United Against Israel: Time To End World’s Longest Occupation
Left to its own devices, Israel would never grant Palestinians their freedom.
In the past, some, whether ignorantly or not, claimed that peace in Palestine can only be achieved through ‘unconditional negotiations’.
This mantra was also championed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, when he cared enough to pay lip service to the ‘peace process’ and other US-originated fantasies. Back then, he spoke about his readiness to hold unconditional negotiations, though constantly arguing that Israel does not have a peace partner.
All of this was, of course, ‘doublespeak’. What Netanyahu and other Israelis were, in fact, saying is that Israel should be freed from any commitment to international law, let alone international pressure. Worse, by declaring that Israel has no Palestinian peace partner, the Israeli government has essentially canceled the hypothetical and ‘unconditional negotiations’ before they even took place.
For years – in fact, for decades – Israel was allowed to perpetuate such nonsense, empowered, of course, by the total and unconditional support of Washington and its other Western allies.
In an environment where Israel receives billions of dollars of US-Western aid, and where it grew to become a thriving technological hub, let alone one of the world’s largest weapons exporters, Tel Aviv simply had no reason to end its occupation or to dismantle its racist apartheid in Palestine.
But things must change now. The genocidal Israeli war in Gaza should completely alter our understanding, not only of the tragic reality underway in Palestine, but of past misunderstanding as well. It should be made clear that Israel never had any intentions of achieving a just peace, ending its colonialism in Palestine, that is, the expansion of illegal settlements or granting Palestinians an iota of rights.
To the contrary, Israel has been planning to carry out a genocide against the Palestinians all along.
Israel has already carried out terrible war crimes against Palestinians, during the Nakba in 1947-48, and in successive wars, ever since. Each crime, large or small, was always accompanied by a campaign of ethnic cleansing. Over 800,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed when Israel was established on the ruins of Palestine 76 years ago. An additional 300,000 were ethnically cleansed during the Naksa, the war and ‘setback’ of 1967.
Throughout the years, mainstream Western media did its best to completely hide the Israeli crimes, or minimize their impact, or blame someone else entirely for them. This process of shielding Israel remains in place to this day, even when tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed since October 7 and when the majority of Gaza, including its hospitals, schools, mosques, churches, civilian homes and shelters have been erased.
Considering all of this, anyone who still speaks of ‘unconditional negotiations’ – especially those conducted under the auspices of Washington – is, frankly, only doing so to help Israel escape international legal and political accountability.
Luckily, the world is waking up to this fact and, hopefully, this awakening will mature sooner rather than later, as Israeli massacres in Gaza continue to claim hundreds of innocent lives every single day.
This collective realization that Israel must be stopped through international measures is also accompanied by an equally critical realization that the US is not an honest peace broker. In fact, it never was.
To appreciate the ruinous role of the US in this so-called conflict, just marvel at this fact. While practically every country that participated with a legal opinion and a political position in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) public hearings from February 19 to the 26, formulated its position based on international law, the US did not.
“The Court should not find that Israel is legally obligated to immediately and unconditionally withdraw from occupied territory,” the acting legal adviser for the US State Department, Richard Visek, embarrassingly said on February 21.
76 years after the Nakba and following 57 years of military occupation, the US legal position remains committed to defending the illegality of Israel’s conduct throughout Palestine.
Compare the above stance to the rounded, courageous and legally grounded position of almost every country in the world, especially of the over 50 countries which requested to speak at the ICJ hearings.
China, whose words, and actions seem far more consistent with international law than many Western nations, especially now, went even further. “In pursuit of the right to self-determination, Palestinian people’s use of force to resist foreign oppression and complete the establishment of an independent state is (an) inalienable right well founded in international law,” Chinese representative Ma Xinmin told the ICJ on February 22.
Unlike the cliched and non-committal position of the likes of UK Foreign Minister, David Cameron, on the need to start an “irreversible progress” towards an independent Palestinian state, the Chinese position is arguably the most comprehensive and realistic articulation.
Ma linked self-determination to liberation struggle, to sovereignty, to the inalienable rights of people, which are all consistent with international laws and norms. In fact, it is these very principles that have led to the liberation of numerous countries in the Global South.
Considering that Israel has no intention to free Palestinians from the grip of apartheid and military occupation, the Palestinian people have had no other option but to resist.
The question now is, will the international community continue to defy the US position in words only, or will it formulate a new approach to the Israeli occupation of Palestine, thus bringing it to an end by any means necessary?
In his statement to the ICJ on February 19, British barrister Philippe Sands, who is a member of team Palestine, offered a roadmap on how the international community can force Israel to end its occupation: “The right of self-determination requires that UN Member States bring Israel’s occupation to an immediate end. No aid. No assistance. No complicity. No contribution to forcible actions. No money. No arms. No trade. No nothing.”
Indeed, it is now time to turn words into actions, especially when thousands of children are being killed for no fault of their own but for being born Palestinian.
Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of six books. His latest book, co-edited with Ilan Pappé, is Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders and Intellectuals Speak Out. His other books include My Father was a Freedom Fighter and The Last Earth. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net.
Biden’s Pier for Gaza Is a Hollow Gesture That Will Accomplish Nothing
A few observations on President Biden’s building of a “temporary pier” – or what his officials are grandly calling a “port” – to get aid into Gaza:
1. Though no one is mentioning it, Biden is actually violating Israel’s 17-year blockade of Gaza with his plan. Gaza doesn’t have a sea port, or an airport, because Israel, its occupier, has long banned it from having either.
Israel barred anything getting into Gaza that didn’t come through the land crossings it controls. Israel stopped international aid flotillas, often violently, from reaching Gaza to bring in medicine. The blockade also created a captive market for Israel’s own poor-quality goods, like damaged fruit and veg, and allowed Israel to skim off money at the land crossings that should have gone to the Palestinians in fees and duties.
2. It will take many weeks for the US to build this pier off-shore and get it up and running. Why the delay? Because every western capital, including the United States, has supported the blockade for the past 17 years.
The siege of Gaza caused gradual malnutrition among the enclave’s children, rather the the current rapid starvation. By helping Israel inflict collective punishment on Gaza for all those years, the US and Europe were complicit in a gross and enduring violation of international law, even before the current genocide.
With his pier, Biden isn’t reversing that long-standing collusion in a crime against humanity. He has stressed it will be temporary. In other words, it will be back to business in Gaza as usual afterwards: any children who survive will once again be allowed to starve in slow-motion, at a rate that doesn’t register with the establishment media and put pressure on Washington to be seen to be doing something.
3. Biden could get aid into Gaza much faster than by building a pier, if he wanted to. He could simply insist that Israel let aid trucks through the land crossings, and threaten it with serious repercussions should it fail to comply. He could threaten to withhold the US bombs he is sending to kill more children in Gaza. Or he could threaten to cut off the billions in military aid Washington sends to Israel every year. Or he could threaten to refuse to cast a US veto to protect Israel from diplomatic fallout at the United Nations. He could do any of that and more, but he chooses not to.
4. Even after Biden buys Israel a few more weeks to further aggressively starve Palestinians in Gaza, while we wait for his temporary pier to be completed, nothing may actually change in practice. Israel will still get to carry out the same checks it currently does at the land crossings but instead in Lanarca, Cyprus, where the aid will be loaded on to ships. In other words, Israel will still be able to create the same interminable hold-ups using “security concerns” as the pretext.
5. Biden isn’t changing course – temporarily – because he suddenly cares about the people, or even the children, of Gaza. They have been suffering in their open-air prison, to varying degrees, for decades. If he had cared, he would have done something to end that suffering after he became president. If he had done something then, October 7 might never have happened, and all those lives lost on both sides – lives continuing to be lost on the Palestinian side every few minutes – might have been saved.
And if he really cared, he wouldn’t have helped Israel in its efforts to destroy UNRWA, the UN relief agency for Palestinians and a vital lifeline for Gaza, by freezing its funding, based on unevidenced claims against the agency by Israel.
No, Biden doesn’t care about Palestinian suffering, or about the fact that, while he’s been busy eating ice cream, many, many tens of thousands of children have been murdered, maimed or orphaned – and the rest starved. He cares about the polls. His timetable for helping Palestinians is being strictly dictated by the schedule of the presidential election. He needs to look like Gaza’s saviour when Democrats are deciding who they are voting for.
He and the Democratic party are betting voters are dumb enough to fall for this charade. Please don’t prove them right.
Jonathan Cook is the author of three books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His website and blog can be found at www.jonathan-cook.net. This originally appeared at his website.
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