Anxieties of a poorly brokered peace

Sri City : After nearly 85000 tons of bombs being dropped over the past 2 years, Israel and Hamas have finally agreed to a brokered peace deal. Way beneath the triumphant rhetoric and the carefully staged ceremonies in Tel Aviv and Sharm el-Sheikh, there lies a far more complex dialectic, which is not an end to the conflict, but an interim pause filled with contradictions, competing agendas, and uncertainties about Gaza. The involvement of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair in the reconstruction, a boastful Donald Trump's contradictory statements about Israeli motivations to annex the West Bank, and Netanyahu's claims about Israel's rights to Judea and Samaria (the West Bank and other surrounding territories) reveal the deep rigidity within this agreement. More fundamentally, the ceasefire amplifies how the external agents, particularly the United States and the EU, are pursuing strategic interests which extend far beyond Palestinian welfare or regional peace. With several blunders in the past, the American-Israeli lobby of the West has not only brokered a temporary peace but has ensured that the horrors of the past 2 years will be forgotten and buried below the rubble that remains in Gaza. 

A weakened Hamas has agreed to the twenty-point peace plan formulated in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, which involves the final release of hostages from both sides and a partial withdrawal of the IDF from Gaza. The second phase of the plan, quite unsurprisingly, involves a transnational committee headed by Palestinian technocrats but supervised by a “Board of Peace” chaired by Trump. The transition from Phase One to Phase Two highlights perhaps the most significant obstacle to lasting peace, where Trump has demanded Hamas's disarmament, even threatening that the United States would disarm Hamas violently if the organisation refuses to comply voluntarily. The existential anxieties for Hamas and the Palestinians have never been higher. For Hamas, the armed resistance constitutes not merely a tactical choice but an ideological foundation and its primary source of political legitimacy within Palestinian society. The organisation emerged as it emerged in the late 1980s explicitly as an armed resistance movement and has consistently framed its military capabilities as essential to defending Palestinian rights against Israeli occupation. Asking Hamas to disarm voluntarily is tantamount to asking the organisation to dissolve itself, something no political movement would do absent either a comprehensive defeat or a fundamental transformation of the political landscape. 

The “Board of Peace”, on the other hand, is being entirely represented by outsiders and violent individuals who are working to create a neo-colonial paradigm in the Middle East. The historical irony is staggering and has not been lost on critics. Blair, whose decision to join the invasion of Iraq in 2003 contributed to regional destabilisation and the deaths of thousands, would now be handed with rebuilding another war-devastated Arab territory. The structural problem extends beyond Blair as an individual. The use of a Board of Peace governed by external agents implies what postcolonial theorists such as Edward Said and Frantz Fanon have critiqued and cited as neo-colonial administration, which starts with the presumption that conflict-affected Global South territories require Western control to achieve political maturity. This framework inherently denies Palestinian agency and self-determination, treating Palestinians as objects of international policy rather than subjects with the right to govern themselves. 

The ceasefire, although a temporary pause, represents a significant milestone in the lives of millions, with Palestinians being seen celebrating it no less than Holocaust victims soon after the Second World War ended. The larger question that stays with us is whether this is going to be the next step in Israel’s military interventions in the West Bank, Syria, and Lebanon. Much of the Western world seems to have forgotten that peace is not a brand but a character test, and the bleak future of this conflict will hold the test of whether violence can be reorganised.