Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his right‑wing government have ensured that Palestinians, pro‑Palestinian groups and activists, and anyone with a sense of decency are willing to give them almost anything just to stop the mass killings in Gaza.
So severe, painful, and devastating have the actions of the Israeli government and military been against the Palestinian people that they have managed to elicit sympathy merely for pausing the slaughter, even briefly. The world has been deceived to forget that it is Israel that has been the one conducting the genocide in the first place. All of a sudden, recognition of a Palestinian state feels unnecessary, even awkward, at a time when news is flooded with announcements of such recognitions.
The unfair and imbalance treatment are made starker by former President Donald Trump’s blunt declaration that if Hamas failed to comply, “Israel would have my full backing to finish the job of destroying Hamas,” and by the fact that the 20‑point plan was drafted with only Trump and Netanyahu at the centre of the process, without Hamas or Palestinian representatives at the table; together these facts suggest that what was presented as an offer of peace is better understood as a forced settlement imposed from above.
While most of us pray that the plan will work, those accepting such as an imbalance plan without caution are either living under the rock the whole time, or having an ahistorical frame of mind. We have seen time and again how Netanyahu has sabotaged agreements, including his own, to derail the path toward a two-state solution.
The so‑called peace plan did not appear in a neutral vacuum. It arrived as a tightly packaged narrative: Israel as besieged democracy, Palestinians as either security problems or supplicants for economic aid. In practice the plan formalised many of Israel’s long‑standing demands: control over strategic territory, a securitised arrangement for any Palestinian entity, and the cementing of Jerusalem as Israel’s undivided capital, while offering Palestinians a strand‑bare promise of economic development and administrative autonomy stripped of real sovereignty.
To Netanyahu, allied with a US president whose public remarks explicitly pledged unconditional backing for the destruction of Hamas should it not comply, this arrangement read less like compromise than like vindication. It gave political cover to expansionist aims while recasting the denial of Palestinian rights as rational, necessary and even merciful.
Viewed through the lens of coercive control, a concept drawn from studies of domestic abuse but here applied to statecraft, the strategy is chillingly familiar. Coercive control is not merely episodic violence; it is a continuous choreography of domination that include surveillance, restriction of movement, deprivation of resources, humiliation, designed to make resistance futile and dependence inevitable. Gaza’s blockade, the regulation of electricity and water, the tight control over imports and humanitarian access, the targeting of infrastructure and civic institutions: these are not isolated military operations. They are instruments that erode capacity and hope. Intermittent pauses in bombardment, ostensible windows for relief, and the occasional theatrical easing of conditions function like the abuser’s brief kindnesses. They do not redress structural injury; they recalibrate it.
This is where trauma bonding appears on a geopolitical scale. Trauma bonds form when cycles of abuse are punctuated by intermittent reprieve: the victim begins to conflate cessation of harm with protection or moral progress. International observers, media audiences and aid organisations, exhausted by the relentless inhumanity on screen, are susceptible to that very conflation. When bombs fall less for a day, when a convoy is allowed to enter, when electricity flickers back into a hospital ward, relief floods in, and with it, a dangerous amnesia about who engineered the conditions that made the pause necessary. The perpetrator becomes the provider of relief; the momentary restraint is mistaken for mercy. This emotional whiplash neutralises outrage, diminishes calls for accountability and creates an environment where tactical silence is rewarded as progress.
The diplomatic choreography around the 20‑point plan amplified this effect. Negotiations that exclude the paramount stakeholders cannot legitimately be called negotiations. When the principal actors deciding the future of a people are the leaders of the occupying power and an allied superpower, the resulting document is less a settlement than a blueprint for submission. Hamas, the elected and de facto authority in Gaza, and Palestinian negotiators were not at that table. Their absence was not a bureaucratic oversight; it was the structural guarantee of an outcome that would entrench Israel’s strategic objectives while making Palestinian sovereignty contingent and conditional.
The optics of a plan written by the two most powerful protagonists, one of whom publicly promised to back military annihilation if political acquiescence failed, underscored the coercive, rather than conciliatory, nature of the exercise.
Yet to argue that this is merely cynical manipulation is to oversimplify. There are real and sometimes terrifying security concerns invoked by Israeli leaders and many outside observers. Rocket fire from Hamas into Israeli towns, terrorism and the fear of further destabilisation are legitimate anxieties for any government.
And Palestinian political failures: division between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, corruption, repression of dissent, have weakened Palestinian capacity for coherent diplomacy and have sometimes squandered opportunities. A balanced analysis must recognise these facts. But acknowledging them is not the same as accepting them as justification for policies that amount to permanent disenfranchisement. Security concerns can be addressed without foreclosing sovereignty; the existence of allegedly corrupt or dysfunctional Palestinian institutions does not erase the moral and legal obligations of an occupying power.
Another element that made the plan durable was the shifting pattern of international responses. Outrage did surge in many quarters: marches, statements, and motions in international fora demanded accountability and an immediate end to civilian suffering. International courts and human rights organisations published scathing reports; legal action was pursued. Yet the combination of strategic diplomacy, carefully staged concessions and an exhaustion‑driven appetite for even temporary calm blunted the momentum for decisive international action. In this context, gestures by influential states and leaders mattered immensely.
Even nations that historically championed Palestinian rights began to show diplomatic caution. Indonesia’s recent role is illustrative: President Prabowo Subianto, though he reaffirmed support for a two‑state solution in his UN General Assembly remarks, gave a speech that stopped short of the severest denunciations expected by many observers, and his subsequent invitation to a high‑profile meeting hosted by the United States was read by some as a symbolic accommodation. Such gestures contribute to a perception of legitimacy that, when multiplied across forums and capitals, becomes the very scaffold of impunity.
Domestic dissent within Israel and Jewish diasporas complicates the picture and must not be elided. Human rights groups inside Israel, from B’Tselem to Yesh Din and to movements such as Breaking the Silence, have documented abuses and criticised the occupation; many Jews around the world have condemned policies they view as antithetical to Jewish values. These voices matter; they show that Netanyahu’s policies do not speak for all Israelis or for Jewish communities globally. But dissidents have been marginalised domestically and their criticisms muffled internationally by a political economy that rewards security arguments and punishes those seen as weakening the national line.
The legal landscape adds another, sterner dimension. International judicial mechanisms have moved in ways that made global commentators uneasy: high‑level filings, provisional measures and inquiries have signalled that international law is not inert. The involvement of the International Court of Justice and other bodies brought legal scrutiny to the conduct of hostilities and the structures of occupation. Yet legal process is slow, and legal measures—however necessary—are insufficient on their own to stop abuse when political and military power is uneven.
Ultimately, this is not a question of rhetorical excess. It is a query of moral consequence: does the world applaud the temporary cessation of killing while allowing the architecture of that killing to remain intact? Pauses in violence should be opportunities for justice, not a balm that enables the perpetrators to consolidate gains. Real peace demands accountability, mutual recognition and the restoration of political rights, not the reframing of domination as a pragmatic compromise.
Unless the international community insists on those conditions, momentary relief will continue to be mischaracterised as achievement, and coercion will be mistaken for diplomacy. The tragedy is that a generation may come to accept this bargain: relief in place of justice, silence in place of sovereignty, and a temporary pause in violence mistaken for the end of a crime.
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Omong-Omong Media’s editorial is also published in The Jakarta Post every Monday.
