Trump’s Diplomatic Initiative: A New Dawn or Just Another Dusk?

TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 20 Oct 2025

Richard Falk | Global Justice in the 21st Century – TRANSCEND Media Service

17 Oct 2025 – Modified responses to questions by Rodrigo Craveiro, a Brazilian journalist. The focus is what to expect in the weeks ahead to follow from the Trump diplomatic offensive to bring an Israeli crafted peace to fruition in Gaza, and broader stability to the entire Middle East.

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1. There is a sense of joy but also of fury due to the fact all the bodies didn´t return to Israel. How do you see this?

Given the overall experience of the past two years, the attention accorded to the hostages by the Western media is misleadingly disproportionate, and as usual Israel-biased. And now the pain of those Israelis who seek the agreed return of the bodies of non-surviving hostages is an extension of this distortion that shifts global concerns away from the terrible carnage and continuing suffering in Gaza, and the totally ravaged homeland of the Palestinians that is being subject to day after arrangements made by its tormentors without Palestinian participation, much less authentic representation selected by the Palestinian people.

Legitimate Palestinian leadership does not presently exist even if there existed a commitment to identify and endow such individuals with appropriate roles. For sustainable progress toward a just future peace to be achieved the Palestinians must participate and be representative of their own choosing. Such a reality can only be decided by the Palestinians themselves, most obviously, in an internationally monitored competitive election among rival claimants to Palestinian leadership throughout Occupied Palestine.

Hamas evidently agreed to return the bodies of dead hostages in their possession, but given the difficulty of locating the bodies and collecting the remains, unless there is a genuine repudiation by Hamas of this underlying duty associated with the ceasefire, their good will deserves the benefit of the doubt. The disappointment of the families in Israel that suffered from this human loss is understandable, but it should be interpreted in ways that are subordinate to more relevant issues such as ceasefire violations.

It was reported two days after the ceasefire went into effect that Israel killed by gunfire and missiles 7 Palestinians seeking to visit their destroyed home in Gaza City, a disturbing incident which seemed received scant, if any, coverage in international media or mainstream international commentary, and yet could be seen as evidence of the fragility of the ceasefire arrangements or an indication that Israel is ready to risk or is even seeking the collapse of the ceasefire by testing its limits. A carefree attitude toward the renewal of the violent encounter that rests on implied, or even secret, assurances of unwavering US support.

2. Trump addressed the Israeli Knesset, where he said that his peace plan marks the “historic dawn of a new Middle East”. Do you believe this is something real or is he exaggerating?

My best guess is that historians looking back at those words will conclude that Trump had confused dawn with dusk. There is no prospect of a brightening of the dark skies casting a shadow on the countries of Middle East until Palestinian rights are respected, and that includes honoring the international right of return of the seven million Palestinian refugees. There must be a campaign to obtain proper accountability for the Gaza Genocide. Until the costs of Gaza reconstruction are borne by the perpetrators of the devastation, accompanied by some process of reconciliation that does not whitewash the crimes of Israel and its enablers it will be impossible to create a peaceful future for the region.

At the very least the vast devastation caused by the genocide must be physically overcome by a process of reconstruction funded by adequate reparations. The scope of reconstruction must include health, heritage and religious sites, educational and cultural institutions, residential neighborhoods, UNRWA facilities, and much else. The most painful losses of loved ones and body parts can never be compensated by material means and are an enduring negative legacy of the Gaza Genocide. Even recognizing pragmatic constraints on peacemaking given political conditions a ‘peace’ crafted to please the perpetrator of genocide and its most complicit supporter, is highly unlikely to proceed very far.

The Trump 20-Point Plan is not a break with the past, but an effort to induce forgetfulness necessary to attain credibility in proposing post-conflict arrangements. To grasp the ironies of this Trump Plan we should imagine our reactions if the Nazi survivors of World War II had been put in charge of designing the future of the international order, or even of just post-war Germany. It would not have seemed like a step toward a peaceful future regardless of the language used to obscure the perverse underlying reality.

3. Trump and the three mediating governments signed the peace plan for Gaza at the Sharm el-Sheik Summit. Given this development, what can we expect to happen in the future?

It is almost universally believed that the ceasefire should remain operative even if violations of the underlying plan occur or its further implementation stalls. Beyond this it is a matter of how much leverage is exerted by the US to advance the governance proposals in Part II of Trump‘s Plan. Whether Hamas and Palestinian resistance forces are subject to being coerced by further threats of Israeli renewal of its genocidal assault is unclear. It is also uncertain if the US would go along with an Israeli unilateral departure from the Trump Plan. Israel is quite capable of fabricating claims that Hamas is violating the ceasefire and related obligations leaving it no choice but to resume its military operations.

It would appear at this time that Trump would allow Israel to exercise such an option. At the same time, Trump is so mercurial and narcissistic that it possible he would regard Israel’s action as undermining his claims as peacemaker, and repudiate the Israeli resumption of large-scale violence in Gaza. In an odd way Israel and Trump may turn out to have different goals. Israel has not given up its quest for ‘Greater Israel,’ which means absorbing not only East Jerusalem, but Gaza and the West Bank within its sovereign territory. Trump may still strangely believe he can obtain the Nobel Peace Prize if his Plan is operationalized in Gaza and the two conflicting parties accept the arrangements.

Overall, it is clear that peace and stability will not be the future of the Middle East until Israel respects Palestinian rights, drastically redefines or repudiate Zionism and apartheid in a manner consistent with international law, and agrees to the establishment of a Peace & Reconciliation Commission to acknowledge Israel’s past criminal violations of Palestinian rights and to announce a new dedication to the creation of an independent commission that assists the Palestinian/Israeli leadership to build future relations between Jews and Arabs on the basis of equality, dignity, and rights as the foundation for sustainable patterns of peaceful coexistence. For a truly new and stable Middle East Israel  must agree to the establishment of a nuclear free zone, including itself and Iran.

4. What are Risks of Clashes between Hamas and Gaza Clans and Factions?

These issues are murky, with contending interpretations and explanations of their recent prominence in the midst of this most ambitious effort to develop the current ceasefire pause into a framework for long-term conflict resolution by implementing, perhaps with modifications, the advanced phases of the Trump 20 Point Plan. In this context, Israel seems to welcome these tensions within Gaza, by various means including subsidies, to allow them an option to exit from this series of developments that might challenge their annexation plans in the West Bank as well as Gaza.

It is possible that the Netanyahu government agreed to the ceasefire only to secure the return of the hostages, and never assented to any wider interference with its militarist approach, and may have had assurances of Trump’s support no matter what.  If this plays out Israel would actually welcome the collapse of the conflict-resolution part of the framework in a manner that would find tacit acceptance, if not outright approval in Washington. Such a manipulation of reality requires pinning the blame on Hamas that is currently taking the form of criticizing Hamas for seeking to destroy those armed groups in Gaza that collaborated with the Israeli military operations.

Such a line of interpretation is reinforced by Israeli unreasonably shrill complaints about the Hamas failure to return all of the bodies of the dead hostages. On its part Hamas claims it has returned all the remains it could discover with its existing equipment, given that some dead hostages remain trapped far beneath the rubble. This seems a reasonable explanation as Hamas has little incentive to retain the remains of dead Israeli hostages or of taking steps that provide an excuse for Israel to resume bombardment and other forms of violence in Gaza.

Such a line of interpretation is also consistent with Israel’s pattern of lethal violence killing Palestinians in several instances that have the clear appearance of being deliberate violations of the ceasefire agreement. Additionally, Israeli interference with the delivery of humanitarian aid by reducing the entry of relief goods by 50% is another expression of Israel’s unwillingness to allow even a conflict-resolving process weighted in its favor to go forward.  These are serious provocations by Israel, causing sharp criticism from some governments that had previously endorsed the Trump approach, but not yet even a whimper of disapproval from the US.

The gathering evidence suggests that Israel is accumulating grounds for repudiating the ‘peace’ process and resuming its military operations accompanied by a renewed clampdown on the further delivery of humanitarian aid, despite widespread hunger, disease, and trauma among the civilian population of Gaza.  The next week or so shall determine whether this pessimistic assessment dooms the ceasefire as well as the prospects for conflict-resolution by diplomacy rather than through further recourse to genocide. Israel since the return of the living hostages in Gaza holds all the cards and Hamas has none except for its incredible capacity of resilience.

As yet there is no signs pointing to a new dawn.

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Prof. Richard Falk is a member of the TRANSCEND Network, of the TRANSCEND Media Service Editorial Committee, Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University, Chair of Global Law, Faculty of Law, at Queen Mary University London, Research Associate the Orfalea Center of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Fellow of the Tellus Institute. He directed the project on Global Climate Change, Human Security, and Democracy at UCSB and formerly served as director the North American group in the World Order Models Project. He also is a member of the editorial board of the magazine The Nation. Between 2008 and 2014, Falk served as UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Occupied Palestine. His book, (Re)Imagining Humane Global Governance (2014), proposes a value-oriented assessment of world order and future trends. His most recent books are Power Shift (2016); Revisiting the Vietnam War (2017); On Nuclear Weapons: Denuclearization, Demilitarization and Disarmament (2019); and On Public Imagination: A Political & Ethical Imperative, ed. with Victor Faessel & Michael Curtin (2019). He is the author or coauthor of other books, including Religion and Humane Global Governance (2001), Explorations at the Edge of Time (1993), Revolutionaries and Functionaries (1988), The Promise of World Order (1988), Indefensible Weapons (with Robert Jay Lifton, 1983), A Study of Future Worlds (1975), and This Endangered Planet (1972). His memoir, Public Intellectual: The Life of a Citizen Pilgrim was published in March 2021 and received an award from Global Policy Institute at Loyala Marymount University as ‘the best book of 2021.’ He has been nominated frequently for the Nobel Peace Prize since 2009.

Go to Original – richardfalk.org

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