The Trump Board of Peace recently announced its new initiative to save the lives of Palestinians. Spoiler alert: Even after 3 years of genocide, it is not Israel and the US that are responsible. Who knew? Read on.
The Board now feels that their ‘contractors’ have improved their skills at delivering food aid to starving people. Remember last year, over two long months, the Israelis killed more than 1400 Palestinians gathered to receive food from the Trump-backed Gaza Humanitarian Fund (GHF) The IDF killed at least 670 at the food distribution sites in Gaza and also shot 200 more on the roads near the few UN aid convoys still allowed to operate. No worries though – it’s been one year since those ‘mistakes’ – long enough for Trump to get excited about a better plan.
Trump and his Board found out that humanitarian food distribution to the Palestinians through their ‘burner’ charity GHF was not their strong suit. It is UNRWA’s. But we need to be careful about referring to UNWRA now, as the ADL and other pro-Israel agencies claim the agency is ‘full of antisemites’.
Still UNWRA’s track record shows that from Oct. 2023 until January 2025, it supplied more than 1.7 million Palestinians with food parcels to feed families for two weeks. Amazingly, not one person who received food aid was shot or killed when UNWRA delivered food.
But now the Board of Peace has a much bigger idea—one first tried in 1952, then in 1962 and now 64 years later. It’s foolproof—except it when it wasn’t.
The plan is to build “human corridors” of “strategic hamlets” throughout western Gaza, so the nice Palestinians can be separated from nasty pro-Hamas Palestinians. The Israelis have already placed an illegal, but very real, yellow line down Gaza; they are pushing the Palestinians further west into what are essentially concentration camps. This is to deepen and harden their control over Gaza.
For the Board of Peace’s first hamlet, Trump will “direct” Gazans to an area in Rafah in the south. The goal is to force Palestinians into smaller and smaller areas, or cantons. The ‘yellow line’ (bright yellow concrete blocks winding over 45 km through Gaza) was part of the ceasefire talks last October. That line has already forced Palestinians elsewhere in Gaza into smaller areas. This coincided with Netanyahu recently ordering the military to seize 70% of Gaza land. As the Trump administration said,
“pushing for the rapid construction of residential compounds to provide housing for Palestinians. …US officials hope Palestinians will be encouraged to move to the new compounds, [with] freedom from Hamas, job opportunities, and a chance to rebuild their lives.”
Their goal is to corral 20,000-25,000 Palestinians in each hamlet or “Alternative Safe Communities”; keep them under heavy guard, in a fenced off enclosure that will cut off supplies and resources – and recruitment to Hamas. It will mean more checkpoints for Palestinians, and more cruising armed drones for ‘security’. Frankly it will mean Israel can continue to murder more Palestinians who are in smaller enclaves.
If you don’t believe me, think about the thousands of desperate, starving Palestinians who walked for kilometres, only to gather around the GHF food distribution trucks – all operated by mercenaries — just one year ago. They could choose to disperse food for as short a period as they wanted – sometimes barely eight minutes. When people were leaving often empty handed, or as others were picking up their flour sacks, Israeli snipers picked off women, men and children and shot them dead, just because they could—and to ostensibly “protect” GHF workers. The new reality was so dangerous that UNRWA’s chief, Philippe Lazzarini, said “the so-called mechanism … is a death trap costing more lives than it saves.”
The US, Israel and GHF were so widely condemned that the ‘burner’ group was all but disbanded.
Now we have Trump’s idiot proposal for “strategic hamlets”. To be fair, he didn’t invent it. The French colonizers in Indochina, notably Vietnam, first put it into practice. The year was 1952 when they developed the program as “pacification by prosperity.” The French troops established villages or agrovilles with electricity, water and other conveniences and created jobs to lure the peasants. The goal was to separate farmers from the “Viet Cong”, or the National Liberation Front (NLF), and their influence. Things didn’t work out so well – many peasants forced to move by French authorities became Communist sympathizers and even hidden fighters for the NLF.
The aim was to “clear the countryside”
Ten years later in Vietnam, the Americans tried the same thing. At one point, they forced over 4 million peasants from their villages into about 3200 hamlets.
“Villagers starved in their Viet-Cong-free encampments because they lost access to their paddy fields. The main aim, however, was not to feed them, but to clear the countryside. The result was that the villagers fled, and the Viet Cong came ever closer to the cities.”
The NLF sabotaged or infiltrated these hamlets and convinced their comrades that the Americans were little different from the French before – both were imperialists and utterly contemptible. As one US critic noted,
“U.S. policies ignored the contradiction between the promotion of freedom and the construction of forced labour camps.”
About Vietnam’s strategic hamlets, renowned journalist and editor of the Middle East Eye David Hearst wrote
“… the US “pacification” programme [was] the father of today’s counterinsurgency. This was born out of the problems US soldiers had in distinguishing civilians from combatants. The solution lay in treating any Vietnamese encountered in a declared “free-fire zone” as the enemy, and opening fire without referring up the chain of command. . . . Villagers starved in their Viet-Cong-free encampments because they lost access to their paddy fields. The main aim, however, was not to feed them, but to clear the countryside. The result was that the villagers fled, and the Viet Cong came ever closer to the cities.
The French and US colonial powers’ attempts to force farmers into “strategic hamlets” fell apart.
Marx has the last words…
Will Trump’s new plan net the results he wants – yes because the Palestinians are basically unarmed, have no standing army, and have been brutalized, starved and murdered by Israel for more than 80 years. The question should be: for how long can this go on?
As Karl Marx is reported to have said, history repeats itself, “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”
Another ruined dinner party... 