From the foregoing, Israel has two choices to make. It must latch on to the Trump Plan as engrossed in UNSC Resolution 2803, and conceive a timeline to accede to Palestinian self-determination, discourage new settlements in the West Bank and Gaza within the UN Partition Plan of 1947. Since the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel has gone beyond the green line through settlement expansion into the Palestinian portion of the land. There is a global convergence around it.
Removing all Israeli settlers might present a peculiar problem that maybe be resolved on the basis of civic citizenship for Israelis living beyond the green line, just as there are Arab-Israelis in Israel with full citizenship. Radical Zionism has ignited a global anti-Semitism that undermines the Jewish civic desire for their Palestinian neigbours. Israel has lost its moral force because of the genocide in Gaza.
It has emptied the very source of the moral solidarity sired by the holocaust of the 1940s in ways that corral sentiments in favour of the Nazi raison detre. Israel lives not because of its military might but because of global solidarity over the crime of the Nazis. The present right-wing leadership in Israel believes in a military solution to live in the historic Palestine. The global solidarity is shifting in favour of the Palestinians, helped by the optics of the carnage in Gaza. Swartz (1970, p. 38) was right to have noted over half a century ago that:
History also makes it clear that as heir to the Islamic tradition of openness and tolerance the Arab people have at hand the moral resources adequate for the forging of any such fraternal relationship. Will they choose to fall back on that heritage, appropriating its resources, or must they go down the devious paths of narrow, self-centered nationalism charted for them by the modern West?
Israel for its part, however, will be called upon to renounce its present form as an outpost of Western political influence, its quasi-racist character, and its blind and arrogant faith in military supremacy as the answer to its problems. As long as Israel retains its present form it will inevitably remain isolated not only from the larger human community in the Near East, but also from the moral resources of its own heritage — a heritage as rich and humane as that to which the Arab world stands heir.
A zero-sum trajectory by the vision of Greater Israel will lead to doom for the Israelis. The U.S. government, a pillar of global support for Israel, is shaped by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a loose coalition of individuals that influences US pro-Israel foreign policy. However, this support is not guaranteed to last indefinitely (Mearsheimer and Walt, 2007).
The American public is beginning to realise that the major conflicts that their country has been drawn into were indeed proxy escapades on behalf of Israel. Jeffrey Sachs acknowledges this in his address to the European Parliament. He notes:
And you can listen to General Wesley Clark online talk about that. He was NATO’s supreme commander in 1999. He went to the Pentagon on September 20, 2001. He was handed the paper explaining seven wars. These, by the way, were Netanyahu’s wars…The idea was partly to clean up old Soviet allies and partly to take out supporters of Hamas and Hezbollah. Because Netanyahu’s idea was there will be one state thank you. Only one state. It will be Israel. Israel will control all of the territory…And anyone that objects, we will overthrow. Not we exactly, our friend, the United States.
That’s U.S. policy until this morning. We don’t know whether it will change. Now the only wrinkle is that maybe the U.S. will own Gaza instead of Israel owning Gaza…But the idea has been around at least for 25 years. It actually goes back to a document called Clean Break that Netanyahu and his American political team put together in 1996 to end the idea of the two-state solution. You can also find it online. So these are projects. These are long-term events.
The Trump Plan as engrossed by UNSC is a formalization of handover of Gaza as a colonial enterprise to the United States. Welcome to the Gaza Riviera!
Concluded.
Akhaine is a Professor in the department of Political Science, Lagos State University (LASU). He delivered this Lecture (excerpts) at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs on December 2, 2025, as part of the Institute’s Foreign Policy Lecture Series
