Israel’s Genocide in Gaza? Let’s Talk about Something Else

Israel committed horrific massacres in Gaza. (Photo: via QNN)

Politicians who have done nothing to stop the genocide are now cashing in by joining the movement to recognize a Palestinian state. They say state, when, against US and Israeli obstruction, there is no possibility of a viable state being established.

A viable state would mean the West Bank, east Jerusalem, and Gaza, and there is absolutely no chance of Israel agreeing to that. Not a slim chance or a slight chance, but no chance at all, unless an international military force is mobilized to drive it out of the 1967 occupied territories and there’s no chance of that either.

What the Palestinians are going to get is an administrative enclave in Gaza. Australia, Canada, the UK, France and Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian collaborator, are lining up as the figurehead leaders to run this enclave; they can call it whatever they like, but it won’t be a state in any realistic understanding of the word.

Apart from this, Abbas does not represent the Palestinian people. His mandate as an elected president ran out in 2009. A poll last year put his support at six percent. His constituency is not the Palestinian people but Israel and the governments that support it. He has turned himself into a human dish rag and when Israel has no more use for him, it will throw him away. Accordingly, Abbas’ survival technique is based on continuing to make himself useful.

As announced by Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, his government’s support for a Palestinian state is “predicated” on conditions presented by Abbas. These are that the Palestinian state recognizes Israel’s ‘right’ to exist (already conceded by Arafat back in the 1980s), that there will be no Hamas in government, that the state will be demilitarized, that general elections will be held and that the system of payment to the families of martyrs and prisoners will be ended.

Albanese welcomed the Arab League’s demand that the “terrorist” Hamas hand its weapons over to the PA before being driven “out of the region” once and for all.

In fact, Hamas is a resistance movement.

The right of any occupied people to resist occupation by all means is upheld in international law. Israel – on the other hand – has no right to occupy, only the responsibilities which it has serially breached for almost 80 years.

It is a characteristic of all occupations in history that civilians are killed. They are killed by the occupier in great numbers and by the occupied in very small numbers, comparatively. The killing of civilians is morally wrong, and legally wrong, but remains an inevitable by-product of occupation. It is a historic reality. When there is occupation, there will always be resistance, and civilians will always die.

Israel had killed thousands of Gazan civilians before October 7, 2023, apart from the tens of thousands of civilians it has murdered elsewhere in Palestine since 1948. Since 2023, it has imprisoned thousands of Palestinian civilians without charge, including hundreds of children.

It was for all these reasons that Hamas broke out of the Gaza open-air prison on October 7, a prison now turned into an open-air death camp. Its ‘western’ cheer squad has allowed all this to happen; more than that, it is fully complicit. Only now, out of embarrassment at what its violent protégé is doing, has it begun to raise its voice.

Indifferent to global outrage, as long as it has the support of the US, Israel is still slaughtering Palestinians every day, is planning to fully occupy Gaza city and is negotiating with other states (the latest is south Sudan) to take in the two million Palestinians it plans to ethnically clean from Gaza before driving the rest out of the West Bank.

It has no intention of surrendering any of the territory it occupied during its war of aggression in 1967. Its parliament has written into law that no Palestinian state will be allowed west of the Jordan River. It has just reinforced its determination to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state by announcing the construction of 3500 more housing units on the West Bank.

At best, the Palestinian state will be an administrative enclave established in part of Gaza, if that point is even reached, as Israel remains committed to purging all of Gaza of its entire population and is talking of annexing part of it anyway.

If it fails to ethnically cleanse Gaza, as the final act of the genocide, it will attempt to herd all the Palestinians into the south. They will be terrorized and starved into flight. Once they are locked up in the concentration camp planned for them at Rafah, they will not be allowed to leave while Israel plans how to get rid of them. This monstrous project has the full support of the US government.

If the Palestinian ‘state’ is created, it will be run by collaborators funded by Gulf states but controlled by Israel. Except for the name ‘state’, there will not be much difference from the present situation or the administrative ‘autonomy’ offered to West Bank Palestinians by Menahem Begin in the late 1970s-early 1980s.

The core historic, legal and moral rights of Palestinians as laid down in international law will be totally ignored, as they have been in all attempts to negotiate a settlement since 1948. The ‘west’, ultimately responsible for this mess, still refuses to deal with its root causes.

The Gaza ‘state’ is another attempt to force on the Palestinians that which Israel and its backers think they are now too weakened to resist. However, they have not come all this way in the past 100 years of martyrdom to give way to the deceit and trickery implicit in the current plans. They will resist, of course, at which point Albanese and others will back off, saying, “This not what we signed up for.”

Actually, all of this is hardly worth talking about anyway. It creates headlines in a storm of noise that shuts out the cries of starving and limbless Palestinian children. There is only one issue and that is not this diversion but the genocide.

Far from even restraining Israel, the US encourages it. It has ‘recognized’ Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and does not even recognize the occupied territories as occupied. Its current ambassador to Israel is an ignorant evangelistic crank who loves Israel so much he does not even defend the Christianity it threatens.

The Palestinians have not been fighting for a century for only a small slice of their homeland, even if that could be wrested from the hands of their oppressors. They are fighting for their rights to all of it.

These rights are enshrined in international law and should be the basis of all negotiations. In the most basic sense of who owned what, ‘Israel’ is stolen Palestinian property. All the Israeli propaganda in the world is not going to change that but instead of this basic truth forming the basis of ‘peace’ negotiations, it is deliberately avoided because somehow Israel cannot be expected to hand back at least some of the territory it has stolen or respect the rights of the Palestinian people to their homeland.

The 1990s ‘peace process’ was typical of how this plays out. It was based only on the future of the territories seized in 1967. ‘Negotiations’ dragging on for years suited Israel, giving it time to expand and consolidate settlements on the West Bank and east Jerusalem. The ‘peace process’ has now been replaced by recognition of a Palestinian state that will be a Bantustan if it even gets that far.

While this attempt is being made to lead the Palestinians into another dead end, the US, Israel and their gulf allies continue their efforts to destroy resistance elsewhere, first and foremost in Lebanon, where the government has been bullied by the US and Israel into trying to disarm Hezbollah.

As Israel and the US knew, even when making this demand, disarming Hezbollah is beyond the capacity of the Lebanese armed forces, which are formed on ‘confessional’ lines and are not unified against Hezbollah anyway. A bigger plan is clearly afoot. Most likely, this would take the shape of a two-pronged attack, by Israel in southern Lebanon and by Jolani’s takfiri brigades crossing the border in the north.

Taking on Hezbollah cannot work any other way, but the problems are still insuperable. First, Jolani’s takfiris are no match for Hezbollah. Second, the Israeli military is exhausted. It does not support Netanyahu’s plan for the occupation of Gaza City. Its reservists are refusing to report for duty, so the army hardly has the manpower for a new operation in Gaza, let alone southern Lebanon.

Third, the Israeli public is overwhelmingly against a new campaign in Gaza, if only for the sake of its captives, and is not likely to support one in southern Lebanon. Fourth, the Lebanese public is largely behind Hezbollah, which is the only force capable of defending Lebanon from outside attack.

Fifth, Iran, which almost brought Israel to its knees in twelve days of war, will find the means of helping Hezbollah. Larijani has just been in Beirut. He has refused to see Yusif Rajji, the Christian right-wing Lebanese Forces’ choice as foreign minister, and undoubtedly has brought with him Iran’s warning against Lebanon being sucked into another quagmire by Israel and the US.

Sixth, Jolani is a Syrian, Arab, and Muslim collaborator with the ‘west’ and Israel who agrees with Israel that “our common enemies are Hezbollah and Iran.” His ‘security forces’ have massacred thousands of Alawis and Druze, he has failed to bring the Kurds into line and if he plays along with the US and Israel in Lebanon, he will be further empowering Syrian and Arab resistance as well as inviting retaliation from Iraq and Iran.

Finally, the flurry of recognition of Palestinian statehood is performative politics. Unwilling to do anything to stop the genocide, the actors divert the attention of the audience by talking about something else. In fact, they will talk about anything else except what they should be talking about.

The illusion they are creating will last only as long as negotiations can be stretched out. Eventually, the 1990s illusion of a ‘peace process’ burst like a bubble and this recognition of a state that Israel and the US won’t allow to exist except on a small patch of sand in Gaza is destined to end the same way.

– Jeremy Salt taught at the University of Melbourne, at Bosporus University in Istanbul and Bilkent University in Ankara for many years, specializing in the modern history of the Middle East. Among his recent publications is his 2008 book, The Unmaking of the Middle East. A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands (University of California Press) and The Last Ottoman Wars. The Human Cost 1877-1923 (University of Utah Press, 2019). He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.