~ Pasquale Liguori ~
Trump’s plan for Gaza—the one that promises reconstruction while instituting a planetary board of directors (“Board of Peace”), an international military force, and a “technical” Palestinian administration under trusteeship—is not a grotesque diplomatic stumble. If anything, it is diplomacy’s truth distilled: peace as the rebranding of occupation, sovereignty as compliance, liberation as procedure. It is a lexicon that replaces politics with governance and, in doing so, attempts to convert a colonial conflict into a dossier of security and investment.
What is revealing is the architecture itself: a UN Security Council resolution has anchored the plan’s framework, authorizing an International Stabilization Force and placing the “rehabilitation” of Gaza within an external chain of command and funding, designed to endure until the Palestinian Authority—already an administrative-security transmission belt of the colonial apparatus—is deemed “reformed” and able to “resume control.” Palestine, once again, is not treated as a constituent subject: it is an object of transition, administered until further notice.
Then there is the detail that is, in fact, the core: the so-called yellow line and the elastic formulas around security. The mechanism does not end occupation; it redesigns it spatially, with “boots on the ground” that remain and borders that become mobile, progressively rewriteable. It is the familiar logic of “peace processes” that shrink Palestinian territory while promising a future: a border that does not delimit but consumes.
If this is the frame, the idea of a reconstruction exceeding one hundred billion dollars—the “Sunrise” fantasy of a Gaza turned into a hi-tech metropolis of resorts, riviera, high-speed rail, and AI infrastructure—appears not as an excess but as the economic form of the same gesture: rubble as an asset, the population as a relocation problem, the land as a platform. This is not a “humanitarian” project. It is a real-estate project dressed in geopolitics.
In this construction, the keyword is disarmament: peace as an administered capitulation. Yet even the officials promoting it concede the sticking point: who disarms Hamas, how, under what mandate, and at what political cost? And while the imminent launch of governing bodies and a stabilization force is announced, reality keeps puncturing the communiqué: Israel continues attacks and pressure; the ceasefire remains fragile; the deaths “after the ceasefire” remind us that genocide can change in intensity without changing its nature.
Trump’s plan is not only predatory; it is politically ridiculous, because it presumes that resistance is a malfunction to be corrected with an organigram. The idea that a bureaucracy disguised as peace can produce surrender is an aberration: as long as occupation persists, surrender is not a technical outcome—it is a colonial demand.
From here a question arises: is it worth, today, attempting an evolutionary—socio-political—discourse on Palestine that carries none of the usual “white” pretensions (NGOs, palliative humanitarianisms, Western legal pedagogies), and that instead accompanies the success of resistance? Yes—if by “success” we mean something precise and unsentimental: the persistence of politics where empire wants only administration; the capacity not to be reduced to a user-population; the refusal to turn liberation into a chapter of governance.
The point, however, is not only to expose the plan’s semantic fraud. It is to understand why it is precisely Palestine that forces the international order to display, without shame, its operating devices: trusteeship, stabilization, reconstruction governance, security sector reform. It is as if, in front of a subjectivity that does not collapse, diplomacy is compelled to reveal its nature: not mediation, but political engineering; not peace, but the administration of colonial violence.
It helps here to call things by their name. The governance of rubble is a global technique of power. Rubble—physical, institutional, psychological—is not an accident; it is a productive condition. It produces dependency. It produces “beneficiaries.” It produces supply chains of contracting, consultancy, monitoring. It produces a new subject: not the citizen, not the resister, but the humanitarian user, the recipient of services. And when power succeeds in manufacturing such a subject, it has already won half the battle, because it has converted political conflict into a management problem. This also explains why what is called “humanitarian action” is not outside this apparatus. It is tolerated only insofar as it remains functional to stabilization, population management, and controlled reproduction of life. When humanitarian actors cease to align perfectly with the requirements of security and governability, they are no longer partners—but liabilities and are therefore expelled.
Palestine, however, does not enter this conversion docilely. Not because it is immune to catastrophe, but because catastrophe—paradoxically—is not enough to dissolve the fundamental political bond: the bond between land and the right of return, between dispossession and presence, between body and geography. It is here that the people–state paradigm—the one Europe exported as the unique form of the political—shows itself for what it is: a cage, often functional to empire. It promises sovereignty as a final prize, while normalizing every loss along the way: a checkpoint here, a settlement there, a “temporary” wall, a buffer zone, a necessary transition.
To criticise that cage does not mean indulging an aesthetic of dispersion or a postmodern slogan of “beyond the state.” It means recognising a more brutal fact: in the real world, the nation-state is often the form through which surplus populations are administered; and in the Palestinian case, the promise of statehood—deferred, conditioned, bargained—has been used to transform liberation into an endlessly postponed horizon. Palestine has been trained for decades to “deserve” a state; Israel has colonised the land while Palestine was invited to prepare for the final exam of governability.
If today Trump’s plan can propose a board of directors and an international force as a bridge, it is because it assumes it can continue that script: first trusteeship, then (perhaps) a conditioned sovereignty.
The only response commensurate with this is not a moral appeal. It is a theory and a practice that recognise Palestine as an already political subject, not as a problem to be stabilised.
A subjectivity grounded concretely—and not through philosophical name-dropping—in a triad: multitude, individuation, becoming, as a convergent conceptual machine.
The multitude names a political that refuses reduction to the One. And Palestine is exemplary here: there is no single sovereign body capable of fully representing its experience. There are Gaza and the West Bank, camps and cities, internal minorities and diaspora; armed formations and community practices, cultures and mutual-aid networks; religious and secular differences, generational and class differences. The West has read all this as deficit—“division,” “lack of an interlocutor,” “absence of reliable leadership”—because it cannot tolerate politics unless it appears in a state-like, negotiable form. In reality, that plurality is a power: cooperation without fusion, the capacity to act without condensing into one image, and above all the capacity to survive institutional decapitation. You cannot behead a multitude; you attempt instead to turn it into an administered population. That is exactly what governance tries to do.
A decisive step follows, if we want to avoid two symmetrical traps: on the one hand, nostalgia for a compact and mythical people; on the other, an aesthetic of dispersion as if it were automatically emancipatory. The point is to stop treating the political subject as a ready-made essence (unitary or scattered) and begin to see it as a process: a historical formation that is produced and transformed under pressure, through ties, ruptures, recompositions, and institutional inventions. Individuation is transindividual: it emerges from a shared field of potentialities (memory, language, trauma, land, symbols, practices) that belongs to no one as private property and cannot be seized by a state as public property. In Palestine that field is violently traversed: colonisation attempts to interrupt the very conditions of collective individuation—breaking territorial continuities, destroying infrastructure, erasing toponyms, isolating communities. It is a work of dis-individuation: not only the domination of bodies, but the prevention of durable bonds.
When the colonial state works to fix and fence, the response can only be another logic: one that escapes capture—one that becomes. Becoming is not flight from the land; it is the way a community, under extreme pressure, invents forms of existence that do not coincide with the institutions offered by the dominator. The colonial project—with its walls, zones, and moving lines—is a vast machine of territorialisation that wants to pin Palestine into two figures only: humanitarian victim or security problem. Becoming-Palestinian is the stubborn insistence on remaining a third term: neither user nor enemy, but a political subject that continues to produce bonds, institutions, memory, organisation.
Multitude, individuation, becoming: three words, one dynamic. The multitude is the form of the subject. Individuation is its ongoing genesis. Becoming is its capacity to slip past the grids of power without dissolving. Kept separate, they look like chapters. Intertwined, they become a theory of resistance as world-building.
The success of resistance is therefore not a slogan. Today it is, first of all, this: having prevented the total conversion of Palestine into an administrable object. Having prevented rubble from becoming, definitively, a new regime of humanitarian normality. In a world where colonial power imagines it can decide even the form of survival, to resist means keeping open the fact that Palestine is not a problem to be solved, but a presence that judges the world order by its persistence alone.
But persistence, if it is not to be reduced to myth, must become institution. Here the keyword is the common. And it must be wrenched from its most insidious Western usage: the common as NGO-lab language, as “community building,” as participatory rhetoric that depoliticises. In Palestine, the common cannot be a pacification device. It must be a material and conflictual practice: land, water, home, energy, care, school, archives, infrastructure. It must be the form through which the multitude sediments its political virtuosity into durable organisation.
Palestinian resistance is rich in virtuosity—practical intelligence, inventive capacity, cooperation under siege. But virtuosity, if it remains pure performance, is vulnerable: it can be spectacularised, consumed, and moralised from the outside. The common is what makes that virtuosity non-consumable: it turns it into social bone, into institution that is neither state nor market.
The common is not a gently horizontal utopia. It is power. It is the capacity to decide collectively on the use of resources and the ways of inhabiting space. It is the capacity to produce internal norms—not juridical in the Western sense, but practical—that stabilise cooperation. It is also, inevitably, conflict: every authentic common collides with both market and colonial state. Rubble governance knows this very well; that is why it proposes “reconstruction” as contracting-out and “stabilisation” as a chain of command. The common is the anti-contract: reconstruction as reappropriation.
And the constraint must be reiterated: the Palestinian common is unthinkable without land. Palestine is not an “idea.” It is a concrete geography between river and sea—cities, hills, olive groves, coasts, erased villages. Any theory of multitude that forgets land slides into moralism: Gaza as icon, Palestine as universal metaphor. This is the West’s most elegant trap: universalise in order to subtract materiality. Palestine speaks to the world precisely because it is irreducibly situated. The common, therefore, is not only social; it is territorial. It is counter-cartography. It is the defence and reinvention of space.
An antidote is needed against the Western temptation to turn everything into culture and compassion: Ghassan Kanafani. Not as a literary icon or a “voice of pain,” but as a political criterion. Precisely because he has so often been domesticated into that form—tragic novelist to be commemorated and quoted as slogan—recovering him is polemical: it shows how neutralisation works. A militant and theorist of liberation is relocated into the protected zone of sensitivity, just as rubble governance shifts Palestine from strategy to testimony, from conflict to emotion, from politics to the humanitarian.
Kanafani’s obsession is the opposite: to prevent Palestine from being reduced to lament, nostalgia, wounded identity. The problem is not remembering the lost village; it is turning memory into organisation, consciousness, capacity to act. Memory is not valuable as archive; it is valuable as collective discipline, as a practice of formation. It is already common, because it does not belong to an “I”; it belongs to a “we” that is built. And that “we” is never a compact people: it is an entanglement traversed by conflict, class differences, moral ambiguities—a plurality in formation that must learn not to coincide with mere survival. This is why he rejects the figure of the “presentable” Palestinian: the proper victim, the body that suffers in the correct language, the life that asks permission to exist.
From this follows another decisive correspondence: humanitarianism as alibi. Not because suffering does not matter, but because—in the right language—it becomes a product: what allows others to feel good without changing the world. It is the cultural version of rubble governance: the West purchases innocence with emotion and demands that Palestine remain assigned to the place of eternal victim, “human case,” object of care. The rupture is simple: Palestine does not ask to be understood; it asks to be liberated. And liberation is neither rhetoric nor a concession from above: it is an organisational process. It is the common; it is institution; it is the capacity to make the diaspora a political network, the camps a political city, culture not a conciliatory “bridge” but part of collective armour.
This thread also helps avoid two symmetrical risks: philosophy as Western luxury (concepts that speak about everything while changing nothing) and resistance as romanticism (heroism without institution, sacrifice without form). The criterion remains material, and the questions become unavoidable: which organisational forms turn the wound into power? which institutions of the common prevent Palestine from being reduced to a manageable “cause”? which practices produce collective subjectivity capable of duration, without collapsing into imposed identities?
If colonisation is the rewriting of space, resistance must also be antagonistic rewriting. Here the common becomes a practice of counter-geography.
We are not speaking only of maps. We are speaking of access to water, the stitching of pathways, rebuilding homes as political act, the collective reuse of destroyed spaces. We are speaking of popular archives of erased villages—not as nostalgia, but as concrete claim: that land has names, genealogies, uses. We are speaking of the right of return not as a domesticated legal formula but as a material axis: to return is to reopen territorial continuities, to reinsert bodies and communities into the space from which they were expelled.
And here the diaspora ceases to be a problem and becomes a political horizon. In terms of multitude, diaspora is suffered deterritorialisation; in terms of becoming, it can be made active deterritorialisation: the circulation of skills, resources, networks. Kanafani understood this: the diaspora is not “outside” Palestine; it is another theatre of the same struggle, an extension of the Palestinian preindividual field. Governance tries to neutralise it with a subtle move: convert it into lobbying, advocacy, fundraising “for reconstruction.” In other words, convert political power into an auxiliary function of the stabilisation plan. The common demands something else: transnational infrastructures of cooperation, not donation circuits.
This difference must be stated bluntly: the West loves solidarity when it is reversible and non-binding; tolerates it when it is performative; criminalises it when it becomes infrastructure. This is why every real resistance is called “radicalisation,” while every symbolic gesture is called “civility.” The common is what makes solidarity irreversible: it turns it into institution.
There is, then, the plane that today decides everything: technology as the government of bodies and space. Palestine is one of the sites where global technocracy appears in its barest form—surveillance, drones, biometric recognition, databases, algorithmic management of permits and mobility. It is the digital translation of colonial logic: not only to dominate, but to render life calculable.
An evolutionary discourse on resistance cannot stop at denunciation. It must ask: how is a technological subject of the common built? Not in the naive sense of “digital solutions,” but in the political sense of wresting infrastructure away from monopolisation by dominators. Here the earlier terms return as programme: the multitude is not only a consumer of technologies; it can produce technical knowledge as common good. Collective individuation also passes through digital security practices, shared archives, resilient media. Becoming is not flight, but the invention of counter-infrastructures: autonomous networks, distributed memory, counter-maps, counter-archives.
This dimension is not futuristic. It is already real, even when embryonic. That is precisely why governance fears it: a technological common reduces dependency, reduces blackmailability, makes Palestine less “manageable.”
We must be explicit about a point often left implicit out of caution: a “presentable Palestine” has been constructed for Western consumption. It is the Palestine that suffers in the right way, speaks the language of law as liturgy, seeks recognition without disturbing relations of force. It is the Palestine that can be invited to a panel, funded for a project, turned into content. It is the Palestine that allows the West to feel human without ceasing to be imperial.
Real Palestine—the Palestine that resists, organises, insists on land, refuses trusteeship—is treated as anomaly. And here Kanafani’s lesson is ferocious: culture, if it is not part of the struggle, becomes decoration of domination. Philosophy, if it is not part of the struggle, becomes ornament. Solidarity, if it does not build the common, becomes moral hygiene.
To say “success of resistance” therefore also means this: to wrench Palestine away from this aesthetic, to return its political power not as symbol but as laboratory of another possible world. Not as an abstract, exportable model, but as the precise question Palestine poses to all contemporary multitudes: how do we build common life under domination, without delegating to the state and without being captured by the market?
If Trump’s plan is ridiculous because it mistakes resistance for a glitch, the horizon that opens is not sentimental utopia but hard political process: disable the colonial machine and, at the same time, construct a decolonial constituent form.
To disable does not mean awaiting a messianic event. It means wearing down impunity, eroding the claim to invincibility, making the political and material costs of colonisation unsustainable. And simultaneously growing a dual power of the common: committees, cooperatives, care networks, cultural and media infrastructures, territorial self-governance. It is the only alternative to trusteeship: if you do not build institution from below, someone else will build governance from above.
Here the common is not “beyond politics”; it is politics in non-state form. And the decolonial constituent is not a legal formula. It is the concrete reorganisation of space between river and sea: dismantle segregation, stitch territorial continuity, transform land and water into commons collectively managed, make return not a concession but a real process. In other words: move from the obsession with recognition to the power of institution.
In the end, the point is simple and radical. Trump’s plan—board, stabilisation, billion-dollar reconstruction—is the latest version of the same idea: peace as contracting-out, sovereignty as certification, Palestine as territory to monetise after it has been devastated.
Becoming-Palestine names the refusal of that idea. Not to replace it with a myth, but to affirm a more demanding political horizon: a multitude rooted in land, individuating collectively through institutions of the common, continuing to become against the grids of colonial power.
Kanafani returns as compass: Palestine is not a story to tell well in order to move the world. It is a struggle that forces the world to choose what it wants to be. Rubble governance would like to close that choice by replacing politics with procedure. Resistance, when it succeeds, does the opposite: it reopens history, prevents administered pacification, builds the common where empire wants beneficiaries.If there is a Palestinian “proposal” to the world, it is not a model to copy. It is a criterion by which to judge the present: every time a power promises reconstruction while instituting trusteeship; every time peace appears as an organisational chart; every time sovereignty is translated into compliance; every time a population is reduced to a user base—Palestine tells us politics is not over. It has only been seized. And it can be taken back—not with moral purity, but through the patient and conflictual construction of the common