By Enyeribe OGUH (PhD)
The recent Security Council’s laudable endorsement of your Gaza Peace Plan on 17 November 2025 has inspired me to pen this letter to help further your bold plans for the Middle East. You deserve huge credit for that historic peace deal adopted 9 October 2025 at Sharm El-Sheikh in Egypt. If the peace holds for good and normalcy is at last restored in Gaza, West Bank, and Israel, then Sharm El-Sheikh might in time be reckoned as the Gettysburg moment in the new Israel-Palestine rapprochement.
Whereas I do not speak nor can claim to speak for the direct victims of the Hamas-Israeli war, this letter represents the voice of a silent majority who for long has been troubled, traumatized, and diminished by the recent horrendous events in the Middle East particularly since the 7 October 2023 mindless massacre in Israel by Hamas militants. The backlash in the Gaza Strip and beyond by the Israeli regime has been mindboggling. Hence, I address this letter to you, Sir, on the back of the United Nations approval of your 20-Point Plan to end the catastrophic goings-on in Gaza.
The first phase of the deal is well underway: a fragile ceasefire is in place; Israeli troops have withdrawn to the agreed yellow lines; greater aid crossings have opened up; all living hostages have returned home; both sides have exchanged prisoners; and the remains of dead hostages are being returned.
The next phases in view include the creation and deployment of an international stabilization force; the demilitarization of Gaza; disarming of Hamas; a transitional government by Palestinian technocrats; the reconstruction of Gaza; and a conditional recognition of Palestine’s right to self-determination. To drive these milestones will be the Board of Peace, which you have elected to chair.
Mr. President, your brave Gaza Peace initiative is truly commendable but incomplete. It is great as a short-term strategy, but short on the desired long-term objective: sustainable peace and stability in the Middle East. What’s the point, Sir, in rebuilding the Gaza Strip today only for it to be reduced to a gigantic cesspit of rubble, mashed cadavers, and charred remains of women, babies, and children at the next flashpoint with Israel? Disarming, disbanding, or even obliterating Hamas – if ever attainable – will not guarantee Israel’s security nor sustainable cessation of hostilities between Palestine and Israel. Hamas is but a front; land is the test. Unless that critical test is fairly and firmly solved, your bold and beautiful plan may only buy time for both sides to replan and rearm for the next inferno.
In contrast, reconciliation – through unification and a restorative justice programme – is the surest path to a lasting peace in the Middle East, greater stability in global trade, and significant economic relief to the US taxpayers. The striking omission of a justice and reconciliation provision in your famous plans for Gaza seems rather unfortunate.
To heal this long festering sore in the heart of humanity and to permanently staunch the hemorrhaging lungs of Arabia once and for all require robust and consistent plans to unite the Palestinians and the Israelis on their land. Yes, it is possible for Palestinian children and Israeli children to be close friends, attend the same schools, use the same playgrounds, and live side by side in the same humane and secure neighborhood.
How can these aims be achieved? One plausible model is that inspired by Queen Anne of England. In 1707, against all odds, Queen Anne of the Scottish House of Stuart oversaw the historic union of the separate kingdoms of England and Scotland into the United Kingdom of Great Britain. This was reached through a series of negotiations marked by political pragmatism and altruistic motives. England, dominant in military and economic terms, extended conditions that Scotland—reeling from the financial failure of the Darien scheme—found hard to refuse.
The Act of Union thus became a delicate balance between sovereignty and survival: Scotland relinquished political sovereignty and independence but retained legal and cultural distinctiveness. In this sense, that extraordinary Union of 1707 can serve as a historical analogue for grappling with the current Israel–Palestine fiasco, where a cascading assortment of issues including asymmetrical power, contested sovereignty, and ethno-cultural identity remain central.
Like the Scotland of Queen Anne’s reign, Palestine today faces negotiations with a far stronger counterpart—Israel—whose politico-economic stature and global alliances might set the terms of engagement. Both contexts highlight how at times relative inequities can shape and undergird lasting treaties: one side’s consolidation coinciding with the other’s compromise.
In our time, Mr. President, you have risen to the test and initiated giant steps to end the anguish in Gaza and to restore peace in the Middle East. Like Queen Anne, you are well placed to facilitate further negotiations to unify the great people of Palestine and the great people of Israel to share a common homeland and to form a new State that may be christened as the State of the Holy Land – a hallowed and fitting name that has long been associated with the area and that long predates the current nomenclatures of the contending nations.
Will this proposal be likely to advance the status quo? Surely. It will be likely to engender untold benefits to the Israelis, the Palestinians, their Arab neighbors, the Americans, and the global human community at large. First, history has copiously shown right from the Nakba of 1948 to the latest strife that both nations cannot long survive as hostile neighbors nursing old wounds, enduring new wounds, and facing mutually assured destruction over unsettled interests in the same Holy Land. The trite political grandstanding about a two-State solution fails to tackle this poser but merely shrugs it off or feebly adjourns it sine die until the next firestorm.
Second, the unification of the Holy Land will be a momentous acknowledgement of the right of common ownership of that prized land by both parties. It will fulfil your Gaza deal’s promise of the right of self-determination for the Palestinian people. It may also help to quell the relentless lampooning of rightful Israeli settlements within the Palestinian areas. Minus unification, it is entirely unlikely that either Israel or Palestine will ever renounce their claims to Jerusalem.
Attempting to resolve this problem by simply proposing a two-State solution that skirts around such sensitive issues like the legal right to East Jerusalem and the legitimacy of the occupations in the West Bank will be utterly insincere and futile. It could amount to laying hidden mines and timebombs to imperil the present and the future generations of Israelis and Palestinians.
Third, unifying Palestinians and Israelis in the Holy Land will be the masterstroke that can decisively dispel the myriads of agitations and insecurities in the Middle East. With a united Holy Land comprising Israel and Palestine, the so-called ‘axis of resistance’ scattered across the Middle East and forever fighting for Palestine’s liberation will be likely to shield their swords and perhaps even claim victory. Also, the much-harassed Israelis may finally be able to go about their daily businesses and to sleep at nights without the constant dread of missile cocktails. With both nations reconciled, Iran, Hezbollah, Houthis or Hamas can have really no fair reason without baiting to lob missiles towards parks or shops mixed with Palestinians, Israelis, and others in the Holy Land.
Fourth, a lasting end to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis through a negotiated settlement will be a massive gain for the United States. For years, the US has bolstered the State of Israel with an annual military and intelligence aid running into several billion US dollars. Its key objective has been to shore up the security of Israel against a sea of hostile neighbors.
In addition, for many years, the United States has maintained numerous military bases and operational facilities across the Middle East with a total estimated annual cost far beyond the GDP of several sovereign States put together. If lasting peace is restored to the Holy Land, the US will be likely to review or reduce its annual military aid to Israel while some of its military bases in the Middle East will be expected to close down. And these factors will generate massive gains to the US taxpayers, indeed.
Some may contend, Mr. President, that the long history of hostile relations between Israel and Palestine works against the unification proposal as the current delicate peace, so closely monitored, could deteriorate in the proposed sovereign Holy Land. To complexify this contention, analysts may compare unifying Israel and Palestine to an improbable proposal to unify Sudan and South Sudan or Serbia and Kosovo. But the case in point differs fundamentally from the weak analogies. South Sudan and Kosovo broke away from Sudan and Serbia respectively after several years of struggle. Each breakaway State occupied a specific area and had frontiers fairly delineated from those of the parent States. Each of the contending sides also had robust autochthonous claims to the areas they occupied.
In contrast, the unification of the Holy Land may be compared to the unification of South Africa. With the coming to power in 1948 of the National Party, apartheid was applied as state policy in South Africa. Subsequently, it enacted a series of segregationist legislation starting with the Bantu Authorities Act of 1951 which led to the creation of many Bantustans (homeland) for Black and colored peoples.
Some of these Bantustans like Transkei, Ciskei, and Venda were granted independence between the 1970s and early 1980s. After years of bitter struggles against this state of affairs led by Dr Nelson Mandela and his once-outlawed African National Congress, a negotiated plan to unify the country was achieved in 1994 when Mandela was installed as the first Black President of South Africa after winning the country’s first multiracial elections.
A closer example, Your Excellency, may be the United States. President Abraham Lincoln oversaw a tough and expensive civil war in the 1860s to keep the North and the South of the US together. It would have been easy but rash for Lincoln to accept proposals for former slaves and their descendants to be granted a separate State or homeland of their own carved out from the enormous territories of the United States. But President Lincoln impressively resisted the temptation to balkanize the Land of Dreams and the Home of the Brave.
It may be fair to state that Lincoln’s victory and prescience tremendously helped to keep America one and multiracial to this day. Like in every human society, problems persist in the US, which impose moral imperatives on its leaders and citizens to work and strive always to perfect the hard-earned Union.
Mr. President, the time is ripe to forge a comparable, necessary, albeit smaller and imperfect, Union in the Holy Land. The time is ripe indeed to right that historical wrong in the Middle East – the shortsightedness of divvying up the Holy Land (little as it is) between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Whereas history has exposed that division to have been reckless and regrettable, we can no longer stand by helplessly and allow the horrible effects of that original sin to rankle on ad infinitum ad nauseam with unimaginably ruinous consequences. As the Holy Writ rightly states, the Sabbath is made for man not man for the Sabbath.
You once imagined a post-conflict Gaza City becoming the Riviera of the Middle East. That vision was perhaps rightly and widely ridiculed at the time. Describing Gaza as a potential ‘Riviera of the Middle East’ appeared to romanticize suffering by projecting a Western leisure metaphor onto a site of immense human trauma. ‘Riviera’ evokes images of beaches, luxury, and tourism. In the prevailing context, it risks erasing historical pain and flattening political struggle into an aesthetic vision of prosperity. Such framing displaces the discourse from justice and human dignity to mere economic triumphalism, as though luxury and tourism were or can be substitutes for freedom, self-determination, and political sovereignty.
On the upside, however, your vision might have been prescient. A reconciled Holy Land – composed of Gaza, West Bank, Golan Heights, and the world-class cities of Israel – can become truly the Riviera of the Middle East. It can be a melting pot of sorts like New York City: beauty, culture, nature, resorts, finance, fashion, faith, and skyscrapers.
The proposed Holy Land at its heights can be a major business and cultural hub in the Middle East and a tourist magnet to rival Dubai, Riyadh, and Doha. It could help to reposition the Middle East towards recapturing its past glories. Recall that ancient Mesopotamia, especially cities like Babylon and Baghdad, brought together Sumerians, Akkadians, Persians, Jews, Arabs, Turks, and Kurds. Under the Abbasid Caliphate (8th–13th centuries), Baghdad was a renowned intellectual center, where Greek philosophy, Persian science, and Arabic scholarship met in translation and dialogue — arguably the first true ‘cosmopolitan’ city in world history.
President Trump, I dare to dream of the day when the future State of the Holy Land will take its seat at the United Nations as the legal successor of the merging states of Israel and Palestine. A new and unstained name will be crucial for this merger so as to make a clean break from the divided and sullied past.
Switching the name of either State will weaken the aptness and legitimacy of the proposal as it may suggest an absorption or dissolution of the other constituent entity. The new name signifies a renewed hope, a renewed land, and a renewed people poised for lasting reconciliation, fraternal consecration, mutual relations, and shared ownership of the Holy Land. The latter will be a union forged in blood and a land hallowed not least by the immense human and material sacrifices of countless persons.
This proposal, no doubt, might prove tough for both sides and their allies to welcome at first blush. It might even be criticized as neither home-brewed nor first advanced by either side. Yet, under the prevailing circumstances, such criticisms are a big plus for the proposal. The existing tension and mutual suspicion between both parties comprehensibly clouds objectivity and can precipitate the stereotyping and distrusting of even the finest ways-forward from either side. But a broad-based, balanced, and progressive reconciliation plan from a respected personality in the region such as President Donald John Trump will have greater purchase if it is timeously, prudently, and confidently promoted.
Like the United States and the Republic of South Africa, the united State of the Holy Land should be a multiracial society for all who live there. It can be a democratic confederation. To that end, the State can be organized by way of administrative regions consistent with the existing geographical, historical, and linguistic lines. Whereas the seat of the central government may remain in Jerusalem, a negotiated quantum of power should devolve to the regions.
The center can retain certain reserved powers like foreign affairs, national security, and monetary policies that cut across the entire State while the devolved regions may handle, among other things, education, health, and housing. In any case, the formula for sharing power, rights, and responsibilities between the center and the regions can be hashed out much later by both parties in liaison with your Board of Peace or a specialized working group.
It is essential, Your Excellency, that the central and the regional governments in the proposed State of the Holy Land be truly democratic and capable of serving as a beacon of inspiration to the rest of the Middle-Eastern States. At the center, in particular, power should be made rotational and complementary between the two major constituent peoples at least for the first twenty-five years.
Over time, when the State has matured and with the people well reconciled, a new constitution or an amendment may enact a new multiracial model for presidential elections. This aspect should form a critical core of the negotiated settlements so as to ensure equity. It will be the onus of the UN and the Peace Board to supervise and safeguard the realization and smooth operation of this proposed constitutional arrangement for as long as necessary.
Accordingly, subject to the terms, it may be agreed that the Presidential or the Prime Ministerial power should rotate between Israeli and Palestinian candidates after every single term of five years or every two terms of ten years. Similarly, for each Israeli President or Prime Minister, there should be a Palestinian Vice President or Deputy Prime Minister and vice versa. Each government of the day must have a fair representation of the constituent nations in the executive cabinet, the parliament, the judiciary, the civil service, and the security services. The diversity ratio at the regions will differ in line with the demographical composition of the local residents.
Lastly, Mr. President, the authenticity and sustainability of these proposals will hinge on certain fundamental guarantees. First, the involvement of Israeli and Palestinian leadership or delegates, both the West Bank and the Gaza factions, in a series of expanded negotiations for a longstanding end of the persistent feuds and the establishment of the proposed State of the Holy Land.
Second, a general recognition by the Palestinian people, through a referendum or an official affirmation by its leadership, of the legal, natural and imprescriptible rights of the Israelis to exist as a people. Third, a valid recognition by the Israelis, via an official affirmation by its leadership or through a referendum, of the legal, natural and imprescriptible rights of the Palestinians to exist as a people.
Fourth, an agreement by both sides to establish a reconciliation commission to redress lingering grievances from the proximate past. A credible model for this can be the South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission that was led by the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu after the dismantling of the apartheid regime.
Fifth, the promise of amnesty and integration for de-radicalized and willing Hamas security personnel into the armed forces and civil service of the proposed State of the Holy Land. And, sixth, a pledge of evenhandedness in the relations with both parties by your administration, particularly during the course of the critical constitutional negotiations as well as a commitment to support positive outcomes mutually and freely reached by both sides.
Mr. President, if your Gaza Peace deal does not end up as a ruse that handed Gaza and the whole of Palestine over to Israel; if it is expanded and enabled to inspire the Palestinians and the Israelis to reconcile with one another, to unify the Holy Land, and to rebuild the ruins triggered by years of spiritual poverty and historical anomaly; you will have left a legacy that far outstrips the weight of a Nobel Peace Prize. The latter may be the cherry on the cake fitting for the brave architects of the new State.
Respectfully
The post An open letter to President Donald J Trump on resolving Israel-Palestine imbroglio appeared first on The Business & Financial Times.
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