Following to our 31st of August comment
It would take a big stretch of the imagination to characterise President Donald Trump’s purported peace plan for Gaza – and indeed for the whole of the Middle East – as being in the traditions of diplomacy. The method is more like arm-twisting, and the proposed terms are still very much, as they say in the shipbroking world, “on subjects.”
At the time of writing, Israel was continuing its deadly bombing campaign, and it was unclear and unlikely that Hamas and its supporters would readily lay down their arms. Commentators will be looking at Mr Trump’s quirky way of staging so-called peace negotiations in the light of the fiasco of his Alaska summit with President Putin, which did nothing to halt the Russian offensive in Ukraine or intensified drone strikes on each other’s populations and energy installations.
It would be a wonder moreover if Arab nations were to sink their bitter differences for the sake of participating in some kind of American-dominated master plan for the whole region. And there could too easily be pretexts for further deadly hostilities in and around Gaza and its benighted population.
