Israel and Palestine

My examination of Israel’s begrudging and belated re-opening of the Rafah Crossing between Gaza and Egypt — the only route in and out of Gaza that doesn’t pass through Israeli territory — in which I reflect on how “Israel has done all it can to to turn the re-opening into yet another example of its obsessive desire to control every aspect of the sealed death camp it has created in Gaza over the last 28 months, and its equally obsessive desire to humiliate Palestinians — when not killing them directly — at every opportunity.” After procrastinating for months, Israel nominally agreed to allow 50 wounded Palestinians (plus 100 companions) to leave Gaza for Egypt every day, and also to allow 50 vetted Palestinians to return from Egypt, where 100,000 Palestinians fled, generally at great expense, in the seven months of genocide until Israel closed the crossing in May 2024. Despite Israel’s promises, however, the numbers allowed in and out of Gaza, in the first few days, have been far less than those promised, and many of the women who have been allowed to return to date have stated that they were blindfolded, subjected to abusive interrogations and urged to become informants, with Abu Shabab gang members involved as they reached Gaza. The women also explained that everything that they brought with them was taken off them, except for one bag of clothes and a mobile phone, which was clearly unnecessary and intentionally cruel. I also look back on the history of the crossing, and focus particularly on how its closure in May 2024 exposed Israel’s lies about encouraging “voluntary migration”, as it deliberately sealed off the only route that made that possible, confirming that what it “clearly intended to do was to ruthlessly cut off Gaza from the outside world, turning what had long been an ‘open-air prison’ into a sealed death camp.” With Donald Trump only interested in Gaza when it serves his purpose to get world leaders together to fawn over him as a “peacemaker”, it remains to be seen if any meaningful pressure can be exerted on Israel to significantly increase the numbers of arrivals and departures, especially as it will otherwise take many years for the 20,000 people in need of medical care to leave, and for the 30,000 to come home who have registered their intent to return, and also because it is reasonable to assume that Israel will find any excuse it can to shut the whole process down.

My response to the unveiling of a grotesque vision for the “regeneration” of Gaza, presented by Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law and a prominent real estate investor, at the launch of Trump’s “Board of Peace” at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on January 22. Kushner’s vision — of “New Gaza”, a futuristic high-rise coastal tourist resort on Gaza’s shoreline, “New Rafah”, a brand-new city for 100,000 people, and other new residential areas flanked by industrial complexes featuring “data centers” and “advanced manufacturing” — was dreamt up with other real estate developers involved in Trump’s “Board of Peace”, and is the vilest manifestation of the mania for “regeneration” that has dominated so much of the global economy for the last two decades. Never before, however, has this kind of “regeneration” been proposed for the site of a genocide, and yet this, sickeningly, is what Kushner’s vision involves, in a plan that also, crucially, sidelines the two million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, almost as though they don’t exist. There are reasons for doubting that Kushner’s plan will succeed — not least because efforts by the US and Israel to displace the Palestinians have proven impossible to achieve — but its unveiling confirms that the Palestinians are now trapped between Israel, which still seeks to erase them entirely, and the most soulless real estate developers in history. What hope there is rests with Hamas and the other Palestinian factions, whose disarmament is a prerequisite not only for the “stability” that Kushner needs for investors, but also, according to its own stated aims, for the State of Israel. On this front, it seems to me, the only realistic way forward lies with the Palestinian technocratic committee, appointed as part of Trump’s “Peace Plan”, who can liaise successfully with Hamas if they are given genuine administrative power, with the support of the Gulf and Middle Eastern countries who have long been involved in negotiations for peace in Gaza; in particular, Qatar and Egypt. The committee has already declared its own commitment to Egypt’s five-year regeneration plan, launched last year, which envisages the immediate provision of temporary housing units for 1.5 million Palestinians throughout the Gaza Strip, along with the restoration of “the essential services that form the bedrock of human dignity such as electricity, water, healthcare, and education.”

In my latest analysis of the situation in the Gaza Strip, I look at how the surviving Palestinians are caught between, on the one hand, Israel, which still occupies 58% of Gaza, and still hopes to actively resume its genocidal assault, and a US-led colonial project, which claims to want to bring peace, but is disturbingly led by mostly US politicians and businessmen who only seem interested in its future as a real estate and business opportunity, in which the Palestinians are regarded as either peripheral or irrelevant. Although some hope must rest with the appointment of the Palestinian National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG), the technocratic committee charged with the day-to-day running of Gaza, it is alarming that, above it are not one, but two largely US-led organizations — the Board of Peace, led by Trump, and featuring only Americans, apart from the inclusion of Tony Blair, and the Gaza Economic Board, which also, at least, includes representatives of the Gulf and Middle Eastern countries who have played a major part in the long negotiations for peace. In addition to doubts about the sincerity or ability of these organizations to bring peace, questions also remain about the extent to which Israel has been excluded, and how much, if at all, it will seek to insist that it has the right to put its own security first, and to press ahead with efforts to resume its genocidal assault on Gaza. More than anything, this, in particular, must not be allowed.

Marking 800 days of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, I point out how, although the relentless carpet-bombing stopped with the ceasefire deal two months ago, nothing else has improved for the Palestinians, and I condemn the western media for moving on, by returning to Joe Biden’s visit to Israel in October 2023, in which he described the attacks on October 7 as equivalent to 15 9/11s. I explain that, after 800 days, the Palestinians have suffered the equivalent of 3,500 9/11s, and that, if the number of deaths in Gaza were scaled up to reflect a proportionate death toll in the US, it would mean that ten million Americans would have been killed. The western media’s complacency is also damning because Israel breaks the ceasefire on an almost daily basis, and has also refused to honor its commitment to allow 600 trucks of humanitarian aid to enter Gaza on daily basis, leaving the Palestinian people still short of food, medical supplies and fuel, with no provision whatsoever for reconstruction, and, crucially, living in makeshift tents that provide no protection against the kinds of extreme winter weather that recently hit Gaza via Storm Byron. I also condemn the west’s lack of interest in Israel’s stalled military withdrawal from Gaza, in which, instead of preparing to withdraw completely as agreed in the ceasefire deal, they are reinforcing the line of their current withdrawal, the so-called “yellow line”, giving them control of 58% of Gaza, into what senior officials have described as a “new border.” Meanwhile, all of Trump’s grandiose plans for an International Stabilization Force and a neo-colonial “Board of Peace” appear to be floundering, as US, EU and Israeli officials attempt to implement plans to establish “compounds” for obedient, screened Palestinians behind the “yellow line”, while doing nothing to address the destruction in the other 42% of the Strip. This is an outcome that seems to be nothing more than a fulfilment of Israel’s plans, earlier this year, to occupy most of Gaza and to herd the remaining population into “concentration camps.” The genocide isn’t over, and we must not be silent.

Marking Human Rights Day and the 77th anniversary of the UN’s adoption of the Universal Declaration Of Human Rights, as well as the adoptions of the Genocide Convention 77 years ago and the Torture Convention in 1984, I reflect on how this ought to be a time when our mainstream media and our politicians should publicize these commitments, and ask “probing questions about the extent to which the post-WWII struggles to prevent genocide and torture and to defend fundamental human rights are being observed or are being flouted, and what both the aspirations and their frequent betrayals say about us as societies.” Instead, however, fundamental human rights are chronically endangered, for one particular reason — Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, fully supported and facilitated by countries headed up by the US, the UK and Germany, but also, as UN Rapporteur Francesca Albanese identified in a recent report, by 60 other countries worldwide, most, but not all, in the west, providing military, political and economic support. Francesca Albanese called for urgent intervention to support the Palestinians, but what is on the table instead is continued Israeli aggression, and Trump’s shameful “Peace Plan”, which whitewashes Israel’s genocide and torture, and sidelines the Palestinians instead of recognizing that the only viable route to peace is via Palestinian self-determination and independence. Otherwise, as I conclude, “If Israel and its complicit partners in genocide win, there will be nothing left to protect further atrocities taking place anywhere that brute force can prevail. We need human rights at least as much now as we did 80 years ago, when the UN was founded in the ashes of the Second World War, and those of us who care about our common humanity must be prepared to fight for it, or face an even darker future.”

My analysis of the deeply flawed UN Security Council resolution on Gaza that was passed last week, which made Donald Trump the unelected and unaccountable emperor of Gaza for the next two years, at the head of a spectral “Board of Peace”, and also authorized the creation of an equally spectral “International Stablilization Force” to disarm Hamas. I note how the resolution fails to punish Israel for two years of genocide, and sidelines the Palestinians, with only the vaguest of mentions of “a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood” at some nebulous point in the future. I quote opposition to the resolution from Palestinian representatives and from Francesca Albanese, and I also explain why I think Trump’s plan will fail — not just because the practical support he needs will either be unacceptable, or will fail to materialize, but also because of the impossibility of quelling the Palestinian resistance. In addition, I think we should all take some comfort from the fact that, behind the scenes, the power imbalance in the United Nations, whereby the US can railroad a resolution through the Security Council the day before the General Assembly voted for a diametrically opposed resolution affirming “the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination”, including “the right to their independent State of Palestine”, cannot hide the fact that most of Trump’s support came from countries that criticized the lack of a clear route to Palestinian self-determination. Meanwhile,Israel retains control of 58% of Gaza, and seems reasonably content to try to ensure that the remaining population of Gaza, trapped in the remaining 42%, are held in dire conditions that resemble, as much as possible, the concentration camps that they envisaged for them when they escalated their genocidal assault in May this year. In the long run, however, I believe that Israel’s position is untenable, and that the only way out of the impasse is, indeed, for Palestinian self-determination and statehood to be prioritized.

In a detailed analysis, I compare Israel’s prisons for Palestinians with US prisons in the “war on terror”, following comparisons that have been made between Sde Teiman, the notorious Israeli facility where a mass rape scandal took place, and Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, noting that the most appropriate comparison is with the CIA’s “black site” torture prisons, as they were the only prisons in the “war on terror” from which the ICRC were excluded, as has happened, under Israel’s far-right National Security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, throughout its entire prison system for Palestinians since October 7, 2023. Along with amendments to the Incarceration of Unlawful Combatants Law, first introduced in 2002, allowing prisoners to be held without any charge or access to lawyers for several months, this has meant that Israel has been engaged in a “black site”-style policy of enforced disappearance and arbitrary detention throughout a network holding thousands of people, dwarfing the numbers held by the US at the height of its “war on terror.” Both the US and Israel were, as I describe it, “driven by a terrifying all-consuming vengeance, by a determination that everyone they seized was a ‘terrorist’, and by claims that they were seeking ‘actionable intelligence’ to target everyone responsible”, and that, as result, they “shredded all protections for prisoners, with complete contempt for all international and domestic laws and treaties that were supposed to guarantee fundamental baseline protections from torture, abuse and murder.” I also bring the story up to date via more recent developments, including the horrific celebrations, within Israel, of the soldiers in the rape scandal as heroes, and a new bill in the Knesset, introduced by Ben-Gvir, which proposes the execution of Palestinian prisoners, and I end with condemnation of the western media, and western leaders, for having bought into discredited lies about atrocities on October 7, while largely failing to recognize or show sympathy for the Palestinians, subjected to genuine atrocities on a colossal scale ever since.

Three weeks into the ceasefire in Gaza, which is still in place, even though Israel switches it on and off at will, and last night undertook unforgivable aerial bombardments killing over a hundred civilians, I examine the short-term and long-term problems with Donald Trump’s “Peace Plan.” Short-term problems include the delivery of humanitarian aid, which, although increasing, is still failing to meet the requirements in the ceasefire deal, while the long-term problems involve the future governance of Gaza. I look at the particularly poisonous impact of the refusal, by Israel and its supporters in the west, to differentiate between Hamas as the legitimate administrative government in Gaza, and its military wing, which, for two years, has underpinned its entire genocidal assault on a trapped civilian population, and reflect on how Hamas cannot be expected to disarm, or even to relinquish power, until a political solution is in place that involves Israel’s military withdrawal and Palestinian self-determination. I also look at how Trump’s proposal for an “International Stabilization Force” will fail without a political solution, as recently confirmed by King Abdullah of Jordan, and assess alarming indications that the US’s primary interest, as suggested by Trump in February, is not in securing a meaningful political settlement, but in redeveloping Gaza as a real estate project.

My report about a devastating advisory opinion issued yesterday by the International Court of Justice (the UN’s principal judicial organ, sometime known as the World Court) regarding Israel’s persistent policies, over the last two years, of depriving the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip of all essential supplies to ensure their survival, despite the fact that they are required to do so as the occupying Power. Unanimously, the Court ruled that the State of Israel was required “to ensure that the population of the Occupied Palestinian Territory has the essential supplies of daily life, including food, water, clothing, bedding, shelter, fuel, medical supplies and services” — “from all of which”, as I explain, “despite persistent and risible protestations to the contrary by senior Israeli officials”, they “have been horrendously deprived, though various ‘sieges’ on all essential supplies, for most of the last two years.” The Court had been specifically asked to rule on Israel’s obligations towards the United Nations and its agencies, and, specifically, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), which Israel has cynically sought to portray as having been “appropriated by Hamas”, to disguise its true aims: doing away with the organization that does more than any other to feed and educate Palestinians, and to provide them with medical supplies, as well as keeping alive the right of those exiled to return to their homeland. In a crucial passage, the Court pointed out that, despite Israel’s claims, it “has not substantiated its allegations that a significant part of UNRWA employees ‘are members of Hamas . . . or other terrorist factions.’” The Court also ran through the harrowing history of Israel’s ongoing efforts to starve the Palestinians, and to cut them off from all of the other supplies necessary for their survival, and it is to be hoped that the international community, and, particularly, the countries of the west, recognize how important it is to continue exerting meaningful pressure on Israel to stop blocking the delivery of humanitarian aid at the scale needed, as stipulated in Donald Trump’s “Peace Plan”, which came into effect two weeks ago.

My analysis of the momentous events of the last few days, as a ceasefire has begun in Gaza, and the last remaining living Israeli hostages have been freed in exchange for 1,968 Palestinians, including 1,718 hostages seized in Gaza since October 7, 2023, and held without charge or trial. I condemn the dehumanization of the Palestinians in most of the western media, in contrast to the attention paid to the Israelis, especially as so many of the Palestinians had so evidently been severely mistreated, and I point out how the media’s bias has prevented it from noting that 55 of those freed were healthcare workers, seized in the unforgivable war on Gaza’s hospitals that Israel has been waging relentlessly for the last two years. I also puncture the balloon of Donald Trump’s pomposity, noting that, although he pushed for the ceasefire deal, he has not put forward a credible plan for post-genocide Gaza beyond an unacceptable suggestion that its governance would be overseen by colonial overlords. I insist that Palestinians must be allowed to decide their own future, as part of a necessary process of securing their independence, in line with the recent recognition of the existence of the State of Palestine by numerous western countries. What is needed most urgently, as Israel is already trying to undermine the ceasefire deal, is for western countries and Arab nations to insist on being allowed to begin undertaking massive debris-clearing and reconstruction operations in Gaza, alongside a massive increase in humanitarian aid, as winter creeps in on a population that is still as deprived of all of the basic necessities of life as it was before Trump began hogging the spotlight.