This article is read by Eunice Wong, a Juilliard-trained actor, featured on Audible's list of Best Women Narrators. Her work is on the annual Best Audiobooks lists of the New York Times, Audible, AudioFile, & Library Journal. www.eunicewong.actor

Text originally filed January 16, 2025

Piece Plan - by Mr. Fish

Israel, going back decades, has played a duplicitous game. It signs a deal with the Palestinians that is to be implemented in phases. The first phase gives Israel what it wants — in this case the release of the Israeli hostages in Gaza — but Israel habitually fails to implement subsequent phases that would lead to a just and equitable peace. It eventually provokes the Palestinians with indiscriminate armed assaults to retaliate, defines a Palestinian response as a provocation and abrogates the ceasefire deal to reignite the slaughter.

If this latest three-phase ceasefire deal is ratified — and there is no certainty that it will be by Israel — it will, I expect, be little more than a presidential inauguration bombing pause. Israel has no intention of halting its merry-go-round of death.

The Israeli cabinet has delayed a vote on the ceasefire proposal while it continues to pound Gaza. At least 81 Palestinians have been killed in the last 24 hours.

The morning after a ceasefire agreement was announced, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused Hamas of reneging on part of the deal “in an effort to extort last minute concessions.” He warned that his cabinet will not meet “until the mediators notify Israel that Hamas has accepted all elements of the agreement.”

Hamas dismissed Netanyahu’s claims and repeated their commitment to the ceasefire as agreed with the mediators.

The deal includes three phases. The first phase, lasting 42 days, will see a cessation of hostilities. Hamas will release some Israeli hostages – 33 Israelis who were captured on Oct. 7, 2023, including all of the remaining five women, those aged above 50, and those with illnesses – in exchange for up to 1,000 Palestinians imprisoned by Israel.

The Israeli army will pull back from the populated areas of the Gaza Strip on the first day of the ceasefire. On the 7th day, displaced Palestinians will be permitted to return to northern Gaza. Israel will allow 600 aid trucks with food and medical supplies to enter Gaza daily.

The second phase, which begins on the 16th day of the ceasefire, will see the release of the remaining Israeli hostages. Israel will complete its withdrawal from Gaza during the second phase, maintaining a presence in some parts of the Philadelphi corridor, which stretches along the eight-mile border between Gaza and Egypt. It will surrender its control of the Rafah border crossing into Egypt.

The third phase will see negotiations for a permanent end of the war.

But it is Netanyahu’s office that appears to have already reneged on the agreement. It released a statement rejecting Israeli troop withdrawal from the Philadelphi Corridor during the first 42-day phase of the ceasefire. “In practical terms, Israel will remain in the Philadelphi Corridor until further notice," while claiming the Palestinians are attempting to violate the agreement. Palestinians throughout the numerous ceasefire negotiations have demanded Israeli troops withdraw from Gaza. Egypt has condemned the seizure of its border crossings by Israel.

The deep fissures between Israel and Hamas, even if the Israelis finally accept the agreement, threaten to implode it. Hamas is seeking a permanent ceasefire. But Israeli policy is unequivocal about its “right” to re-engage militarily. There is no consensus about who will govern Gaza. Israel has made it clear the continuance of Hamas in power is unacceptable. There is no mention of the status of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), the U.N. agency that Israel has outlawed and that provides the bulk of the humanitarian aid given to the Palestinians, 95 percent of whom have been displaced. There is no agreement on the reconstruction of Gaza, which lies in rubble. And, of course, there is no route in the agreement to an independent and sovereign Palestinian state.

Israeli mendacity and manipulation is pitifully predictable.

The Camp David Accords, signed in 1979 by Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, without the participation of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), normalized diplomatic relations between Israel and Egypt. But the subsequent phases, which included a promise by Israel to resolve the Palestinian question along with Jordan and Egypt, permit Palestinian self-governance in the West Bank and Gaza within five years, and end the building of Israeli colonies in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, were never honored.

Or take the 1993 Oslo Accords. The agreement, signed in 1993, which saw the PLO recognize Israel’s right to exist and Israel recognize the PLO as the legitimate representatives of the Palestinian people, and Oslo II, signed in 1995, which detailed the process towards peace and a Palestinian state, was stillborn. It stipulated that any discussion of illegal Jewish “settlements” was to be delayed until “final’ status talks, by which time Israeli military withdrawals from the occupied West Bank were to have been completed. Governing authority was to be transferred from Israel to the supposedly temporary Palestinian Authority. The West Bank was carved up into Areas A, B and C. The Palestinian Authority has limited authority in Areas A and B. Israel controls all of Area C, over 60 percent of the West Bank.

The right of Palestinian refugees to return to the historic lands seized from them in 1948 when Israel was created — a right enshrined in international law — was given up by the PLO leader Yasser Arafat, instantly alienating many Palestinians, especially those in Gaza where 75 percent are refugees or the descendants of refugees. Edward Said called the Oslo agreement “an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles” and lambasted Arafat as “the Pétain of the Palestinians.”

The scheduled Israeli military withdrawals under Oslo never took place. There was no provision in the interim agreement to end Jewish colonization, only a prohibition of “unilateral steps.” There were around 250,000 Jewish colonists in the West Bank at the time of the Oslo agreement. They have increased to at least 700,000. No final treaty was ever concluded.

The journalist Robert Fisk called Oslo “a sham, a lie, a trick to entangle Arafat and the PLO into abandonment of all that they had sought and struggled for over a quarter of a century, a method of creating false hope in order to emasculate the aspiration of statehood.”

Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, who signed the Oslo agreement, was assassinated on Nov. 4, 1995 following a rally in support of the agreement, by Yigal Amir, a far-right Jewish law student. Itamar Ben-Gvir, now Israel’s National Security Minister, was one of many rightwing politicians who issued threats against Rabin. Rabin’s widow, Leah, blamed Netanyahu and his supporters — who distribute...