Afrasianet - Nihad Zaki - Bear the White Man's Burden
Send your best breeds
Go and oblige your exiled sons.
To serve the need of your captives
Serve them and gather them hard
They are broken and savage people
They are your sullen peoples who have recently been hunted,
Half-human peoples, half devil and half child.

In 1899, the British poet Rudyard Kipling composed his most famous poem, "The White Man's Burden," as a political effort to urge the United States to occupy the Philippines during the Spanish-American War, which ended with Washington taking control of the Philippines, Puerto Rico , and the island of Guam.

In the poem, Kipling called on Americans to carry the heavy burden of the British Empire, carrying the torch of the Enlightenment and spreading the principles of Western culture, inciting them to expand empire to liberate peoples he described as barbaric and barbaric.

In this sense, the poem not only reflected the racist sense of "racial superiority"  of the white man, but also glorified the manifestations of colonial power, which gave the imperialist states a proper justification for imperial expansion and colonization of African and Asian countries.

Palestinian author Adel Saeed Bishtawi argues in his book "The History of American Injustice" that the British poet did not realize that once the United States bore the heavy burden of Western culture, the British Empire would remove itself from its throne and become the sole superpower on the world.

In Kipling's view, there are peoples who are unable to practice good enough politics to manage their own affairs, a concept that was popular in the colonial era to justify invasion and influence in order to expand Western civilization and its values, and then quickly turned into political cover through a system of mandate and protection.

Today, this ideology is embodied in the form of "international tutelage" exercised over many conflict zones, in what can be seen as an extension of colonialism in a new form, which goes beyond the idea of sovereignty and the right to self-determination and deprives peoples of it.

In the Arab context, the white burden was seen as an extension of the domination exercised by Western powers over the concepts of culture, modernity, and democracy in non-Western societies. This dominance is not only economic or political, but also extends to the field of knowledge, so that "value" and "standard" are defined in the West, and local knowledge becomes lagging behind in terms of precedence, and received in terms of addition.

For example, in Orientalism, Edward Said points out that the Orientalist text "thrives in the forms that the pages of books and magazines published in Arabic have described as second-rate analyses written by Arabs about the Arab mind and about Islam." That is, even Arab voices may participate, consciously or unconsciously, in the production of subordinate thought that reproduces the stereotypes created by orientalists.

More than a hundred years have passed since Kipling's poem, and the United States has not yet abandoned its "paternalistic" ideology of what Washington calls the "liberation of peoples" through the imposition of tutelage and colonialism, despite its repeated failures, most recently in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

On September 29, US President Donald Trump announced his plan to end Israel's war on Gaza. The star of the plan, ironically, is the same man who shared Washington's invasion of Iraq to spread freedom in the Middle East two decades earlier: former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Trump announced his plan as an exceptional event that could bring lasting peace to the Middle East, as he proposed placing the Gaza Strip under "international trusteeship", in the manner of imposing protection  and the old British mandate , announcing the establishment of a body called the "Peace Council", in which Blair would manage the Gaza Strip during the transitional period, with Trump himself taking over the presidency of the council.

Trump returns to Kipling's logic, and colonialism becomes a heroic sacrifice worthy of an international peace prize, as white nations are forced to send their children to live in the diaspora in order to serve the colonized peoples, as if those peoples do not deserve and cannot be self-sufficient.

The time of the international envoy for peace and negotiation is over, and the time of the supreme ruler of the region has begun, to whom the de facto powers are vested politically, security, as well as culturally. This transformation, in which Blair appears to be just the beginning, will drag behind it a string of variables that will put the region in front of a very dangerous entitlement.

  In an article published in the British newspaper The Independent on September 30, World Affairs Editor Sam Kelly said that the terms of this cunning plan would turn the Gaza Strip into a "colony" ruled by Trump, run by Tony Blair as a "ruler ," while the Trump Peace Council is nothing but a "colonial hoax" that ends up imposing more Israeli hegemony over the lives and will of Palestinians.

The White Man's Burden in Gaza

In the past few days, many doubts and questions have been raised about the terms of Trump's vague plan, as  while the conditions of the commitments imposed on Hamas were firm and clear, such as the handing over of all prisoners alive and dead within 72 hours, disarming the resistance movements and destroying the tunnels, we find that the plan on the other side is characterized by ambiguity and lack of transparency regarding the Israeli occupation's commitments  

The proposal did not specify a time frame for the withdrawal of the Israeli army forces from Gaza, nor did it ignore the future of the Palestinian state, and made only a passing reference to the coordination of a Palestinian-Israeli dialogue on the future of Gaza, which made some doubt that international guardianship could continue indefinitely.

Dr. Mohamed Senussi, professor of forward-looking studies and international affairs at Mohammed V University in Morocco, says that history repeats itself and recycles endless cycles of Palestinian tragedies, starting with the Balfour Declaration in 1917, passing through the partition decision in 1947, and the Oslo Accords in 1993.

This is indicated by Sam Kelly's report, which says that Trump and Netanyahu before him have stated that the Gaza Strip will remain under international tutelage "until"  the Palestinian Authority can  prove its worth in accordance with American and Israeli standards.

This means that the trusteeship remains in place until the "guardians" are sure that the Palestinians are ready to take power, and thus the proposal raises a very important question: Who decides whether the Palestinian people are ready to govern themselves and decide their own destiny?

The question of "assessing" the performance of the Palestinian Authority has been left to the guardian itself, the United States, which is not a neutral party in the conflict, but a longtime ally of Israel and a party to Israel's war of annihilation on the Gaza Strip since October2023.

Moreover, the plan, which was promoted under the guise of humanity as a first step on the road to peace, would separate Gaza from  the West Bank, preventing the establishment of a Palestinian state and depriving the Palestinian cause of its content.
 
The proposal to impose guardianship on the Palestinian people was a step back in time, recalling the logic of the "white man's burden", which prevailed throughout the nineteenth century until the mid-twentieth century, and sought to justify colonialism by not being sufficiently civilized for peoples to govern themselves, considering the international guardianship as a temporary period, during which the white man undertook to equip other races according to the standards of "Western culture", so that they would be prepared and worthy of being granted the right to self-determination.

In his book "A History of American Injustice," Adel Peshtawi argues that Kipling "put in one poem a new human burden on the shoulders of non-white humanity, which is the burden of the black, yellow, or black man, and if the white man has really borne the burden, it is the burden of transporting the wealth of other colored people to his country, leaving behind ignorance, poverty, disease, and hunger."

In light of the "white man's burden" theory, and a quick review of the statements of Netanyahu and a number of his government officials, a racial supremacist tendency towards the Palestinians is clearly apparent: they have dehumanized them, described them as human animals, and linked the people of Gaza to the Amalekites, a people mentioned in the biblical accounts and ordered the Jews to exterminate them from their father's reel, according to them.

This close relationship between racism and colonialism was closely discussed by the late thinker Dr. Abdel Wahab Al-Messiri, in the sixth volume of his encyclopedia on Jews, Judaism and Zionism, saying that the Zionist project sought to adopt the basic ideas and theories on which the imperialist West built its colonial project, and therefore it was not surprising that the sons of the Zionist project adopted the concept of the "white man's burden."

The Zionist sociologist Arthur Rubin considered the term "Jew" to be reserved for white Jews alone, i.e., Ashkenazis, and not other races, so that, according to Messiri, they could share in the privileges and rights that the white man had reserved for himself, including carrying his heavy cultural and colonial burden.

Trump's plan is not the first

In April 2003, after former U.S. President George W. Bush announced a "road map" for a two-state solution by 2005, former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk wrote a lengthy article in Foreign Affairs magazine in May calling for Palestine to be placed under U.S. tutelage with a U.N. mandateuntil a final solution is reached on the question of the borders of the Palestinian state, claiming that foreign tutelage is the only way to put in place practical mechanisms to implement the road map on the ground.

The INDIC plan included a U.S. mandate, during which the United States would build democratic political institutions, an independent judiciary, draft a new constitution for the country, and ultimately oversee free elections before handing over power to the Palestinians.

The plan also stipulates the formation of an international military force of 10,000 troops, with the participation of countries including Britain, Australia and Canada, noting that it will play a role similar to the one played by the United States in Afghanistan in 2001. INDEC has set a time frame for the end of the mandate of three years, which can be extended as circumstances and data require.

INDC's vision is not much different from Trump's recently announced plan, both of which require a foreign authority to take over the administration of the Palestinian territories and become its official legal and political representative, and thus these visions are identified with all the old colonial ideologies, stemming from a patriarchal authority that assumes that there is a moral obligation on Western countries to regulate the affairs of the less civilized and less civilized countries.

This is the fundamental meaning of the concept of the "white man's burden", which ignores the sovereignty of peoples over their territories and their right to self-determination.

Both plans also put the Palestinian people in front of two options, either international trusteeship or Israeli occupation, and in this way these plans do not seem to be a means of peace as much as a tool of pressure and blackmail, using the Israeli occupation as a scarecrow to intimidate and subjugate the Palestinians. All of this leads us to wonder whether Trump's peace plan is just a game that gives Israel more time to change the facts on the ground.

It is also worth noting that there are two versions of the plan, with  Pakistani Foreign Minister Mohammad Ishaq Dar confirming that the plan announced by Trump is completely different from the document that Arab and Muslim countries reviewed in their meeting with him last week. Netanyahu made his amendments to the announced text in a six-hour meeting that brought together the president's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and Steve Witkoff , the US envoy to the Middle East, according  to Axios .

It is not surprising, then, that Netanyahu is the first to support the American plan, as it achieves the declared war goals that he has been unable to achieve over two years of military intervention, without incurring the heavy price of fighting.

At the same time, the plan represents a lifeline for Israel at a time when it is suffering from suffocating international isolation as a result of the escalating global anger over its brutal war of genocide against the Gaza Strip and its use of starvation as a weapon to break the resistance of the Palestinian people.

Tony Blair's Plan

Some believe that the reason why Tony Blair was chosen to run the Gaza Strip the day after the war was due to his political and diplomatic relations that made him fully aware of the nature of the complex conflicts between Palestinians and Israelis, especially since he served as a mediator between the two sides for eight years. This is true, but it is only one of many factors that contributed to his selection.

After the British prime minister stepped down in 2007, he was immediately appointed envoy of the Middle East Quartet , which was made up of the United States, Russia , the European Union , and the United Nations, with the aim of settling the outstanding "political problems" between the Palestinian Authority and Israel, in preparation for the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Martin Indyk published a report in Foreign Affairs, urging Tony Blair to adopt a plan to impose international trusteeship on Palestine as envoy of the Quartet, advising him that any success in his new post would require a ready-made plan of action and several thousand international support forces.

In the first weeks of the Israeli war on the Gaza Strip, Blair visited the occupied Palestinian territories more than once, and upon his return he tasked his famous institution with drafting a proposal to establish a body that could receive a mandate from the United Nations to become the legitimate and political representative of the Gaza Strip, under the name of the International Transitional Authority for Gaza.

This means that as soon as the war began, Blair began to formulate his own plan to impose a tutelage on Gaza. As we get to this moment, it is clear how the threads of the three plans, the Trump project, the Blair plan, and Martin Indyk's vision, have converged to decide the fate of Gaza independently of the will of its people.

In a speech announcing his comprehensive plan for peace in Gaza, Trump called the former British politician "the good man Blair," a description that is in line with the image with which Blair wants to paint his return to the international arena and public life.

South Africa's best-known archbishop Desmond Tutu has described Blair as saying he should be tried at the International Criminal Court in The Hague for his role in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis during the Iraq war. American writer and journalist Beline Fernandez agrees , saying that the mere mention of Blair's name at Trump's peace council gives a "colonial stamp" to the whole project, wondering how a war criminal in Iraq can become a peacemaker in Gaza.

In the July war on Lebanon in 2006, Blair sided with the United States, rejecting a ceasefire, and stating that Israel needed more time to destroy Hezbollah's capabilities.

During his tenure as envoy of the Quartet, Blair did not appear to be neutral in dealing with the Palestinian issue and the Palestinians. This led many critics to point out that his policies at the time were not much different from those pursued during his tenure as British prime minister, which aligned with the American and Israeli agendas.

All these factors that arouse suspicions and fears bring to mind the history  of the British Mandate era for Palestine (1917-1948), the details of which were recounted by the Jerusalem historian Dr. Ahmed Alami in his book "The British Invasion of Palestine", explaining how Britain worked to create the appropriate conditions for the crystallization and planting of the foreign Zionist state in the occupied Palestinian territories, in order to achieve the promise of the British Foreign Secretary Balfour.

Blair's political history is not limited to the role he played in misleading the British public into falsely believing the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, a role he deservedly played, according to the findings of the British Commission of Inquiry into the Iraq War, headed by Sir John Chilcott, which concluded in 2016 that the decision to invade was wrong and based on false intelligence, but goes beyond that to other accusations that go beyond politics, British journalist Jonathan Cook pointed out in a research paper published Fall 2013 at the Institute for Palestine Studies.

According to his critics, Blair was not fair in his dealings with the Middle East, and moreover, the Financial Times estimated his annual income at £20 million in 2012.

  In 2008, he joined the American investment bank JPMorgan as a senior consultant with a huge salary.

For all these reasons, the status of Gaza under the direct American tutelage and under the supervision of Tony Blair is the most serious clause of this plan, which Sam Kelly said in his aforementioned report, which puts the Palestinian position in a predicament, whether it is accepted or rejected. It uses peace as a mask behind which a deceptive and tight political game is hidden to blackmail, bargain for a ceasefire, and the entry of humanitarian aid to the people of the Gaza Strip.

In this game, reconstruction is a tool of blackmail, and Israeli withdrawal is a conditional reward rather than an inherent right of the Palestinians, and in this way the Trump project becomes a minefield, not a peace plan.

This is the trap that the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas)  seeks to overcome, as its response to the US president's plan on October 3 came in two parts.

The first proves good faith by agreeing to hand over all prisoners, alive or dead, in order to achieve the first item and to ensure the cessation of Israeli aggression against the Gaza Strip. The second part of the movement's statement stated that the future of Gaza is a national issue that cannot be decided by Hamas alone. The movement confirmed its approval of the Egyptian proposal and reiterated its desire to hand over the administration of the Gaza Strip to a Palestinian body of independents.

Unexpectedly,  Trump welcomed Hamas' response, and published the statement on his official social media pages, which came as a surprise to Netanyahu, especially since he considered Hamas' response a rejection of the American plan, according to the American website Axios.

Despite the imminent imminence of reaching a ceasefire agreement and thus ending the war between the occupation army and the resistance factions, the coming days will witness complex negotiations that are pregnant with many details that each side wants to ensure achieved, and in the midst of all this, Tony Blair and those behind him are waiting, waiting for what the next negotiations will lead to, waiting for a new imperialist role that hides behind a beautiful name, the "Peace Council".