On 17 November 2025, the UN Security Council passed a resolution endorsing Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu’s so-called “peace plan” for Gaza. In a statement, the Cabinet of the Progressive International condemned it as a colonial scheme and a “calculated attempt to erase the horizon of Palestinian liberation.”

This is not the first time the Trump administration has imposed a so-called “peace” on a besieged people. In Sudan, the US is brokering a “peace process” under the banner of the Quad Initiative — a mechanism launched by the US together with the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, all of which have supplied parties to the vicious war for their own benefit.

Before Sudan, the US brokered the so-called “Washington Accord” to end the fighting between the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Rwanda. The deal called for the withdrawal of Rwandan troops from the DRC and the Congolese government to cease supporting the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda — all while surrendering much of Congo’s vast mineral wealth to US tutelage.

What do these so-called “peace” deals have in common? And whom do they serve?

In each case, the “peace” was built on the back of genocidal violence and destruction. The wars in Congo, Sudan and Palestine have collectively killed well over six million people — in fact, six million have perished in the thirty-year bloodbath in the DRC alone, with hundreds of thousands more in Sudan and Gaza — and displaced more than twenty million. Those who left — and those who remain — now live in conditions that threaten to claim more lives than the violence of bombs and bullets.

In each case, key perpetrators of the violence have acted as de facto Western proxies or received military, economic, or diplomatic backing — allowing them to operate with relative impunity.

The eastern DRC has suffered massacre after massacre, with many carried out directly by Rwandan forces or the Rwandan-backed militia, the M23 Movement. In Sudan, the two competing factions — the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) — are fuelled, on one hand, by the United Arab Emirates and, on the other, by Saudi Arabia and Egypt. All are part of the “Quad Initiative” and all receive ample support from the United States. This is not a policy error; it is part of a strategic calculus in which death and destruction serve to reproduce conditions for each country’s hyper-exploitation by Western capital.

In each case, the moves towards “peace” did not stop the fighting. Not long after Trump’s “wonderful treaty” was signed, M23 forces launched a renewed offensive in Rutshuru, exterminating Hutu civilians, according to rights groups. In Gaza, Israel continues to massacre scores of civilians each day despite the “ceasefire” — all while preventing urgently needed humanitarian aid from reaching Gaza’s starving population. And in Sudan, the RSF launched a catastrophic offensive against more than 260,000 civilians trapped in the besieged city of El-Fasher, launching a killing spree so extensive that its bloody stains were reportedly visible in satellite imagery.

In the face of this violence, each manoeuvre towards “peace” was an ultimatum: surrender or face extermination. Indeed, the threat was often made explicitly. The US warned that a rejection of its proposal for Gaza at the UN Security Council would be “a vote to return to war”.

The “peace” introduced by these plans is not for the people of Congo, Sudan or Palestine. Instead, by exterminating and immiserating their people, disarming their resistance movements, and devastating their land, it has generated conditions for each state’s “peaceful” plunder by transnational capital. The “peace” is not for the plundered, but for the capitalists headquartered in Tel Aviv, Cairo, Dubai, Riyadh, and, ultimately, Washington, who carve up the vast resources made available to them by war — while profiting from the bombs and bullets they produce.

Since the start of the genocide in Gaza, labor unions and popular movements around the world have organized to shut down the war machine and prevent arms shipments from reaching Israeli occupation forces. In the UK, activists forced Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest arms manufacturer, to close manufacturing plants. In Italy, Greece, Spain and beyond, dockworkers blocked vessels carrying military cargo to the occupation — as did the No Harbour for Genocide and Mask off Maersk campaigns.

Now, activists are calling for an extension of this popular arms embargo. The Sudanese Resistance Front, for instance, has called for a People’s Arms Embargo for Sudan, aiming to expose imperial complicity in the violence and disrupt the war machine by mobilizing at ports, embassies, and arms suppliers to block the flow of weapons.

There is a common denominator to the violence that is increasingly engulfing all of our societies — and that is imperialism and its relentless pursuit of profit. For peace to succeed, the engine of war must be defeated at its root and across all its frontiers.

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