On 29 September 2025, Trump’s 20-point plan, whereby Washington imposed a ceasefire in Gaza, was made public. This brought a (temporary) end to the two-year war waged by the Israeli army, in exchange for the release of Israeli and Palestinian hostages and prisoners. However, this plan contains elements of doctrine that were already present in the Quartet’s Middle East project that emerged in 2002, at a time when the 1993 Oslo peace process was already moribund.
The Quartet for the Middle-East is a group composed of representatives of the United States, the European Union (EU), the United Nations (UN) and the Russian Federation. It was created in 2002 in connection with the second Intifada, at the time when the Oslo process was falling apart after the failure of the Camp David negotiations in 2000, the ones at Taba in January 2001, and the 11-September 2001 attacks on New York and Washington DC . Its missions have evolved over time. The most important one has been to pilot the “Road Map” (April 2003), that kind of instruction manual meant to guide Israelis and Palestinians in their “negotiations”. While those historic circumstances are long gone today, the Quartet still exists, through nobody knows where or what it does.
It was Al-Qaida’s attacks against the USA on 11 September 2001 which may be said to have “invented” the Quartet as a precursory tool for the diplomatic new deal in the Middle-East. Immediately after 9/11, US, European, and Russian representatives agreed to intervene jointly in Gaza, to get Yasser Arafat to declare publicly that East-West relations were going to change and that there was no other choice but to rally behind those who were waging “the war against terrorism”.
The Palestinian President’s declaration in favour of a cease-fire made in Gaza on 18 September 2001 in answer to that collective demand prefigured a new kind of relationship between the international community and the Palestinians. While the Quartet was not officially created until 2002, it was during that crucial week in September 2001 that it began to exist. Its appearance on the Middle-Eastern stage should be understood in the context of the international coalition formed to eliminate Al-Qaida and overthrow the Taliban who were protecting Ousama Ben Laden in Afghanistan. One of the Quartet’s demands was indeed “that there be an end to violence and terrorism as soon as the Palestinian people are endowed with an authority acting resolutely against terror .”
The crimes committed by Hamas on 7 October 2023 are not to be confused with the international terrorism of 2001, although in the view of Israel’s Prime Minister there is no difference between Hamas, the Islamic Jihad, Iran, Hezbolla, the pro-Iranian militia in Syria and Iraq or the Yemeni Houthis. French President Emmanuel Macron seemed at one time to share this all-embracing conception when he suggested that the “international coalition against Daech (...) might also fight against Hamas,” (Jerusalem, 23 October, 2023). This demand for a fight against “terrorism” turns up again in the Trump plan. In fact it figures in point one: “Gaza will be a de-radicalised terror-free zone that does not pose a threat to its neighbours”. In other words, Hamas and its allies must disarm or be subjected to the force of US arms. Their disarmament will be “placed under the supervision of independent monitors.”
Both the Quartet’s Road Map and the Trump Plan should be seen as knee-jerk reactions of defence on the part of the West (and of Israel), against international terrorism in the past and against Hamas’ armed resistance today.
At the turn of the new century, it was because of the successive failures of the negotiations that the idea of a “peace imposed” by the international community or, at the very least, by its forced implication, matured, since Israelis and Palestinians couldn’t come to an agreement on their own. While the former, in their great majority, rejected foreign interventions, the Palestinians were not averse to a more active international presence in order to avoid having to confront Israel alone. The Quartet was to be one of the instruments of that international interference in Palestinian affairs. The group will in particular have been given the task between 2002 and 2003 of making Yasser Arafat understand that it was time to create a post of Prime Minister as a way of depriving him of some of his ambitions.
This post will be held by Mamoud Abbas (Abou Mazen) who, once he became President of the Palestinian Authority (PA), would show himself ready to comply with US and Israeli demands by giving up the struggle against the occupation in exchange for the repression of Hamas. It is also the Quartet that repeatedly advised the Palestinians to accept this or that concession on the grounds that it would alleviate Israeli intransigence. Yet without ever exerting any pressure on Israel, in particular concerning the continued colonisation of the West Bank and Jerusalem.
The Trump plan is the very embodiment of that “imposed peace”, of which the first virtue is indisputable : to have demanded and obtained a cease-fire. It provides for Gaza to be governed “under the temporary transitional governance of a technocratic, apolitical Palestinian committee, responsible for delivering the day-to-day running of public services and municipalities for the people in Gaza.”
This notion of technocratic governance - implying the absence of any political dimension, of any nationalist demand and of course excluding Hamas - was already present in 2007 (Salam Fayyad government) and in 2013 (Rami Hamdallah government).
According to some tentative information, this temporary, transitional authority would be made up of from 7 to 10 members, only one of whom would be Palestinian. In keeping with the logic of its originators, this single Palestinian could only be a businessman or a security official. Mohammad Dahlan who, in Arafat’s day, was in charge of security in Gaza, would combine perfectly these two qualities : he detests Hamas, has close ties with Israel (and, it is said, with the CIA) and since his exile in the United Arab Emirates has developed regional Arab networks. However it would seem that today he has been quite demonetized in Gazan society where he would not be readily accepted.
The Authority would be placed under the “oversight and supervision of a new international transitional body, the ”Board of Peace”, which will be headed and chaired by President Donald J. Trump, with other members and heads of state to be announced, including former (British) Prime Minister Tony Blair.”
In other words, the Gazans would have only municipal functions : rebuilding their schools, their hospitals, their roads or collecting garbage. They had already been slated for the same municipal functions under the Interim Agreement on the West Bank and Gaza Strip (Oslo II, 1997). The fact that the international “peace council” is to be run by Washington with the unsinkable Tony Blair at its helm is another reminder of the Oslo era.
Tony Blair had already been unilaterally appointed by the United States in 2007 as the Quartet’s envoy for the Middle-East. He was the one who dreamed up those extravagant “quick impact projects” such as a sewage treatment plant in Gaza, housing projects in the West Bank, industrial estates, the development of a “corridor of peace and prosperity” etc., all projects which, under cover of economic progress supposed to benefit both Israelis and Palestinians, concealed their close fit with the structures of the occupation. Nor have they left the Palestinians with very pleasant memories.
Quartet, Palestinian Transitional Authority and international “Peace Council”, all hark back to the same US and Israeli conviction : the Palestinians are still in the infantile stage of their history and are not yet mature enough to bear the burden of self-determination and the responsibilities of statehood. So they have to be taken by the hand and led down the right path, even if it means showing firmness and authority should they prove stubborn.
At a time when the words “Oslo agreement” no longer meant much, Washington conceived the Quartet as little more than a rubber stamp for its decisions. The beginning of the new century was marked by various diplomatic and security initiatives of US obedience : Tenet security plan (named after the head of the CIA), Zinni diplomatic mission (named for a retired Marine Corps General), Senator Mitchell’s international investigating commission, President Clinton’s parameters and the Quartet’s Road Map. All these had the particularity that the partners or allies of the United States were not asked for their opinion or approval, yet Washington expected all their allies or partners to promote them with Arafat. Independently of their own merits, these initiatives functioned as a pressure group, a “lobby”, meant to persuade or indeed coerce the weaker party to the conflict, namely the Palestinians.
The chances are high that the US President’s peace council will fall into line with that logic which casts his international partners as under obligation to him. Nothing is provided in the Trump plan in terms of responsibility or accountability. To whom will the state of play be reported ? Before whom will the US choices be explained ? Who will bear the consequences of the decisions taken ? Who will evaluate the progress made ? These are the questions of yesterday. They are still valid today.
When the Quartet was formed the USA made it clear that its national interest - including its strategic relations with Israel - could never be diluted in any multi-lateral quartet (Russia, EU, UN). There is no longer any danger of that since the framers of the Trump plan have arranged to lock down every part of it. One of the questions which remains unanswered is that of the composition of the Peace Council. It is to be made up of “members and chiefs of State”. Of Arab allies ? Politicians involved in the Abraham Accords of 2020 ? Europeans ? Others ? Israelis ?
In Arafat’s day, the Quartet was meant to remind the Palestinian President regularly that Anti-Israeli terrorism beyond the “green line” was unacceptable, politically and morally, and could not be defined as resistance. The Trump plan says the same thing. While it refers only to the Gaza strip, it obviously applies also to the West Bank. The 2001 Tenet plan proposed a cease-fire and the reactivation of the security cooperation between Israel and the Palestine Authority. It came at the time of the Second Intifada (2000-2005), a period of intensification of Israeli-Palestinian clashes. It provided for the formation of police forces piloted by the CIA. It served as a technical basis for the Quartet and was meant to prefigure a political process, already beginning sketchily to appear.
The Trump Plan’s Temporary International Stabilisation Force has exactly the same objective. It consists in re-establishing a Palestinian Police Force to ensure the protection of the line of demarcation between Israel and the occupied territories, in other words to prevent attacks or incursions into Israel, especially from Egypt. Jordan will be one of the countries, along with Egypt, to be in charge of forming this Palestinian police force. The Hashemite Kingdom is accustomed to this task. Between 2005 and 2010, it was entrusted to Lieutenant General Keith Dayton, based in Annan. The Trump Plan outlines a political process, specifying that “the United States will establish a dialogue between Israel and the Palestinians to agree on a political horizon for peaceful and prosperous co-existence,” an irenic statement which smacks of negotiations, moderation or compromise.
The Quartet was interested in economic projects or ways of alleviating Israeli restrictions. The goal was to lay economic foundations for a viable State, not just to do business, at least not openly. Shimon Peres, Israeli Prime Minister at the time, had always defended the notion that economic prosperity was a condition for peace (UN General Assembly, September 1993) “The Middle-East must become prosperous, not only peaceful”. This idea cropped up regularly in the rhetoric emanating from the Quartet at the time. Sadam Fayad, then Palestinian Prime Minister, declared in 2008 : “You can do business in Palestine”. Everyone made a point of associating economics with peace, the economy was going to bring peace.
The Trump plan is more outspoken. For that business man -turned-President, there are wondrous investments within easy reach on the shores of the Mediterranean. In Gaza, everything has to be rebuilt. Where the Palestinians see nothing but destruction and havoc, Trump sees a necessary demolition site for the construction of “modern cities” such as those that exist throughout the Middle-East.
His plan had already been outlined in 2024 by his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, when he spoke of building an “international seaside resort” in Gaza, an idea corroborated by the President himself when he declared in February 2025 that “Gaza could surpass Monaco” or even become “the Riviera of the Middle-East”. A Trump Plan for economic development will be launched and the top international real estate developers - mostly Anglo-Saxon ones - will be invited to construct the new cities. Will it be necessary to empty Gaza of its population in order to carry out these grandiose projects and make them profitable ?
Translated from French by Noël Burch
