National leaders deceive most people most of the time. Israel’s long, atrocious, US-backed assault on the Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon is the latest example, as are their joint attacks on Syria, Yemen, and Iran.

What President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu have led the gullible to believe is a three-phase “peace process” for Gaza has not even completed phase one. Already, Israel is finding pretexts to abrogate it.

Those who take Netanyahu at his word should recall that no past ceasefire has ended Israel’s multiple assaults on Palestinians. Hamas, whose welfare-delivery operation Israel at first funded, was elected to lead Gaza in 2006, instead of Fatah which Netanyahu expected to win. Hamas was then repeatedly targeted by the Israel Defence Force, with major attacks occurring in 2008, 2014, and 2018-19. The IDF has murdered hundreds of Hamas leaders in Gaza and Lebanon and thousands of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. After 17 years of repression, Hamas and other Palestinians broke through the barricades on 7 October 2023, killing 1200 Israeli citizens and military and foreigners, and taking 251 as hostages to Gaza.

Some suspect Netanyahu knew in advance of the mission and let it happen to enable the retaliatory IDF onslaught and keep himself in power and out of jail. Certainly, he permitted the “Hannibal Doctrine” to take effect. This meant permitting IDF attacks on vehicles returning to Gaza with their colleagues inside, rather than letting them be captured as hostages. “We look after our own,” say some Israelis and Jewish expatriates, but in this case they didn’t. Instead, Netanyahu dragged out the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, making a ceasefire and hostage return impossible for at least two years. The crowd of 100,000 Israelis in Hostage Square on 12 October 2025 thanked Trump for the return of their remaining hostages but hooted when his envoy, Steve Witkoff, mentioned Netanyahu’s name.

Israel always asserts its right to defend itself against Palestinians, but the right of Hamas to defend Gaza against Israel is never proposed. Hamas has to disarm, while Israel does not. The US and its allies (including Australia), having declared that Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis are “terrorists”, continue to arm Israel against them and share intelligence. The US alone has provided weapons worth US$22 billion to Israel since October 2023. Only when the slaughter and starvation of many thousands of Palestinians became undeniable, did the remaining minority of UN member states join those supporting Gaza against Israel and the US. Even then, some did so with reservations.

Nothing like the worldwide opposition to apartheid in 1980s South Africa has yet been applied to Israeli Zionists and American supporters of their “new Nakba”. The US has consistently vetoed UN Security Council resolutions condemning the genocide, and Trump has imposed prohibitions on members of the International Criminal Court and ignored its rulings. The US State Department is pressing African countries to take Palestinians willing to leave Gaza. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner plans a resort development on the ruins of Gaza, and he of all people is to lead its “reconstruction”. For some eight months, he has been working on plans for post-war Gaza together with Tony Blair, a designated “Board of Peace” member.

No Palestinians are on the Board. They were repeatedly excluded from discussions about their own future, including the “peace talks” at Camp David in 1978, Oslo in 1993 and 1995 and the Abraham Accords in 2020. Representatives of Hamas took part for the first time in negotiations in Qatar and Egypt in 2025, and members of the Palestinian Authority did so in France. Yet Palestinians were refused US visas to attend the UN General Assembly in September.

Trump’s proposed “temporary transitional government” of Gaza will not include Palestinians. It is to be backed by an “International Stabilisation Force” to guarantee the agreement. Details about it are few, except that it won’t include Hamas which, by giving back the living hostages and the few dead ones it can find, is surrendering its bargaining power. All Palestinians in Gaza are regarded by Netanyahu as Hamas and hence as “terrorists” whom the IDF has a right to exterminate. Hamas knows from the two failed ceasefires in November 2023 and January 2025 that it must disarm or die, or both.

Accused war criminal Netanyahu repeatedly visits the US and is not arrested, although he doesn’t go to Egypt or Qatar for peace negotiations, perhaps for fear of arrest there. Israel ignored the Arab League’s proposals to legitimise its place in the region, at Fez in 1982 and at Beirut in 2002. But several Arab states have been collaborating with the US and Israel for years, and their armed forces were secretly training together even while their leaders denounced the “Zionist entity”. Now, the Arabs no longer trust the US to restrain the Netanyahu junta, a former American defence official says. Israel “has become a terrorist state that rules Palestine and adjoining countries through violent intimidation and the culling of their populations”. (Chas Freeman, ‘Israel or America First?’ Address to the Arab Center, Washington, DC. 16 October 2025).

Netanyahu has told Hamas to choose between “the easy way and the hard way” to peace. That he is proud of Israel’s record of discrimination, ethnic cleansing, assassinations, war crimes, apartheid and genocide against Palestinians since 1947 is well documented. It is modern, and so better recorded than the earlier exploits of other settler colonisers, European, American, and British — including in Australia — but comparable in its method and intent to theirs. All seized territory, oppressed or killed the inhabitants and lied about it. The difference is that decades of self-indoctrination — and the example set by the Nazis — have emboldened many Israelis, Zionist Americans, and Jewish citizens of other countries publicly to assert that Jewish people have a God-given right to “Greater Israel”, extending from the Nile to the Euphrates, and that the Palestinians living there are “vermin”, sub-humans to be expelled or exterminated. No “ceasefire” or Hamas’ “disarmament” will stop Netanyahu doing it.

This is what Trump’s “peace deal” is reduced to, while the world does nothing. Only when Israel’s supply of weapons and intelligence is cut off will the war crimes and genocide end. Until then the leaders of nations delivering them — Americans, British, Europeans and Australians — remain complicit. Australia’s calls for a two-state solution, our arrest warrants for two Israeli ministers, our calls for humanitarian aid and our belated recognition of Palestine are minimal gestures that do not absolve our leaders from guilt for gross inhumanity.

Join Australians for Humanity at their webinar The Future of Palestine: What Australia must do Friday 31 October 9:00AM - 3:30 PM in two sessions

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.