Archive | September, 2026

A Warmongering Ceasefire, The Trump 20-Point Peace Plan and a Veil Over the Ongoing Gaza Genocide

22 Sep

[Prefatory Note: also published on my Substack platform, which I invite you to become a free subscriber: <richardafalk5.substack.com> If you are sympathetic with my treatment of issues I would ask you to invite friends and colleagues to subscribe as well.]

Trump’s 20-point Plan for Gaza starting with an ultimatum-driven deal that imposed in its first phase a ceasefire on the parties in exchange for the release by Hamas of 48 Israeli hostages and the remains of others in its possession since the attacks of October 7, 2023 accompanied by the release of nearly 2,000 Palestinians, of whom 184 were political resistance fighters serving long sentences in Israeli prisons and 1,700 were Gazans detained during the retaliatory period following the Hamas attacks. The released prisoners did not gain true freedom, but were subjected to a post-prison punitive ‘forced exile’ of indefinite durations. This meant the potentially permanent separation from family and homeland. The Gazans detained after October 7 were released to the genocidal wasteland that Gaza had become in the course of the preceding two years, and was now enduring the genocide continuing beneath the radar of public discourse. We the peoples of the world are instructed to believe the falsehoods that ‘the Gaza war is over’ and that the current Gaza challenges are situated in the supposed ‘aftermath of genocide.’ In this atmosphere the Trump diplomacy functions to blindfold the conscience of humanity to the Palestinian ordeal, not only the genocidal happenings of the past two years but even more pointedly to present Israeli crimes, including genocide.

Overall, the coercive Trump Plan was one-sided from its origins. This should come as no surprise in view of the US/Israel militarist behavior of recent years throughout the Middle East. In this spirit a warmongering ceasefire was worked out in close consultation between Trump and the Netanyahu leadership in Israel as to the contents of the plan and its disclosure to the world.

In this twilight period of Gaza genocide, Israel’s behavior persists in subverting international law while being benefitted in a morally surrealistic manner by this diplomatic sequel to the fury of its retaliatory assault. It is also  politically novel for the United States, the most complicit of the states guilty of giving significant material and diplomatic support to Israel as the perpetrator of this genocide, the most transparent instance of genocide in its daily impacts on the eyes and ears of the world. Against this background for the Trump Plan to insist on the demilitarization of Hamas and its exclusion from the future political administration of Gaza has the intended effect of exonerating and rewarding the criminal while unjustly inflicting further punishments on the victim. Such a perversion of justice is primarily punitive toward the civilian Palestinian population of Gaza, while seeming to be vindictively concerned with only the ‘peaceful’ extermination of Hamas and the strengthening of Israel’s future security. This paints a lurid picture of peacemaking diplomacy that was swallowed without question by most media platforms as well as endorsed by the governments of the liberal democracies joined together in the NATO alliance since 1949. To this day media and even the UN projects the Hamas attack as coming out of the blue while one need not be a Palestinian partisan to realize that it was staged in reaction to the harsh unlawfulness of Israel’s occupation and its campaign to erase Palestine from Netanyahu’s map of ‘the new Middle East.’ Currently, these policies are being downplayed in Western circles, but the campaigns of erasure and  expulsion are far from. For some years they were hidden by the redeployment of IDF forces on the Israeli side of Gaza’s borders and the abandonment of Israeli settlements in 2005. Of course, to point out Israel’s unjust visualization of the future does not relieve Hamas from legal responsibility for its own violation of the laws of war in carrying out its resistance uprising, but it views the violent acts of both parties through a more balanced optic of asymmetrical responsibility. Hamas’ wrongs, although serious, are trivial if compared to Israel’s decades of calculated wrongdoing.

Despite the documented genocide, Israel has not even been censured by the UN for such a sustained violation of the most basic of human rights norms or ordered to pay reparations sufficient to cover the emergency restoration costs of the civilian and infrastructural devastation it has caused since October 7, itself increasingly ambiguous as to whether it was what Israel claimed and convinced most of the world or a pretext to validate its genocidal retaliation. The Trump plan goes beyond the pre-October 7 status quo by implicitly authorizing Israel’s indefinite occupation of more than 50% of the Gaza Strip. Even this encroachment on Gaza is now further territorially extended by the de facto unchallenged IDF presence well beyond the boundary of the already controversial authorized Israeli presence set forth in the Trump Plan. This additional Israeli land grab allows Israel to gain a strong staging area for its Greater Israel project of expanded territorial sovereignty in Gaza coupled with the total denial of any Palestinian rights to autonomy, much less sovereignty, in their own homeland. This situation is softened somewhat in the Plan by its vague and conditional assurance that a continued Palestinian human presence in Gaza would be respected and supplemented by a right of return if a  Palestinian who had decided to depart Gaza later seeks to resume residency in his/her homeland. The Plan is also unacceptably silent about the fate of over eight million Palestinians coercively expelled in the 1948 nakba and 1967 naksa. This apparent willingness in the Plan to obligate Israel to refrain from endorsing ethnic cleansing has been sharply challenged in recent internal Israeli high-level discourse and the escalation of West Bank violence. Such developments and others totally disregard this seemingly promising provision in the Plan while championing  ethnic cleansing of the surviving Gaza population and by making in the West Bank more and more unlivable. The acknowledged Zionist goal of minimizing the Palestinian presence is not just a preoccupation of the Israeli right. In effect, a civil society consensus in Israel seems to be informally  advocating ‘a politics of elimination,’ and no credible candidate in the upcoming October elections is raising objections in a politically meaningful form.

What adds to the increasingly hidden Gaza plight is the refusal of the U.S. to insist that Israel at least abide by the provisions of a plan heavily weighted in its favor. In the months that the ceasefire has been in effect Israel has repeatedly violated the core obligation ‘to suspend’ violence in Gaza. In its unapologetic and unreprimanded daily ceasefire violations Israel mainly through bombardment has killed as of September 2026 at least 1000 Palestinians as validated by the Gaza Ministry of Health. As far as is known there has been no public criticism of this behavior from either Washington or the UN, and what criticisms have been issued by governments in the region have been confined to rhetoric and lacks any sign of remedial intentions to impose national or international sanctions. If I were a Palestinian, I would place no trust whatsoever in the already weak protective provisions of the Trump Plan as to ending Israeli occupation of Gaza and not threatening to eliminate Palestinians by means of subsidies to receiving countries and departing Gazans. This Palestinian vulnerability is accentuated by the exclusion of meaningful Gazan representation when and if the governance elements of the Plan are implemented. Further skepticism arises by the failure of the Plan to declare the vision of a Greater Israel as incompatible with the admittedly amorphous pledge to consider Palestinian aspirations of statehood once the security issues had been addressed in a manner deemed satisfactory by Israel.

The Trump Plan becomes even more objectionable from the perspective of justice if in addition to scrutinizing its controversial features its most notable omissions are highlighted. Of particular concern is the absence of  any mention of Israeli accountability for the criminality of its retaliatory attacks, widely deemed genocide by most of the world. This populist consensus as to criminality was  given a provisional, yet highly influential endorsement by the International Court of Justice in its decision on Interim Measures of January 25, 2024 in litigation initiated by South Africa in accord with the Genocide Convention (1948).

 Perhaps more revealing is the absence of any attention given to the assignment of a responsibility for the removal of rat-infested rubble, repairs of dangerously damaged buildings where Gazans are sheltering in preference to living in primitive tents, and a concerted rebuilding program of Gaza’s residential neighborhoods and targeted hospitals, schools, and heritage sites. Israel’s continuing conflictual intentions are convincingly demonstrated by its disruptive interference with the delivery of humanitarian assistance, including the prohibition of heavy machinery to removed the debris and the human needs of food, medicine, fuel, and potable water.

As well, if ‘peace’ rather that a diplomatic package acceptable to Israel had been the objective, it would seem a crippling oversight not to have prescribed the immediate establishment of a Peace and Reconciliation Commission as had usefully eased the transition to peace in such troubled settings as post-apartheid South Africa and post-Pinochet Chile.

In a shocking subservience to militarized geopolitics the UN Security Council gave its unanimous blessing to the Trump Plan in its December 17, 2025 Resolution 2803. The reputation of the UN was further tarnished by the Secretary General António Guterres’ September 30 official statement welcoming the Trump Plan as a benevolent approach to peace despite its denial of the relevance of law and morality. Even more objectionable was the SG’s call to all UN members to support the Trump Plan unconditionally.

But as the months pass, the Trump diplomacy not only posits a framework that favors Israel, but in practice serves as a smokescreen that is enabling Israel to proceed with its genocidal undertaking, which in its current phase features ethnic cleansing and tactics of distraction as regional and global attention shifts to a variety of non-Gaza concerns, especially the regional and global impacts that have followed the inconclusive war of aggression launched against Iran by the U.S. and Israel on February 28, 2026, and its frozen aftermath.

And if this was not enough, the U.S. Government chose this time  to replenish Israel’s depleted munitions with the kind of weaponry that has made a wasteland of Gaza and this part of Occupied Palestine unlivable. The Trump presidency has approved of U.S. military sales amounting to $2.8 billion, consisting of 40,000 one-ton bombs that even the Biden presidency paused because their explosive radius was so large as to make such ordinance indiscriminate, and a mass killer of civilians in the crowded conditions of Gaza. Israel is also being sold 20,000 penetrator bombs presumably for possible use in future regional warfare, particularly the expected resumed targeting of Iran’s nuclear program.

But this arms deal is even more sinister than it appears, especially with its dual effect of deceiving the American people and ensuring U.S. arms producers with large windfall profits. The arrangement is made to appear as a ‘sale’ to Israel rather than acknowledged to be an outright ‘gift’ as the Israeli purchases are to be funded by prior military aid packages for Israel. This effectively means that the fuel for restoring Israel’s relentless war machine is being indirectly and mostly unknowingly paid for by U.S. taxpayers. Such a transaction in all probability violates the letter of the U.S. legal requirement that military assistance be used by foreign recipients in a manner consistent with complex restrictions contained in the Arms Export Control Act and the Foreign Assistance Act.

Donald Trump may boast that he is the most deserving candidate for a Nobel Peace Prize in all of history. If Nobel had set up a retirement prize for the most dangerously apocalyptic narcissist in the world, Trump would deserve consideration, and maybe even the prize. More discerning persons around the world would be appalled if the NPP were awarded to Trump, an act so discrediting as to undermine the integrity of the prize itself. To single out Trump after his complicit role in the Gaza genocide and his role in embedding injustice in what has been presented to the world as ‘Trump’s Peace Plan’ should be more than enough to remove him from the list of candidates in the first round, without even needing to take account of his launch of aggressive wars in Iran or the kidnapping and prosecution of the Venezuelan head of state.

What stands out in this entire tragic course of events is the degree to which truthtelling and symbolic accountability for genocide were addressed by civil society initiatives. Protest activity around the world, although repressed in the complicit countries, contributed to the Palestinian victory in the Legitimacy War fought for control of the landscape of law, morality, and justice. There were important civil society initiatives in the form of peoples’ tribunals that documented with testimony of survivors and experts the allegations of genocide, compiling a record free from the propaganda and defamation of Israel’s critics. In Canada and the United Kingdom tribunals were organized by ordinary citizens to consider evidence of the complicity of their respective governments, while the International Global Tribunal (IGT) addressed the multi-faceted phenomenon of genocide and its implications for law, morality, and legitimacy. A major goal of the IGT was to encourage civil society solidarity initiatives linked to the global anti-apartheid movement that played such a crucial role in waging the successful struggle against the racism of the South African governing process. While citizens and scholars were being punished for naming the violence in Gaza as ‘genocide’ these tribunals were documenting the allegations, resisting efforts by constitutional democracies to stifle dissent and limit freedom of expression.

With respect to the Gaza struggle also fulfilling Palestinian aspirations depends on the activism of peoples awakened to injustice than on the empathetic behavior of governments, international institutions, and the priorities of corporations and financial actors. Their moral compass tends to be distorted by strategic ambitions, civilizational affinities, the political realism of foreign policy elites, and the profit maximation guiding the behavior of private sector actors.

In conclusion, the violence following October 7 never was a ‘war,’ which presupposes two sides capable of mounting battlefield resistance, and the genocidal assault has yet to end nor Israel shown any altered disposition to live together with Palestinian in condition of peaceful co-existence.

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9/11 After 25 Years: Terrorism & War Transformed: ‘Just War’ rechristened as ‘The Great Terror War’

14 Sep

[Prefatory Note: this is a republication of Substack publication as an alternative way of remembering 9/11, essentially as a systemic tragedy legitimizing the state crime of state terror and demonizing political resistance to such criminality as validating retaliation under the rubrics of either counterterrrorism or a new revived species of pre-modern ‘just war.’ See <richardafalk5.substack.com]

25 years after 9/11 there continues to be well-evidenced doubts about the authenticity of the official version of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, and an aborted mission to attack the White House. Such doubts have been ignored or more commonly dismissed by the mainstream media, derided as ‘conspiracy theory.’ This controversy remains to be resolved, and accompanied by continuing empathy for those families that suffered losses in the course of the tragedy. Whether the identity of the 9/11 perpetrators and their motives were as officially alleged or were motivated by a variety of strategic goals that have been attributed by critics to both adversaries and allies of the West is a matter of great unresolved lingering historical significance.

Yet what tends to be overlooked is an evaluation of the response, how it was crafted as ‘war’  rather than ‘crime’ and given a globalizing twist by generalizing the acts as an assault on the professed values of liberal democracy in the West without a hint of responsibility for the record of civilizational dominance achieved by colonizing violence, exploitation of resources, and coercive intervention with non-Western aspirations for self-determination. With a consciousness of this background, my focus is how the call to arms in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks reshaped warmaking as a core feature of international relations and geopolitical behavior that subtly undermined the UN and the role of international law in the management of global security. The most concise formulation of the original retaliatory formulation can be found in a rereading of President George W. Bush’s address to a Joint Session of Congress on January 20, 2001. From these perspectives, it seems persuasive to view as regressive the transformation of war and the nature of global security that represented, at least in part, a flawed interpretation of  the 9/11 phenomenon.

As the sitting president in 2001, George W. Bush, made clear in his address to Congress that there were immediate important alterations of U.S. foreign policy in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Perhaps none more fundamental than demeaning the perpetrators as terrorists outside the domain of constraining elements in the law of war that had evolved over the centuries and then linking their attack to a global terrorist network. Beyond this, Bush raised the stakes by in effect declaring war on the vaguely depict global network rather than limiting the response to rendering what he deemed as ‘justice’ to the perpetrators. Several points of interpretation follow:

—the emergence of 9/11 mega-terrorism that was not a matter of warmaking directly attributable to a foreign state that made it permissible for the target state to retaliate with or without the permission of the sovereign state from which the attack emanated. This became through time an unchallenged de facto modification of the UN Charter conception of state sovereignty and a greatly expanded idea of justifiable self-defense not rooted in international law;

—the broader implication of this expanded right of retaliation meant that such a permissible use of force was not restricted to the territorial limits of the state from which the perpetrators were given safe harbor, were trained, recruited, and sent abroad to carry out the 9/11 mission. In other words, any sovereign state to which the perpetrators retreated whether by stealth or invitation could not insulate the suspected perpetrators from an enlarged right of retaliation, in effect creating a geographically unlimited permissible scope of retaliation quite independent of international boundary. This meant that retaliation or engagement in counterterrorist warfare imposed no framework of legal, moral, or even geopolitical constraint. In Bush’s words, “This is civilization’s fight,” referring to the unity of liberal values shared across all ethnic boundaries, without any overt hint of Orientalism beyond an implicit hint of a new phase of Pax Americana: “Tonight we are a country awakened to danger and called upon to defend freedom. Our grief has turned to anger, and anger to resolution.” Such a message made clear that unlike past wars, this war against terror because of its boundaryless nature would be a long struggle without the defeat of an enemy government, it cannot be ended until the terrorist network is destroyed, requiring patience and the active support of foreign nations.

—the characterization of the perpetrators of 9/11 as ‘terrorists,’ given the accompanying legitimation of the right of retaliation that transformed counter-terrorism into a new kind of ‘just war’ that was unregulated by either the law of war or international humanitarian law. [See Richard Falk, The Great Terror War for early evaluation] It treated such transnational political violence as ‘terrorism’ even if undertaken as a reaction to prior unlawful behavior by the targeted state, and gave states a policy justification for violations of sovereign rights as well as individual human rights. Detained individuals suspected of participating or complicit in such attacks were not accorded the rights of ‘prisoners of war’ but subjected to abusive forms of detentions, including torture, as ‘terrorists’ without denials or apologies from U.S. leaders.

—sovereign states were no longer free to proclaim their neutrality in relation to a sustained conflict between a violent transnational political movement and counterterrorist operations this was a unilateral revision of the right to remain neutral in relation to international warfare. Even during the two world wars and the Cold War the countries of the Global South were more or less respected if their governments opted for neutrality although subject to taunts by the John Foster Dulles, as U.S. Secretary of State that being neutral in the struggle against Soviet Communism was ‘immoral.’ Bush went further in the unipolar atmosphere of 2001 a decade after the Soviet collapse, declaring that “[E]very nation, in every region has a decision to make: Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.” This is a grandiose demand that ends the option of occupying the neutral political space separating war and peace. Besides, it overlooks the obvious contradiction. The U.S. has long given support and asylum to ‘terrorists’ who support American foreign policy, most notoriously with respect to Cuba since the Castro-led revolution of 1959.

What is not evident in the U.S. response to 9/11 even after 25 years was the degree to which this pattern of transnational violence and counterterrorism represented a partial unconscious retreat to the pre-Westphalian idea of international relations as an anarchic domain where all pressures, including those derived from morality and religion, to constrain warmaking, protest POWs against abuse, and encourage peaceful resolution of conflict by diplomacy and judicial settlement procedures are abandoned when confronted by non-state political violence simply by calling such actors as ‘terrorists.’ Over time, rather than leading this unrestrained retaliatory violence, the U.S. has followed the Israeli lead that treats every act of resistance against oppressive occupation of the Palestinian homeland as ‘terrorism,’ sanitizing retaliatory violence as a deserving recipient of impunity regardless of policy context.

With the passage of time this counterterrorism paradigm for warmaking outside the limits of international law has been carried to genocidal extremes by the behavior of Israel toward the Palestinian people, characterizing recourse to violent struggle in their resistance to Israel’s lawless occupation as ‘terrorism,’ most unambiguously after the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, the word alone the issuance of a license not only to Israel for its genocidal response but also to validate the complicity of leading liberal democracies of the West. Indeed, any violence, whether by assassination of designated individuals or military assaults are described in the language of anti-terrorism as protective shields for lawlessness, immorality, and cruelty stripping away any pretensions of accountability.

The United States has also followed this Israeli path leading to the pre-Westphalian legitimacy of unprovoked wars of aggression best illustrated by the ‘wars’ against Iran in 2025 and more intensely in 2026. Although the justifications for recourse to war is tinged with the delegitimation of the Tehran government as ‘a terrorist regime’ reinforcing the closely related rationale of disrupting Iran’s supposed challenge to the Nonproliferation Treaty, which contains no enforcement measure against violators of NPT, and in relation to which the U.S. and Israel are the most blatant violating governments refusing the treaty obligation to pursue nuclear disarmament, and in Israel’s case the stealth acquisition of the weaponry through the connivance of Western liberal democracies.

In the decade about the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ending of the Cold War it seemed as if the territoriality of war as sustained political violence among antagonistic states would be restored. In this sense the 9/11 attacks ruptured such expectations, which were under pressure in any event due to Euro-American resolve to engage in aggressive uses of violence to prevent unwanted proliferation of nuclear weaponry as in Iraq, Libya, and of course, Iran. In important respects the war plans of nuclear weapons states are committed to engage in state terror of a planetary magnitude.

In conclusion, the U.S. response to the 9/11 attacks led to an irresponsible conflation of war with terrorism that has been applied in a manner that justifies Western acts of state terror while claiming to be engaged in counterterroristic ill-defined struggles civil society movements of resistance and resilience. This selective use of the language of ‘terrorism’ is what has greenlighted the violent practice and policies of governments of sovereign states while demonizing all acts or resilience, resistance, and liberation. Rather than restoring justice, as Bush claimed, it has spread injustice and personal tragedy a far greater number of victims that resulted from the 9/11 attacks, as well as discrediting the international procedures in place to promote justice. In this respect, it would be a mistake to discount the relevance of the U.S. Government’s hostility to the work of the International Criminal Court by the unprecedented behavior of imposing sanctions on its prosecutor, chief judge, and a number of its officials. This too is an aspect of ‘world order 25 years after 9/11.’

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