What Trump’s Peace Deal Really Means for Gaza

0:01Dan Wakin:This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times Opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it.

0:14Diana Buttu:I'm Dan Wakin, an international editor for New York Times Opinion.

0:21Diana Buttu:There's relief across Gaza and Israel, relief that there is a ceasefire, relief that the killing has stopped, relief that the Israeli hostages are home, and relief that close to 2 ,000 Palestinian detainees and prisoners have been released. The ceasefire came in the first phase of President Trump's 20-point peace plan, which Hamas and Israel have agreed to. But so many questions remain on the fate of Hamas, on the Israeli presence in Gaza, on the future of the Palestinian cause. To talk about this, I'm joined by Deanna Butu, a lawyer and former advisor to the Palestine Liberation Organization.

1:00Diana Buttu:Diana, welcome.

1:02Dan Wakin:Thanks, Jan. It's nice to be here.

1:05Diana Buttu:You're speaking to me from your home in Haifa now. Yes. What have the last few days been like for you, a Palestinian living in Israel?

1:14Dan Wakin:Where do I begin? It's been a mix of emotions. The first is that I'm relieved that the bombs have stopped. I don't think there was any Palestinian who wanted to see that continue, particularly because we've lived through two years of watching a live stream genocide. And at the same time, I'm very worried because I'm worried about the future. I'm worried about what this agreement means. And I'm worried about what it means for me, and I'm worried that we're just going to be papering over what's happened over the past two years. And that for many people, it's just going to return to life as usual, except for Palestinians, in particular Palestinians in Gaza.

2:11Dan Wakin:So there's just, it's a mix of emotions, a real mix.

2:16Diana Buttu:Do you have any friends in Gaza? And if so, what have you been hearing from them?

2:23Dan Wakin:So, yes, I have a lot of friends in Gaza. Dan, I lived in Gaza for a year and a half.

2:32Dan Wakin:And it's been such a hard two years. Because over the course of two years, I didn't have words. I didn't know what to say to them. I just felt totally helpless. Today, when I checked in on my friends, their reactions were mixed. Every one of them had their home destroyed. Every one of them was displaced more than once. Every one of them had at least one member of their family killed. And so this impacted them very deeply. And there was definitely relief that the bombs are over. But as they were going back to their homes, particularly those who live in Gaza City, they were going back to rubble, to just rubble.

3:33Dan Wakin:and thinking about all of the ways in which they're going to have to rebuild, how they're going to rebuild, and how they're going to start their lives again. How do we begin? How do we begin? And who's going to help us? And as far as the deal itself, the various provisions of the deal,

3:56Diana Buttu:you're an advisor, as I mentioned, to the PLO. You've seen peace negotiations up close. and you know what goes into them, and you know what the result can be. What do you think about this deal?

4:10Dan Wakin:You know, Dan, there's something really troubling about this agreement, and it's the fact that Palestinians had to negotiate this agreement. It's just never been in history that people need to negotiate an end to genocide. We've had everybody from international human rights organizations to two UN reports, to the International Association of Genocide Scholars, to a number of genocide scholars, to the International Court of Justice saying that there's a plausible case for genocide, to two Israeli human rights organizations all calling it genocide. And yet, rather than there being sanctions put on Israel or an arms embargo put on Israel, we instead forced Palestinians to go down the path of negotiating.

5:04Dan Wakin:And that in and of itself is very troublesome. And we force Palestinians to be negotiating and to famine with the very people who have been starving them in the first place. So leaving that aside, and it's important for me to say that, leaving that aside, when you look at the text of the agreement, it's so problematic because embedded in this agreement, there are no guarantees that are given to Palestinians that Israel isn't going to resume this again. Remember, Israel has never abided by any agreement. They haven't abided by UN resolutions. not having any guarantees makes it such that you're leaving Palestinians once again to negotiate with the stronger party, and it's akin to negotiating with a gun to your head.

5:55Dan Wakin:And so I would have hoped that after all of this, that instead of just pretending that these two years didn't happen, that there would have been a recognition that there was a root cause to all of this, which is the occupation. And instead, there would have been a recognition that this occupation must end. And sanctions put on Israel until this occupation ends. Instead, they just papered over it and pretended as though these two years didn't happen. And that's it.

6:35Diana Buttu:When you say that Palestinians are being forced to negotiate with a gun to their head, I think from the Israeli side, you might hear it said, well, Hamas was the organization that launched an attack that killed 1 ,200 innocent people. And why should Israel therefore give them the benefit of the doubt when it comes to negotiating? How would you respond to that?

7:01Dan Wakin:You know, when we look at October the 7th, it didn't come out of a vacuum. The Israelis have lived now for decades completely ignoring Gaza and at the same time maintaining a very brutal occupation over Gaza. And that's the problem is that there's been this brutal occupation that has been made invisible not only to Israelis but has been made invisible also to the rest of the world. And in making it invisible, they somehow ignore the harm and dehumanize Palestinians. And there's been a lot of emphasis placed on the Israelis. But I think it's important to talk about what has been happening to Palestinians.

7:54Dan Wakin:On Monday, the Israelis released 1 ,700 Palestinians to Gaza, Palestinians who were hostages, Palestinians who were picked up in the aftermath of October of 2023. And they were used as bargaining chips. And by the way, there's still roughly 1 ,000 from Gaza who remain in Israeli prisons. But if you look at the history of the ways in which Palestinians have been used, nobody ever really looks at these numbers of how many Palestinian prisoners there are and how it is that these people are never, ever released. and it's a system that just keeps going and going and these are the nameless, the faceless that we never hear about and my fear is that in this agreement we're just going to go back to the way it was before it's just going to be yet another papering over the harm that has been caused by these decades of occupation

9:10Diana Buttu:There was a summit on Monday in Egypt, and it was focused on ending the war, bringing peace to the Middle East. Egyptian President el-Sisi stated openly that he advocated for a two-state solution. That is a state for Israelis and a state for Palestinians in the region. But President Trump didn't mention that at all. Do you see a disconnect here between the political future of Palestinians and what President Trump and Israel see in the future? Most definitely.

9:50Dan Wakin:This 20-point plan looks like, sounds like, feels like an Israeli plan that was rebranded as an American plan. In fact, a Trump plan, not just an American plan. And in this American-slash-Trump plan, it doesn't mention freedom for Palestinians. If Palestinians behave, if Palestinians reform—and by the way, their reform means that if the Palestinian Authority drops all of its claims in the International Criminal Court against Netanyahu and against Galant, the Israeli defense minister at the time— If all of that is done to President Trump's satisfaction, then maybe we can start talking about a Palestinian state, which he acknowledges that Palestinians aspire to.

10:41Dan Wakin:That's what's written in the 20-point plan. So there's nowhere in this plan the idea of a Palestinian state. There's nowhere in this plan an end to the occupation. And one of the strangest things, Dan, for me was seeing all of these states who just a few weeks ago announced that they were recognizing a Palestinian state come forward to this agreement. So it left me puzzled and thinking, well, what exactly did you recognize? So it's completely off. It's completely off. And that's why I'm very worried about it. I'm very, very worried. And of course, the other thing is that in this agreement, it still leaves Israel with all of the room to decide Gaza's future.

11:31Dan Wakin:It gives Israel the ability to decide what gets into Gaza, how much gets into Gaza, and when it gets into Gaza. And over the course of the past two years, we've seen that Israel has bombed roughly 98 % of Gaza's farmland, which means that the population of the Gaza Strip is now almost entirely dependent upon Israel for its food supply. Whether that means the quantity or the quality, it's going to be practically dependent upon Israel.

12:08Diana Buttu:I hear you that many think this is a deeply flawed agreement. But would it have been better to not reach an agreement at all and stop the killing just because these other aspects were not included?

12:25Dan Wakin:I don't think that we should be looking at it in such binary terms. I think that there was a way to stop the killing. and I think that there is a way to address the root causes. And I don't think that they addressed either, to be honest. I don't think that they have stopped the killing, particularly since we've seen over the course of the past few days that the killing has not stopped. The major bombs have stopped, but the killing has not. And I don't think that they have come up with a way, they being the United States, Israel, and the rest of the international community, have come up with a way to actually end the occupation, to address the root causes.

13:09Dan Wakin:So it was neither here nor there. The only thing that they addressed was the one side of the equation, which was the Israelis, and that was it.

13:21Diana Buttu:You mentioned what appeared to be empty recognitions of Palestinian statehood. Yes. That is, in the past few weeks, the UK, France, Canada, all recognized a Palestinian state. Do you think that those acts of recognition will have any future impact on things? I certainly hope so. But as somebody who was involved for such a long time, I just didn't see that their involvement ever meant anything.

13:53Dan Wakin:And let me step back and say, for many, many years, all I heard was this idea of the belief in the two-state solution. And I call it the magic pill. It's like they swallowed this magic pill that everything could somehow be dismissed if you just swallow the magic pill. So the boom in settlement construction could be dismissed by swallowing the magic pill or the construction of the wall in the West Bank that can be ignored because the magic pill of the two-state solution or the harm that's caused by the imprisonment of so many people that can be ignored because of the two-state solution or the siege on Gaza.

14:45Dan Wakin:that can be ignored because of this magic pill of the two-state solution. And that was the world that I lived in for such a long period of time that for all of those years, all I heard was the two-state solution, but none of these states did anything to actually bring that two-state solution about. They just kept swallowing the pill, swallowing the pill, swallowing the pill. And so the idea of the recognition of the state feels the same, that they have recognized a state, And it's the new magic pill. So, yes, we recognize the state, but we're going to close our eyes to the continued settlement construction expansion.

15:25Dan Wakin:We're going to close our ears when one of the Israeli ministers, Smotred, Minister of Finance, says that he's going to annex the West Bank and is pushing for it. We're going to close our ears and eyes when we see what they're doing in Gaza because we believe in, you know, we've recognized the Palestinian state. And so this is where it feels so empty and so hollow that they're not going to do anything about it. They once again have swallowed that magic pill and are going to absolve themselves of it.

15:56Diana Buttu:How does the world end the swallowing of the magic pill? What changes that?

16:03Dan Wakin:It requires countries to finally confront Israel. They're not willing to do that, but they should. And that means everything from an arms embargo on Israel. Because we've seen how Israel uses its weapons. It uses it to bomb hospitals, to bomb schools, to violate international law. It means cutting off trade with Israel. It means ousting Israel from these international arenas. And it can be done, it has been done in the past with South Africa. So it's possible. And it's possible particularly since they've now recognized the state of Palestine. But of course, my fear is that they're not going to do that.

16:47Dan Wakin:My fear is that, okay, as we're seeing what we're seeing in Gaza, as we're watching this genocide unfold, instead of undertaking their obligations under the Genocide Convention, which is to prevent genocide or to stop genocide, instead it's like they're going to give us a cookie by, you know, we're going to recognize you. That's my fear, Dan. That's my fear. And the recognizing Palestine as we're watching it being erased. It's just mind-boggling.

17:21Diana Buttu:Let me ask you some slightly more personal question. You grew up in Canada and lived in Gaza and the West Bank, and you then moved to Israel in 2010. You're one of the rare Palestinians who has lived in all three places. So you have a good perspective on the way it feels to be a Palestinian in the region, and also the way it feels for the world to look upon Palestinians. Do you think the perception of the Palestinian people has changed over the course of recent years? And particularly, what impact has October 7th had on that?

18:00Dan Wakin:Yes, I do think that it has changed. And the reason that I think it's changed is because back in the 90s with the Oslo agreements, I think that Palestine and Palestinians became an issue that people didn't have to think about. And then suddenly and over time, it changed. It changed. And in particular, in the aftermath of October the 7th, I think that we've seen a groundswell of support for Palestinians. And I think that we've finally seen that people are aware of what it's like to live under Israeli military rule. I think they've seen what it's like to live in Gaza. And I do think that public opinion is shifting.

18:54Diana Buttu:You said earlier in our conversation that you're worried about what this agreement means for Palestinians, but also specifically you're worried about what it means for you personally. What do you mean by that? You know, Dan, I don't even know where to begin.

19:22Dan Wakin:You know, there was a poll that came out this year, and the poll said that 82 % of Israelis approved of the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, right? Like removing Palestinians from Gaza. And then the next question was, do you support the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians who hold Israeli citizenship? And the response was 56 % said yes. And the younger the respondents were, the higher the percentage went up. And that does not at all surprise me, Dan. It's not at all surprising to me. And the reason that that's not at all surprising is that over time, living here, I've seen that people have shifted more and more and more to the right.

20:26Dan Wakin:And what could have been, what was, I wasn't really around, but in the 80s, a discussion about the occupation and the need to end the occupation. Now there's sort of a feeling inside Israel that it's just going to be around forever. And because it's just going to be around forever, it's just like it's part of the state. What do you mean by it? The occupation, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. And because the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip is going to be around forever in the mindset, this was before October the 7th. It became kind of easy to just ignore the fact that Israel was created through the Nakba.

21:27Diana Buttu:Tell our listeners what the Nakba was.

21:29Dan Wakin:So the Nakba is 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine. 75 % of the Palestinian population fled or was forced out of their homeland. And hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages were wiped off the map. There were roughly 150 ,000 Palestinians who remained. My parents were two of them. My father's town was one of those towns that was wiped off the map and replaced with an Israeli town.