Peace Without Justice: Palestine being sold by gangsters

Donald Trump’s so-called “peace plan” is not an attempt at justice; it is a demand for submission dressed up as diplomacy. It asks the world to applaud the language of peace while looking away at the reality of dispossession. It is not that people are tired of peace, they are tired of fake peace, imposed peace, peace that requires one side to disappear. What is understandable is the list of signatories to this plan. All nations deeply captured by the USA and others “tariff-ied” of Trump. 

A peace process that excludes Palestinians from meaningful authorship of their own future is not a peace plan at all. It is a unilateral political settlement designed to normalise occupation, reward power and create a permanence of injustice. Peace cannot be subcontracted to the occupier and then sold to the occupied as a favour.

At its core, Trump’s approach follows a very familiar colonial script:

Land is taken first. Destroy the occupied peoples which allows for the unfettered power to define the legality of your actions. Then, the dispossessed are invited only to accept the outcome.

The Palestinians are treated not as a people with inalienable rights, but as a humanitarian problem to be managed, bribed with economic incentives while stripped of sovereignty, borders, airspace, water and the right of return. This is not peace. It is containment. Rubbish. 

Worse still, the plan attempts to redefine justice itself. International law, UN resolutions and decades of consensus are dismissed as inconvenient. Occupation is reframed as  the need for “security.” Apartheid conditions are softened with the language of “autonomy.” Resistance is criminalised, while violence is rendered invisible. Inevitably, international law is suspended. Only when you are a white nation and have been allowed to build an arsenal of destructive weaponry with which to threaten, insult, subdue and when required destroy a people is this possible. It is important to quote Francesca Albanese where she said: “Palestine is revealing to us… the world of idiots in which we live. If we cannot stop it, we have truly lost what’s left of our humanity.”

History teaches us something very simple: There is no peace without justice, and no justice without equality. As South Africans, we know this well. Peace did not arrive because apartheid was made more efficient or economically attractive. It arrived when the system itself became morally and politically indefensible and when the oppressed were globally recognised as equal partners in shaping the future by aggressively applying boycotts, divestment and sanctions. 

What would a just solution look like?

A just and lasting peace must be built on clear, non-negotiable principles:

• Full recognition of Palestinian peoplehood. Palestinians are not a demographic obstacle or a security threat. They are a people with the same right to self-determination as any other nation.
• An end to occupation and apartheid practices. No peace plan can coexist with military occupation, illegal settlements, checkpoints, sieges and collective punishment. These are not “issues to be negotiated later”, they are the problem.
• Equal rights under the law. Ideally through one state with equal citizenship for all and equality before the law. Peace built on ethnic or religious supremacy is inherently unstable. 
• Jerusalem as a shared city, not an exclusive prize. A city sacred to many cannot belong politically to one at the expense of others. Its future must reflect its plural reality.
• A just resolution for all refugees. Refugees cannot be erased by decree. Any serious peace process must acknowledge historical dispossession and offer restitution, return or fair compensation in line with what is left of international law.
• International guarantees, not imperial sponsorship. Peace cannot be brokered by a party that openly sides with one actor. It requires credible, multilateral guarantees rooted in law, not geopolitics. Not a recycled warmonger Tony Blair. 

This is the truth Trump’s plan avoids. Peace is not the absence of Palestinian resistance. Peace is the absence of Palestinian oppression. Until Palestinian lives are valued as fully as the lives of all others, until law applies equally and until power submits to morality, every “peace plan” will be rejected by history, even if it is applauded by presidents.

For those who believe that the world started on October 7, here’s a chronological overview of the major “unilateral” peace plans over decades with why each ultimately failed or stalled. I’ll focus on the most important ones rather than every minor initiative. 

* Shabodien Roomanay is the board Chairman of Muslim Views Publication, founding member of the Salt River Heritage Society, and a trustee of the SA Foundation for Islamic Art. 

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.