%20autoplay;%20clipboard-write;%20encrypted-media;%20gyroscope;%20picture-in-picture;%20web-share%22%20referrerpolicy=%22strict-origin-when-cross-origin%22%20allowfullscreen%3E%3C/iframe%3E>
.

For the past year it has armed those gangs so they could steal the trickle
of aid Israel allowed into Gaza. Israel then blamed Hamas for the thefts.
This self-rationalising narrative allowed Israel to conceal the fact it was
the party responsible for depriving ordinary Palestinians of food while
also giving it a military pretext to refuse to allow in more aid.

[image: Mourners react as they attend the funeral of Palestinians who,
according to medics, were killed in overnight Israeli strikes, at Al-Shifa
Hospital in Gaza City, November 20, 2025.]
Mourners react as they attend the funeral of Palestinians who, according to
medics, were killed in overnight Israeli strikes, at Al-Shifa Hospital in
Gaza City on 20 November 2025 (Reuters)

This alliance will now grow more sophisticated
<https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/first-person/2025/06/25/israel-arming-gangs-fracture-gazas-society-inside>.
The gangs can be sheltered and trained inside the "Green Zone" before
heading out on operations, backed by Israeli air power, into the ruins of
the "Red Zone" to fight Hamas.

Hebrew media has already reported
<https://www.maariv.co.il/news/military/article-1241797> that the Israeli
army has been "guarding" the gangs behind a "yellow line" separating the
Green and Red Zones. Any other Palestinians who approach this cordon are
shot on sight.

By looting aid from Gaza’s starving population, the gangs have proved
<https://www.newarab.com/analysis/how-israel-aiding-gangs-gaza-sow-societal-collapse>they
have no interest in protecting civilians - or any compunction about helping
Israel to tear apart their own society.

There is already a model - if a failed one - for Israel to draw on. For
years, until it was forced out in 2000, Israel protected
<https://www.newarab.com/analysis/rise-and-fall-south-lebanon-army>
Christian-led paramilitaries that helped enforce its illegal, brutal
two-decade occupation of south Lebanon.
Behind the curtain

This week, hand-picked members of the media were given a peek behind the
curtain to see who will be running Gaza.

The New York Times reported <https://archive.ph/Fb43c> that a warehouse in
the Israeli town of Kiryat Gat, north-east of Gaza, was serving as the
headquarters of a new "Civil-Military Coordination Centre".

It is filled with Israeli, US and European military officials, Arab
intelligence agents, diplomats and aid workers. There was, the paper noted,
no one representing Palestinian interests.

<https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/israels-settler-colonial-expansion-never-done-yet-it-still-cannot-finish-job>

Israel's violent expansion is never done, yet it still cannot 'finish the
job'

Read More »
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/israels-settler-colonial-expansion-never-done-yet-it-still-cannot-finish-job>

The same building was used earlier to house the Gaza Humanitarian
Foundation, the US and Israeli-backed mercenary group that pretended to be
an aid agency until it was wound up last month.

The new centre <https://archive.ph/CM6cf> is led by Aryeh Lightstone, who
served in Trump’s first term under the then US ambassador to Israel, David
Friedman <https://www.middleeasteye.net/tags/david-friedman>, an outspoken,
pro-Israel zealot whose main mission was to get the US embassy moved - in
violation of international law - to the Israeli-occupied city of Jerusalem.

Lightstone is likely to emerge as the new Paul Bremer
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leUWhjIQKVA>, the hugely unqualified
US-appointed governor of Iraq following the illegal 2003 invasion.

Bremer gutted
<https://crescent.icit-digital.org/articles/paul-bremer-s-self-serving-defence-of-his-role-as-the-us-s-vice-consul-in-iraq>
what was left of Iraqi national institutions and civil society after a US
"shock and awe" bombing campaign. The resulting lawlessness made the Iraqi
population prey to sectarian death squads, while US firms sought to plunder
Iraq’s wealth.

The profits from untapped
<https://al-shabaka.org/briefs/the-gas-fields-off-gaza-a-gift-or-a-curse/>
oil and gas now beckon off Gaza’s coast - a prize Palestinians have been
denied for decades, not least by Blair when he served as the Quartet’s
Middle East envoy. It is hard to imagine Trump will not now be eyeing
Gaza’s riches.

So clueless are many of the centre’s officials about Gaza that it had to
hold a primer for newcomers on "What is Hamas?", according to the New York
Times.

To keep things light, each day is reportedly themed on one of the
catastrophes facing the people of Gaza: "Wellness Wednesdays" deal with the
issues thrown up by Israel’s eradication of hospitals and schools, while
"Thirsty Thursdays" concern Israel’s destruction of the enclave’s water
infrastructure.
Nowhere safe

Shortly before the UN vote, the Guardian reported that the US had decided
only to rebuild in the "Green Zone", the section of Gaza under Israeli
control. The Red Zone is to be left in ruins for the time being.

A US official told
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/14/us-military-plan-divided-gaza-green-zone>
the paper of the Gaza plan: "Ideally you would want to make it all whole,
right? But that’s aspirational. It’s going to take some time. It’s not
going to be easy."

The reality is that Trump’s 'peace plan' is never going to be meaningfully
realised - and is not intended to be

According to reports, the US will build what are to be called "alternative
safe communities" - a polite way to refer to the construction of holding
pens for Palestinians - in the areas under Israeli control. There is no
indication yet that these will be permanent communities.

The Green Zone is where ISF troops will be stationed too, presumably
alongside the Israeli military. They are expected to man crossing points
along the yellow line, the death zone separating the Green and Red Zones.

"You’re not going to leave [the Green Zone]," a US official told the
Guardian of the multinational force, in an all-too-obvious echo of US
experiences in Iraq two decades ago. Then, the US had to build a giant
garrison town in the centre of Baghdad called the Green Zone, from which
its soldiers rarely ventured unless on military operations.

Palestinians will supposedly be permitted into these "safe communities",
but only if they can prove they or their extended families have no
connections to Hamas, Gaza’s government for nearly two decades. That will
necessarily exclude large chunks of the population.

Everywhere else in Gaza will presumably remain "unsafe" - meaning Israel
will have a free hand to bomb it, as now, under the pretext that these
areas remain Hamas strongholds.

This will play to all of Israel’s devious strengths. It will pressure
Palestinian families to serve as informers and collaborators to gain an
exit from the Red Zone – replicating a system of control Israel has
specialised in for decades.

In pre-genocide Gaza, Israel notoriously achieved
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/12/israeli-intelligence-unit-testimonies>
the same by tapping phone calls and blackmailing anyone who had a secret -
such as their sexual orientation, an affair, or mental health issues.
Israeli authorities also often demanded collaboration before they would
issue a medical travel permit out of Gaza for the sick or injured.

Its recruitment of informers is primarily designed to fragment Palestinian
society, and spread distrust and discord.

Via a system of patronage and privilege, these new "safe communities" will
also serve to further incentivise crime gangs to collude with Israel,
helping it sustain a civil war in Gaza to make the territory permanently
ungovernable - and justify Israel’s refusal to countenance Palestinian
statehood.

In any other context, what all of this amounts to would be clear: a
protection racket now headed by the US gangster-in-chief.
Living hell

The reality, however, is that Trump’s "peace plan" is never going to be
meaningfully realised - and is not intended to be.

Gaza was already one of the most densely populated places
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/gaza-war-one-year-changing-us-all>on
earth. How is its surviving population of two million or so to be crammed
into half the space, with no homes and all its hospitals and schools either
bombed into rubble or out of reach?

<https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/trump-gaza-plan-great-betrayal-arab-muslim-leaders-rewarding-israel-genocide>

The great betrayal: Why Arab and Muslim rulers backed Trump's Gaza plan

Read More »
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/trump-gaza-plan-great-betrayal-arab-muslim-leaders-rewarding-israel-genocide>

In truth, this is simply a way to justify prolonging a living hell for
Gaza’s population under cover of a "peace plan".

Israel had exhausted world sympathy to the point where western leaders’
complicity in the genocide had become too visible to conceal.

Now rather than having Israeli military officials on air spouting
self-evident lies about only targeting Hamas fighters, we will have US
officials explaining - with the help of far more savvy public relations
teams - how they are struggling under insuperable odds to improve the
situation of Palestinians.

Anyone refused entry into the Green Zone will be presented as Hamas or an
ally of Hamas. Families in the Red Zone killed with US-supplied bombs will
be terrorists by definition. The new "barbarians at the gate".

The western media will finally be placated, as its genocide-complicit
correspondents are ushered into Gaza - but only into the Green Zone. There,
they will be guided around model "safe communities", where they can busy
themselves airing footage of afflicted Palestinians fleeing Hamas and
offered respite.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of Palestinians will struggle to survive the
winter without shelter and significant aid, with no hospitals and no
schools for their children. All while being indiscriminately bombed by
Israel.

This is the only "peace" Trump is offering.

*The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not
necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.*
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