Peace in the Middle East begins with ending Palestinianism.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s Peace Plan declares: Jewish sovereignty is not the problem. It’s the precedent.

U.S. President Donald Trump meets with family members of the Israeli hostages earlier this week in Israel. (photo: The White House/X)

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This is a guest essay by Bob Goldberg, who writes the newsletter, “The New Zionist Times.”

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The Trump Peace Plan is not a map. It is a shift in narrative.

Its borders are a deliberate act of moral realignment that eliminates Palestinianism. And let’s call it what it is and how U.S. President Donald Trump defines it: Palestinianism is the sanctification of the annihilation of the Jewish People — a creed that recasts Jewish extermination as justice, a modern blood libel institutionalized into policy, sustained by the fiction that Palestinians are eternal refugees entitled to reclaim land that was never lost.

This is no small thing. The proposal marks the first time in decades that a major diplomatic framework has declared moral clarity a prerequisite to political progress. It aims to halt the adoption of the oldest hatred — the notion of the Jew as history’s malign force — into the bloodstream of international policy. By reversing that narrative, it initiates the long-overdue task of dismantling the ideological scaffolding that keeps the conflict alive.

The plan also performs an act of exposure. It isolates the “pro-Palestinian” movement as the true obstacle to peace. It is a doctrine that replaces nation-building with negation, that turns the rejection of Jewish sovereignty into a moral commandment.

Indeed, the real goal of the proposal is to eliminate Islamism and Palestinianism, the co-joined doctrinal claim that the Jewish nation must disappear to bring about a perfect world. Palestinianism drove the demonization and delegitimization of Israel and Jews. It has stoked the latest blood libel that Israel is guilty of genocide.

Eliminating it deprives the Western haters of Israel, particularly “anti-Zionists” whose ideology about Israel being born in sin made Palestinianism possible, of their funding and their purpose.

At the heart of this shift is power — unapologetically wielded. Talk of peace does not produce peace. Pressure does. Qatar, Egypt, and Turkey have not leaned on Hamas out of sudden enlightenment; they have done so because Israel and the United States have shown the will to compel compliance. Silence follows when Israeli jets destroy Iranian missile depots, when Hezbollah’s arsenals vanish overnight, when Hamas operatives find themselves hunted even in Doha. Interests align when power is exercised, not when it is theorized.

This is the strategic foundation of the Trump plan: Align moral clarity with military credibility. Use normalization, investment, and access to prosperity as levers to compel behavior — demilitarization over destruction, governance over grievance. That is how the fiction of perpetual victimhood suffocates: not by argument, but by attrition.

The Abraham Accords are the living proof of the plan. What began as bilateral normalization has evolved into a regional architecture — an alliance of the willing, bound by trade, energy, and security. Each new participant diminishes the oxygen that sustains Palestinianism. Under this framework, nations are rewarded for integration and penalized for delegitimization. It is diplomacy with consequences, not condolences.

Reconstruction under this plan is selective by design. Those ruled by Hamas or consumed by rejectionism will be left behind. Progress will flow to cantons that deliver education, services, and law while publicly renouncing the doctrine of elimination. The Abraham Accords’ durability through war and crisis has already shown that state-level cooperation can outlast slogans. The next phase is to translate that resilience into Palestinian political life: a slow replacement of mythology with municipal success.

In a perfect world, the apostles of Palestinianism would stand before history and renounce the “right of return” — the demographic fantasy that would erase the Jewish state. They will not. They will fade, deprived of funds and platforms. Palestinianism survives only where it is subsidized: in schools that teach martyrdom as destiny, in NGOs that monetize grievance, in institutions that mistake perpetual aid for progress. The remedy is simple and unsentimental: conditional funding. Aid tied to education that teaches coexistence, not annihilation. Governance training, not indoctrination. Transparent audits, not blank checks.

While Palestinianism may persist for some time, its supporters will gradually lose resources and influence. The Trump plan continues reconstruction, but areas controlled by Hamas or deeply rooted in Palestinianism will be excluded.

Instead, governance will focus on providing services, education, and law, rejecting extreme positions. The Abraham Accords show that strong state relationships can survive adversity, and Trump and Israel aim to leverage these ties to encourage change within Palestinian politics.

This is how rhetoric becomes reality. Diplomatic isolation for the obstinate. Incentives for the accountable. The use of American power and Israeli resolve to turn moral clarity into political architecture.

Enemies are not defeated when they repent. They are defeated when their ideology exacts a cost they can no longer bear. The Trump plan creates that cost. It rewards states that abandon Jew-hatred and isolates those that persist. It builds a political economy in which anti-Judaism and Palestinianism are liabilities, not causes. Recent history shows that the reconstruction of evil regimes is possible, but only when their capacity to spread their creed is destroyed and replaced under the steady shadow of force; the capacity to transmit and implement their ideologies is also destroyed.

The Trump proposal seeks to reverse the tide of delegitimization and isolate the doctrine of Islamism and Palestinianism. The urgent task is to convert rhetoric into institutions. Let us use this moment to amplify Israel’s newfound power and America’s influence, to reinforce the Abraham Accords and agreements necessary for performing the unglamorous work of building a political alternative to annihilationist myth.

The small steps matter: local competence, conditional aid, diplomatic rewards, and an international consensus that the “right of return” and the questioning of Israel’s existence should no longer be weaponized.

The Trump proposal does not promise utopia. It promises consequences. It seeks to end the moral inversion that has long defined the conflict, the one that casts Jewish survival as aggression and Arab rejectionism as virtue. Its goal is to re-civilize the language of peace itself, to drain it of cannot and restore it to purpose.

That is not idealism. That is how peace is made in the real world: through narratives reversed, power applied, and delusion starved of oxygen. Focus there and the rest will follow.

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