On Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nominated Donald Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize. In the same breath, he endorsed Trump’s plan to transform the depopulated ruins of southern Gaza — where over 57,000 Palestinians have been documented killed by Israel to date — into a luxury resort. This grotesque flourish topped a day of backroom deals in Washington, where Trump pushed a ceasefire not as a path to peace, but as leverage for a normalization agreement with Syria.

Palestinian and Syrian voices were not present at or invited to the table. Their security, sovereignty, and wellbeing are not part of the equation. As ever, the only security being considered—by Trump, Netanyahu, and their envoys—is Israel’s.

Trump’s proposal, now being fast-tracked through secret meetings and envoy visits, includes three pillars: a temporary ceasefire in Gaza, a prisoner exchange with Hamas, and the aforementioned normalization pact with Syria. All of this comes with American “guarantees” to Israel—not to end the occupation, not to stop the bombing, not to address root causes—but to ensure Israel emerges even stronger, insulated, and celebrated.

Outside Washington, Netanyahu is under pressure— from the ICC, from foreign capitals, and even from some in Israel itself. Trump, meanwhile, wants a win before November. For both of them, this is the perfect deal: Netanyahu gets political cover and legacy headlines; Trump gets a Nobel nomination and a grotesque rebrand from chaos agent to peace broker. The people living under occupation, siege, or drone strike get a brief respite from carpet-bombing and… that’s it. Their options are to go along with whatever Washington and Tel Aviv decide — or to ‘disappear’.

Depopulation is part of the plan. Trump’s so-called “humanitarian city” in southern Gaza, backed by an initiative linked to Tony Blair, envisions a tightly controlled enclave run by outsiders, built atop Palestinian rubble and stripped of political resistance. It’s not reconstruction—it’s containment. And Netanyahu’s resort endorsement adds a particularly cruel layer of fantasy: genocide followed by beachfront development.

The same logic is being applied to Syria. Trump’s team has reportedly lifted sanctions on Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) because its former leader, the current Syrian president, Ahmad al-Sharaa is viewed by Washington as being potentially pliable enough to negotiate with. A US envoy flew to Damascus on Monday, expecting to close a deal “within days.”

Although Syrians have not been consulted or heeded to date, Syria’s interim government—formed after Assad’s overthrow last December—has made clear that any deal must include Israeli withdrawal from the occupied Golan Heights and an end to Israeli incursions and landgrabs, which have continued unabated. But Washington and Tel Aviv are ignoring these demands entirely.

Israel justifies its aggression by citing Iranian influence in Syria. But aside from a few diehard Assadist remnants, Syrians won’t tolerate any Iranian presence; nobody in Syria is listening to Tehran’s ‘resistance’ claims any more after its regime spent 14 years propping up Assad’s dictatorship alongside Russia, helping massacre hundreds of thousands and dispossess over half the population, while officials in Tehran gloatingly described Syria as Iran’s “35th province.” The notion that another regional expansionist state, Israel, is now “protecting” Syria from Iranian expansionism - by launching attacks, killing or abducting civilians, destroying homes, and seizing more Syrian land and resources - is grotesquely absurd and insulting.

This latest US-Israel love-in at the White House is not a moment of hope for peace, just one more performance in which powerful men trade other people’s futures over steak dinners and off-camera meetings. Justice is absent. Consent is irrelevant. And peace is whatever can be packaged for a press release.

From genocide to golf course, Trump and Netanyahu are marketing themselves as peacemakers. Their true message, however, couldn’t be clearer: real peace, grounded in rights, accountability, and self-determination, is off the table. Only power matters. And everyone else is expected to get out of the way.
But everyone else isn’t about to follow their script.

By Ruth Riegler

Photo: Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu hands US President Donald Trump a folder during a meeting in the Blue Room of the White House, Monday, July 7, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)