From genocide to “Humanitarian Crisis”: How Trump’s Gaza Reconstruction Plan Depoliticizes Palestinian Liberation

Abstract

This thesis examines how Trump’s Plan for Gaza Reconstruction, codified in UN Security Council Resolution 2803 (November 2025), operates not as a humanitarian response but as an instrument of colonial governance that systematically depoliticizes Palestinian liberation Struggle. Drawing on Critical Discourse Analysis and decolonial feminist epistemology, the research analyzes three categories of discourse: Trump administration documents, Palestinian counter-narratives, and international responses, to demonstrate how reconstruction discourse transforms genocide into a manageable crisis, political demand into technical problems, and political subjects into objects requiring external management. The analysis identifies four interconnected depoliticization mechanisms: linguistic reframing, technocratic management, agency erasure, and future foreclosing, through which liberation becomes epistemologically unimaginable. Gender functions not as an additional variable but as the constitutive linchpin: the complete erasure of Palestinian women from reconstruction documents enables the broader construction of all Palestinians as lacking political capacity. Palestinian responses, from Hamas and the BDS Movement to Palestinian feminist collectives, are theorized as intellectual decolonization, systematic refusal of every depoliticizing operation. Written from the positionality of a Palestinian woman from Gaza, this research makes four theoretical contributions: gender as a mechanism, reconstruction as colonial governance, temporal sovereignty, and epistemic decolonization through refusal.

Date of Award	2026
Original language	American English
Awarding Institution	HBKU College of Humanities and Social Science