“Is it possible that after 42,000 people killed, you cannot empathise with the Palestinians?” Albanese said in her statement about the need to “recognise (Israel’s war on Gaza) as a genocide”. “Those of you who have not uttered a word about what is happening in Gaza demonstrate that empathy has evaporated from this room,” she added.

Was Albanese too idealistic when she chose to appeal to empathy which, in her words, represents “the glue that makes us stand united as humanity”?

The answer largely depends on how we wish to define the role being played by the UN and its various institutions; whether its global platform was established as a guarantor of peace, or as a political club for those with military might and political power to impose their agendas on the rest of the world?

Albanese is not the first person to express deep frustration with the institutional, let alone the moral collapse of the UN, or the inability of the institution to effect any kind of tangible change, especially during times of great crises.

The UN’s own Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, himself had accused the executive branch of the UN, the Security Council, of being “outdated”, “unfair” and an “ineffective system”.

“The truth is that the Security Council has systematically failed in relation to the capacity to put an end to the most dramatic conflicts that we face today,” he said, referring to “Sudan, Gaza, Ukraine”. Also, although noting that “The UN is not the Security Council”, Guterres acknowledged that all UN bodies “suffer from the fact that the people look at them and think, ‘Well, but the Security Council has failed us.’”

Some UN officials, however, are mainly concerned about how the UN’s failure is compromising the standing of the international system, thus whatever remains of their own credibility. But some, like Albanese, are indeed driven by an overriding sense of humanity.

On 28 October, 2023, mere weeks after the start of the war, the Director of the New York office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights left his post because he could no longer find any room to reconcile between the failure to stop the war in Gaza and the credibility of the institution.

“This will be my last communication to you,” Craig Mokhiber wrote to the UN High Commissioner in Geneva, Volker Turk. “Once again we are seeing a genocide unfolding before our eyes and the organisation we serve appears powerless to stop it,” Mokhiber added.

The phrase “once again” may explain why the UN official made his decision to leave shortly after the start of the war. He felt that history was repeating itself, in all its gory details, while the international community remained divided between powerlessness and apathy.

The problem is multi-layered, complicated by the fact that UN officials and employees do not have the power to alter the very skewed structure of the world’s largest political institution. That power lies in the hands of those who wield political, military, financial and veto power.

“UN in Gaza,” Digital, Midjourney / Clip2Comic, 2024.

Within that context, countries like Israel can do whatever they want, including outlawing the very UN organisations that have been commissioned to uphold international law, as the Israeli Knesset did on 28 October when it passed a law banning UNRWA from conducting “any activity” or providing services in Israel and the Occupied Territories.

But is there a way out?

Many, especially in the Global South, believe that the UN has outlived its usefulness or needs serious reforms.

These assessments are valid, based on this simple maxim: The UN was established in 1945 with the main objectives of the “maintenance of international peace and security, the promotion of the well-being of the peoples of the world, and international cooperation to these ends.”

Very little of the above commitment has been achieved. In fact, not only has the UN failed at that primary mission, but it has become a manifestation of the unequalled distribution of power among its members.

Though the UN was formed following the atrocities of WWII, now it stands largely useless in its inability to stop similar atrocities in Palestine, Lebanon, Sudan and elsewhere.

In her speech, Albanese pointed out that, if the UN’s failures continue, its mandate will become even “more and more irrelevant to the rest of the world”, especially during these times of turmoil.

Albanese is right, of course, but considering the irreversible damage that has already taken place, one can hardly find a moral, let alone rational justification of why the UN, at least in its current form, should continue to exist.

Now that the Global South is finally rising with its own political, economic and legal initiatives, it is time for these new bodies to either offer a complete alternative to the UN or push for serious and irreversible reforms in the organisation.

Either that or the international system will continue to be defined by nothing but apathy and self-interest.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

Via Middle East Monitor

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

The group represented the who’s who in the Israeli right, far right and ultranationalists. They included Israeli Ministers, Itamar Ben-Gvir, May Golan and Bezalel Smotrich, as well as ten MKs of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party.

The event, entitled “Preparing to Resettle Gaza”, was organised by one of Israel’s most extreme settler movements, Nachala, led by the notorious Daniella Weiss.

To appreciate how extremist this 79-year-old settler is, consider this: on 27 June, the Canadian government, though one of the most stalwart supporters of Netanyahu and his wars, imposed sanctions on her, due to her “role in facilitating (…) acts of violence by Israeli extremist settlers against Palestinian civilians.”

The hate-filled conference, however, was but a culmination of a year-long effort to build a case of why Israel should ethnically cleanse Palestinians in the Strip and re-establish illegal settlements.

The story, however, does not start on 7 October. In 2005, Israel decided to redeploy its forces out of the tiny coastal region. That was the start of the hermetic Israeli siege on the Strip, which led to multiple wars and, ultimately, the 7 October events and the ongoing genocide.

Although the number of Jewish settlers who were evacuated from the dismantled 15 illegal settlements was fairly small – 8,500 – the sense of betrayal felt by the settlers created deep divisions throughout Israeli society.

Chaotic scenes of settlers being forcefully removed from the Gush Katif settlements bloc in Gaza created a national crisis in Israel, and was compared to the forceful evacuation of the illegal Sinai settlement of Yamit, which Israel dismantled in April 1982 as part of a previous agreement with Egypt. But, why the crisis?

Israel is a settler-colonial society, which has linked its colonial expansion to religious diktats and prophecies. So the forced departure from Gaza, to most of these settlers, must have appeared to represent both national treason and a sacrilegious act.

This is why resettling Gaza became the immediate rallying cry for Israeli settlers. Compared to their limited political share of power during the redeployment of 2005, current extremists are now effectively the decision-makers.

While the army remains unclear regarding its strategic objectives in Gaza, the settlers have always been aware of the nature of their mission: the ethnic cleansing of all Palestinians from Gaza and the rebuilding of the settlements.

Thus, quickly, the likes of Weiss and many of her supporters began calling on Israelis to join the recolonisation campaign. “Register, register, you’ll be in Gaza,” Weiss told an audience of supporters last March, joyfully declaring that 500 families had already signed up, according to a CNN report.

“Settling,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3, Crop2Comic, 2024

Weiss and Nachala are not acting independently from the overall objective of the country’s leading politicians. For example, on the first day of the war, 7 October, 2023, Netanyahu made his intentions clear: “I say to the residents of Gaza: Leave now, because we will operate forcefully everywhere.”

On 17 October, a position paper introduced by the Israeli Misgav Institute for National Security & Zionist Strategy called for the “relocation and final settlement of the entire Gaza population.”

The report saw in the war “a unique and rare opportunity to evacuate the whole Gaza Strip” into the Sinai desert. Later that same month, the Israeli intelligence ministry itself became involved, with the Israeli news outlet, Calcalist, publishing a document “recommend(ing) the transfer of Gaza residents to Sinai.”

On 14 November, far-right Minister Smotrich spoke of ‘voluntary migration’. In December, media reports said that Netanyahu himself had told Likud party members that Israel’s real challenge is finding “countries that are willing to absorb them”, meaning the people of Gaza.

Conferences began to be organised to gather support around the idea of ethnically cleansing Palestinians. The first major conference was held by a coalition of settler movements last December. “A house on the beach is not a dream”, an advertisement for the gathering proclaimed. The ‘beach’ here is a reference to the Gaza beach.

Even Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, jumped on the opportunity. In March, he spoke of Gaza’s “very valuable … waterfront property”, which required Israel to remove the civilians and “clean up the Strip”.

The ongoing so-called General’s Plan, aimed at the extermination and ethnic cleansing of northern Gaza, is but the military component of the settlers’ vision, that of ‘Gaza is ours, forever’.

But if Israel has failed to sustain its settlements in the rebellious Strip under more manageable circumstances in the past, will it succeed now?

The settlers are already aware of the challenge at hand. This is why they constantly link their colonisation of Gaza with the ethnic cleansing of the Strip’s Palestinian inhabitants.

Israel’s success and failure, however, will ultimately be determined by this maxim: as long as the Palestinian people are fighting back, Weiss and her fellow extremists will not find safety in Gaza.

Indeed, the native population of Gaza has subsisted in that historical land for thousands of years. If genocide has not forced them off their land, nothing else will.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

Via Middle East Monitor

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

“The Palestinians look at everything from a broad, long-term perspective,” he said in an interview with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in 2019. “They see that, at the moment, there are five-six-seven million Jews here, surrounded by hundreds of millions of Arabs. They have no reason to give in, because the Jewish state can’t last. They are bound to win. In another 30 to 50 years they will overcome us, come what may.”

Morris is right. He is correct in the sense that Palestinians will not give up, that there can never be a situation where societies indefinitely survive and thrive within a permanent matrix of racial segregation, violence and exclusion – exclusion of the other, the Palestinians and the isolation of the self.

The very history of Palestine is a testament to such a truth. If the oppressed, the natives of the land, are not fully vanquished or decimated, they are likely to rise, fight and win back their freedom.

It must be utterly frustrating for Israel that all the killings and destruction underway in Gaza have not been enough to affect the overall outcomes of the war: the ‘total victory’ of which Netanyahu continues to speak.

Israel’s frustration is understandable because, like all military occupiers of the past, Tel Aviv continues to believe that the right quantity of violence should be enough to subdue colonised nations.

But Palestinians have a different intellectual trajectory that guides their collective behavior.

Of the many classifications of history, modern French historians separate between ‘histoire événementielle’ – evental history – and ‘longue durée’ – long history. In short, the former believes that history is the result of the accumulation of consequential events over the course of time, while the latter sees history on a far more complex level.

Credible history can only be seen in its totality, not merely the total events of history, recent or old, but the sum of feelings, the culmination of ideas, the evolution of collective consciousness, identities, relationships and the subtle changes that occur to societies over the course of time.

Palestinians are the perfect example of history being shaped by ideas, not guns; memories, not politics; collective hope, not international relations. They will eventually win their freedom, because they have invested in a long-term trajectory of ideas, memories and communal aspirations, which often translate to spirituality or, rather, a deep, immovable faith that grows stronger, even during times of horrific wars.

“Palestinicity,” Digital, Midjourney, 2024

In an interview I conducted with former United Nations Special Rapporteur, Professor Richard Falk in 2020, he summarised the struggle in Palestine as a war between those with arms and and those with legitimacy. He said that in the context of national liberation movements, there are two kinds of war: the actual war, as in soldiers carrying guns and the legitimacy war. The one who wins the latter will ultimately prevail.

Palestinians do, indeed, “look at everything from a broad, long-term perspective”. Agreeing with Morris’ statement may seem odd for, after all, societies are often driven by their own class struggles and socio-economic agendas instead of a unified and cohesive long-term vision.

This is where longue durée becomes most relevant in the Palestinian case. Even if Palestinians have not made a common agreement to wait for the invaders to leave, or for Palestine to, once again, become a place of social, racial and religious co-existence, they are driven, even if subconsciously, by the same energy that compelled their ancestors to push back against injustice in all its forms.

While many western politicians and academics are busy blaming Palestinains for their own oppression, Palestinian society continues to evolve based on entirely independent dynamics. For example, in Palestine, sumud, or resilience, is an ingrained culture, hardly subject to outside stimuli, political or academic. It is a culture that is as old as time. Innate. Intuitive. Generational.

This Palestinian saga started long before the war, long before Israel, long before modern colonialism. This truth demonstrates that history is not just moved by mere events, but by countless other factors; that, while ‘evental history’ – the political, military and economic aspects that contribute to the making of history through short-term events – is important, long-term history offers a more profound understanding of the past, and its consequences.

This discussion should engage all of those who are concerned about the struggle in Palestine, and are keen to present a version of the truth that is not driven by future political interests, but a profound understanding of the past. Only then we can begin to slowly liberate the Palestinian narrative from all the convenient histories imposed on the Palestinian people.

This is not an easy task, but an unavoidable one as it is critical to break away from the confines of superimposed language, historical events, recurring dates, dehumanising statistics and outright deception.

Ultimately, it should be clear to any astute reader of history that, while fighter jets and bunker-buster bombs may impact short-term historical events, courage, faith and communal love determine long-term history. This is why Palestinians are winning the legitimacy war, and this is why freedom for the Palestinian people is only a matter of time.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

Middle East Monitor

Unless otherwise stated in the article above, this work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

These were the last words written by my sister in a text message to one of her daughters.

Dr Soma Baroud was murdered on 9 October when Israeli warplanes bombed the taxi that carried her and other tired Gazans somewhere near the Bani Suhaila roundabout near Khan Yunis, in the southern Gaza Strip.

I still don’t know whether she was on her way to the hospital where she worked, or leaving the hospital to go home. Does it even matter?

The news of her assassination — which was a political murder; Israel has deliberately targeted and killed 986 medical workers, including 166 doctors — arrived through a screenshot copied from a Facebook page: “Update: these are the names of the martyrs of the latest Israeli bombing of two taxis in the Khan Yunis area…” It was followed by a list of names. “Soma Mohammed Mohammed Baroud” was the fifth name on the list, number 42,010 on Gaza’s ever-growing list of martyrs.

I refused to believe the news, even when more posts began popping up everywhere on social media, listing her as number five, and sometimes six in the list of martyrs of the Khan Yunis air strike.

I kept calling her, over and over again, hoping that the line would crackle a bit, followed by a brief silence, and then her kind, motherly voice would say, “Marhaba Abu Sammy. How are you, brother?” But she never answered the call.

I had told her repeatedly that she does not need to bother with elaborate text or audio messages due to the unreliable internet connection and electricity.

“Every morning,” I said, “just type: ‘We are fine’.” That’s all I asked of her.

But she would skip several days without writing, often due to the lack of an internet connection. Then, a message would arrive, although never brief. She wrote with a torrent of thoughts, linking up her daily struggle to survive, to her fears for her children, to poetry, to a Qur’anic verse, to one of her favourite novels, and so on.

“You know, what you said last time reminds me of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude,” she told me on more than one occasion, before she would take the conversation into the most complex philosophical spins. I would listen, and just repeat, “Yes… totally… I agree… one hundred per cent.”

For us, Soma was a larger-than-life figure. This is precisely why her sudden absence has shocked us to the point of disbelief. Her children, although grown up, felt orphaned. But her brothers, me included, felt the same way.

I wrote about Soma as a central character in my book My Father Was a Freedom Fighter, because she was indeed central to our lives, and to our very survival in a Gaza refugee camp.

The first born, and only daughter, she had to carry a much greater share of work and expectations than the rest of us. She was just a child when my eldest brother, Anwar, still a toddler, died in an UNRWA clinic at the Nuseirat refugee camp due to the lack of medicine. Then, she was introduced to pain, the kind of pain that with time turned into a permanent state of grief that would never abandon her until her murder by a US-supplied Israeli bomb in Khan Yunis.

“Operating Room,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3 / Clip2Comic, 2024

Two years after the death of Anwar, another boy was born. They also called him Anwar, so that the legacy of the first boy could carry on. Soma cherished the newcomer, maintaining a special friendship with him for decades to come.

My father began his life as a child labourer, then a fighter in the Palestine Liberation Army, then a police officer during the Egyptian administration of Gaza, then, once again, a labourer, because he refused to join the Israeli-funded Gaza police force after the 1967 Naksa (the Six Day War).

A clever, principled man, and a self-taught intellectual, my Dad did everything he could to provide a measure of dignity for his small family; and Soma, a child, often barefoot, stood by him every step of the way. When he decided to become a merchant, as in buying discarded and odd items in Israel and repackaging them to sell in the refugee camp, Soma was his main helper. Although her skin healed, cuts on her fingers due to wrapping thousands of razors individually, remained as a testament to the difficult life she lived.

“Soma’s little finger is worth more than a thousand men,” my father would often repeat, to remind us, eventually five boys, that our sister will always be the main heroine in the family’s story. Now that she is a martyr, that legacy has been secured for eternity.

Years later, my parents sent her to Aleppo to obtain a medical degree. She returned to Gaza, where she spent over three decades healing the pain of others, although never her own.

She worked at Al-Shifa Hospital and Nasser Hospital among other medical centres. Later, she obtained another certificate in family medicine, and opened a clinic of her own. She did not charge the poor, and did all she could to heal those victimised by war.

Soma was a member of a generation of female doctors in Gaza who truly changed the face of medicine.

Collectively, they put great emphasis on the rights of women to medical care and expanding the understanding of family medicine to include psychological trauma with particular emphasis on the centrality as well as the vulnerability of women in a war-torn society.

When my daughter Zarefah managed to visit her in Gaza shortly before the ongoing war, she told me that, “When aunt Soma walked into the hospital, an entourage of women — doctors, nurses and other medical staff — would surround her in total adoration.”

At one point, it felt that all of Soma’s suffering was finally paying off: a nice family home in Khan Yunis, with a small olive orchard, and a few palm trees; a loving husband, a professor of law and eventually the dean of law school at a reputable Gaza university; three daughters and two sons, whose educational specialties ranged from dentistry to pharmacy, to law to engineering.

Even under siege, life — at least for Soma and her family — seemed manageable. True, she was not allowed to leave the Strip for many years due to the blockade, and thus we were denied the chance to see her for years on end. True, she was tormented by loneliness and seclusion, hence her love affair with and constant citation of García Márquez’s seminal novel. But at least her husband was not killed or missing. Her beautiful house and clinic were still standing. And she was living and breathing, communicating her philosophical nuggets about life, death, memories and hope. And then…

“If I could only find the remains of Hamdi, so that we can give him a proper burial,” she wrote to me last January, when the news circulated that her husband had been executed by an Israeli quadcopter in Khan Yunis. Because his body was missing, she held on to some faint hope that he was still alive. Her boys, on the other hand, kept digging in the wreckage and debris of the area where Hamdi was shot, hoping to find him and give him a proper burial. They would often be attacked by Israeli drones in the process of trying to unearth their father’s body. They would run away, and return with their shovels to carry on with the grim task.

To maximise their chances of survival, my sister’s family decided to split up between displacement camps and other family homes in southern Gaza. This meant that Soma had to be in a constant state of moving, travelling, often long distances on foot, between towns, villages and refugee camps, just to check on her children, following every incursion, and every massacre.

“I am exhausted,” she kept telling me. “All I want from life is for this war to end, for cosy new pyjamas, my favourite book, and a comfortable bed.”

These simple and reasonable expectations looked like a mirage, especially when her home in the Qarara area, in Khan Yunis, was demolished by the Israeli army last month. “My heart aches,” she wrote. “Everything is gone. Three decades of life, of memories, of achievement, all turned into rubble.”

She pointed out that this is not a story about stones and concrete. “It is much bigger. It is a story that cannot be fully told, however long I write or speak. Seven souls had lived here. We ate, drank, laughed, quarrelled, and despite all the challenges of living in Gaza, we managed to carve out a happy life for our family.”

A few days before she was killed, she told me that she had been sleeping in a half-destroyed building belonging to her neighbours in Qarara. She sent me a photo taken by her son, as she sat on a makeshift chair, on which she also slept amidst the ruins. She looked tired, so very tired.

There was nothing I could say or do to convince her to leave. She insisted that she wanted to keep an eye on the rubble of what remained of her home. Her logic made no sense to me. I pleaded with her to leave. She ignored me, and instead kept sending me photos of what she had salvaged from the rubble, an old photo, a small olive tree, a birth certificate…

My last message to her, hours before she was killed, was a promise that when the war is over, I would do everything in my power to compensate her for all of this. That the whole family would meet in Egypt, or Turkiye, and that we would shower her with gifts, and boundless family love. I finished with, “Let’s start planning now. Whatever you want. You just say it. Awaiting your instructions…” She never saw the message.

Even when her name, as yet another casualty of the Israeli genocide in Gaza was mentioned in local Palestinian news, I refused to believe it. I continued to call. “Please pick up, Soma, please pick up,” I pleaded.

Only when a video emerged of white body bags arriving at Nasser Hospital in the back of an ambulance did I think that maybe my sister was indeed gone.

Some of the bags had the names of the others mentioned in the social media posts. Each bag was pulled out separately and placed on the ground. A group of mourners, bereaved men, women and children would rush to hug the body, screaming the same shouts of agony and despair that have accompanied this ongoing genocide from the first day.

Then, another bag, with “Soma Mohammed Mohammed Baroud” written across the thick white plastic.

Her colleagues carried her body and laid it gently on the ground. They were about to zip the bag open to confirm her identity. I looked away.

I refuse to see her in any way but the way that she wanted to be seen, a strong person, a manifestation of love, kindness and wisdom; someone whose “little finger is worth more than a thousand men.”

But why do I continue to check my messages with the hope that she will text me to tell me that the whole thing was a major, cruel misunderstanding and that she is okay?

My sister Soma was buried under a small mound of dirt, somewhere in Khan Yunis.

No more messages from her.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

Middle East Monitor

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Many Palestinians welcomed the international consensus that essentially declared to be null and void any Israeli attempt to make what is meant to be a temporary military occupation permanent. However, many were not impressed, understandably so, simply because the international community has proven ineffectual in bringing the catastrophic Israeli war against the Palestinians in Gaza to an end, or in enforcing its previous resolutions on the matter.

Israeli media largely ignored both events, while mainstream western media repeatedly emphasised that both the advisory opinion and the resolution are “non-binding”. This is true. However, as former UN Special Rapporteur John Dugard said twenty years ago, the laws and conventions upon which advisory opinions are based “are binding”, not least the Fourth Geneva Convention. [See Protecting Human Rights in Occupied Palestine…, Clarity Press, 2022, p19]

Although it is also true that international law without enforcement is largely useless, one must not be rash to conclude that the latest actions by the ICJ and the General Assembly deserve no pause for consideration. To appreciate the importance of both, we must place them within their proper context.

Unlike the ICJ’s advisory opinion of 2004, the 19 July opinion does not focus on a specific issue, the illegality of Israel’s so-called Separation Wall in the occupied West Bank. The latest decision by the world’s highest Court was the outcome of a specific request by the UNGA on 20 January, 2023, to opine “on Israeli practices affecting the human rights of the Palestinian people in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem.”

Moreover, the ICJ reached its conclusions after listening to the testimonies of representatives of 52 countries and three international organisations, which sided fully with the Palestinians in their historic quest for freedom, justice and respect for international law.

The ICJ opinion leaves no space for Israeli and US misinterpretation

Then there is the fact that the ICJ opinion touched upon numerous issues, leaving no space for any misinterpretation on the part of Israel and the United States. For example, it called on Israel to end its “unlawful presence” in occupied Palestine, and for it to “withdraw its military forces; halt the expansion of settlements and evacuate all settlers from occupied land; and demolish parts of a separation wall constructed inside the occupied West Bank.”

US officials give Israeli PM Netanyahu standing ovation as he vows to continue bombing Gaza – Cartoon [Sabaaneh/MiddleEastMonitor]

The ICJ opinion follows years of supposed Israeli achievements in marginalising the Palestinian cause, and exacting American support, which effectively recognised Israeli sovereignty over occupied Palestinian and Arab land.

If the ICJ pressed the reset button on the illegality of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, the UNGA pressed the political button. Indeed, UN Resolution A/ES-10/L.31/Rev.1 on 18 September has ended any Israeli illusions that it will be able, through pressure, threats or the passage of time, to end the conversation on its military occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza.

The resolution “calls for Israel to comply with international law and withdraw its military forces, immediately cease all new settlement activity, evacuate all settlers from occupied land, and dismantle parts of the separation wall it constructed inside the occupied West Bank.”

Importantly, 124 countries voted in favour of the resolution, while 14 voted against it, separating once again those who believe in the primacy of international law in conflict resolution and those who don’t. Also significant is that the UN set a time frame for when the Israeli occupation must come to an end: “No later than 12 months from the adoption of the resolution.”

In international law, military occupations are meant to be a temporary process, regulated through numerous treaties and legal understandings, including the Fourth Geneva Conventions. Israel, however, has turned that temporary process into a permanent one.

If the Israeli military occupation does not end within the resolution’s specified time frame, Israel would then be in violation of two sets of laws: previous UN resolutions on the matter, including the ICJ advisory opinions, and the latest resolution as well.

The emphasis by western media on the “non-binding” element of these resolutions does not, in any way, alter the illegality of the Israeli occupation, or undermine the unanimity of the international community regarding the righteousness of the Palestinian struggle against Israeli occupation and all other injustices.

Ultimately, Palestine will not be liberated by a UN resolution.

UN resolutions are merely an expression of the balances of power that exist on the international stage. As such, Palestinians and their supporters should not expect that a UN resolution, binding or otherwise, will drive the Israeli military out of the West Bank and Gaza.

I believe that the Palestinians will liberate themselves. However, the position of the international community remains significant as it re-emphasises the legitimacy of the Palestinian struggle, creates space for solidarity and helps further marginalise Israel for its continued violations of international law and the rights of the Palestinian people.

<i>The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.</i>

Via Middle East Monitor

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Even a quick glance at headlines in international media reveals the depth of the Israeli dilemma. While Tel Aviv continues to carry out a genocidal war against the Palestinian people in Gaza, it seems to have no idea what to do beyond simply destroying the Strip and its people.

Even the country’s Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, who could soon be officially wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC), indicated on multiple occasions that Israel has no post-war plan in Gaza.

“Since October, I have been raising this issue consistently in the Cabinet, and have received no response,” Gallant said in the clearest possible language in May.

Others suggest that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right government might have a plan but, in the language of the Washington Post, it is a “no workable plan” or, according to Vox, “is no plan at all”.

Netanyahu’s “not workable” plan, or “no plan at all”, is inconsistent with the wishes of the US administration.

True, both Israel and the US are in full agreement regarding the war itself. Even after Washington had finally begun shifting its position from wanting the war to continue, to asking Netanyahu to conclude his bloody task, American weapons have continued to flow at the same rate.

The Americans, however, are not convinced that destroying Hamas, fully demilitarising Gaza, taking control of the Gaza-Egypt border, shutting down the UNRWA refugees’ agency and the ‘de-radicalisation’ of the besieged Palestinian population is the right approach.

But Netanyahu himself must have already known this, if not at the very start of the war, at least nearly a year into the genocide. His exhausted army kept moving from one phase to another, declaring “tactical victories” without achieving a single strategic goal in Gaza.

The most optimistic estimation of the Israeli army is that their war, which has practically destroyed all of Gaza, has resulted in a stalemate. A more sober reading of the war, according to former Prime Minister, General Ehud Barak, is that Israel must end it before “sinking into its moral abyss”.

Yet, more delusional plans, pertaining to both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, continue to be leaked to the media.

The first major leak was a taped recording of a speech by extremist and very influential Israeli minister in Netanyahu’s cabinet, Bezalel Smotrich.

“I am telling, it is mega-dramatic. Such changes change a system’s DNA,” Smotrich told a group of Israeli Jewish settlers in June, according to the New York Times.

The minister’s “carefully orchestrated programme” hinges on transferring the authority of the West Bank from the occupation army to a group of civilians under the leadership of Smotrich himself. The goal is to seize more Palestinian land, expand the illegal settlements and prevent any possible continuity of a viable Palestinian State.

In fact, the plan is already underway. On 29 May, Israel appointed Hillel Roth, a close ally of Smotrich, as the deputy in the West Bank Civil Administration.

“Netanyahu, Butcher of Gaza,” Digital, Dream/ Dreamland v3 / PS Express, 2024

The plan for Gaza is another episode of cruelty, but also delusional. It was revealed in an article by the editor of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz on 9 September.

Aluf Benn wrote that Netanyahu’s plan also consists of the hiring of an Israeli “governor of Gaza”, Brigadier General Elad Goren, who became the ‘Head of Humanitarian-Civilian effort’ in the Strip on 28 August.

Using a combination of tactics, including starvation, military pressure and the like, Netanyahu wants to drive the population of northern Gaza to the south in preparation of formally annexing the region and bringing back Jewish settlers.

These are not the only plans that have been leaked or, at times, communicated openly by Israeli officials.

At the start of the war, such ideas as ethnically cleansing the Gaza population into Sinai were advocated openly by Israeli officials, and were also the main topic of discussion in Israeli evening news programmes.

Some Israeli officials spoke of fully occupying Gaza, while others, like Israel’s Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu, floated the idea of dropping a nuclear bomb.

The plan of totally evacuating Gaza did not work simply because Palestinians would not leave, and Egypt had rejected the very insinuation that ethnically cleansing Gazans was an option. Additionally, the total depopulation of northern Gaza also did not work, partly because Israel was massacring civilians in both north and south at comparable rates.

Israel’s new plans will not succeed in achieving what the original plans have failed to achieve, simply because Israel continues to face the same obstacle: the steadfastness of the Palestinian people.

However, much can still be learned from the nature of the Israeli schemes, old and new, mainly the fact that Israel regards the Palestinian people as the enemy.

This conclusion is not only gleaned through statements by top Israeli officials, including President Isaac Herzog himself, when he said that “an entire nation out there (..) is responsible”.

Almost every Israeli scheme seems to involve killing Palestinians in large numbers, starving them or displacing them en masse.

This means that the Israeli war has always been a war against the Palestinian people. The Palestinians themselves know it. Shouldn’t the rest of the world also know it by now?

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

Via Middle East Monitor

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

In his capacity as a minister in the equally extremist government of Benjamin Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir has worked hard to translate his language into action. He has raided Al-Aqsa Mosque repeatedly, and implemented his starvation policies against Palestinian detainees, going as far as defending rape inside Israeli military detention camps and calling the soldiers accused of such a heinous crime “our best heroes”.

Moreover, his supporters have carried out hundreds of assaults and dozens of pogroms targeting Palestinian communities in the West Bank. According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, at least 670 Palestinians have been killed in the occupied West Bank since the start of the Gaza war last October. A large number among those killed and injured were victims of illegal Jewish settlers.

However, not all Israelis in the political or security establishments agree with Ben-Gvir’s behaviour or tactics. For example, on 22 August, Israel’s Shin Bet chief, Ronen Bar, warned against the damage to Israel caused by Ben-Gvir’s actions in East Jerusalem.

“The damage to the State of Israel, especially now… is indescribable: global delegitimisation, even among our greatest allies,” wrote Bar in a letter to several Israeli ministers.

His letter may seem odd. The Shin Bet has been instrumental in the killing of numerous Palestinians in the name of Israeli security. Bar himself is a strong supporter of the illegal settlements, and as hawkish as is required for the person who leads such a notorious organisation.

Bar’s conflict with Ben-Gvir, however, is not one of substance, but style.

This conflict is only an expression of a much greater ideological and political war among Israel’s top institutions. This “Zionism vs Zionism” war, however, began before the 7 October attack and the ongoing Israeli war and genocide in Gaza.

Seven months before the start of the current war in Gaza, Israeli President Isaac Herzog said in a televised speech that, “Those who think that a real civil war… is a border we won’t cross, have no idea.”

The context of his comments was the “real, deep hate” among Israelis resulting from the attempts by Netanyahu and his extremist government coalition partners to undermine the power of the judiciary. The fight over the Supreme Court, however, was merely the tip of the iceberg. The fact that it took Israel five elections in four years to settle on a stable government in December 2022 was itself indicative of Israel’s unprecedented political conflict.

The new government may have been “stable” in terms of the parliamentary balances, but it destabilised the country on all fronts, leading to mass protests, involving the powerful, but increasingly marginalised military class.

“Extremism,” Digital, Dream/ Dreamland v3, 2024.

The 7 October attack took place at a time of social and political vulnerability, arguably unprecedented since the founding of Israel atop the ruins of historic Palestine in May 1948.

The war, and especially the failure to achieve any of its objectives, deepened that existing conflict. This led to warnings from politicians and military men that the country was collapsing.

The clearest of these warnings came from Yitzhak Brik, a former top Israeli military commander. He wrote in Haaretz on 22 August that the “country… is galloping towards the edge of an abyss,” and that it “will collapse within no more than a year.”

Although Brik was, among other things, blaming Netanyahu’s losing war in Gaza, the anti-Netanyahu political class believes that the crisis lies mainly in the government itself. The solution, according to recent comments made by Herzog, is that

Kahanism needs to be removed from the government.

Kahanism refers to the Kach Party of Rabbi Meir Kahane. Although now banned, Kach has resurfaced in numerous forms, including in Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit party. As a disciple of Kahane, Ben-Gvir is set to achieve the vision of the extremist rabbi: the complete ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people.

Ben-Gvir and his ilk are fully aware of the historic opportunity that is now available to them as they hope to ignite the much-coveted religious war. They also know that if the war in Gaza ends without advancing their main plan of colonising the rest of the occupied territories, the opportunity may never present itself again.

The far-right Ben-Gvir’s rush to fulfil the religious Zionist agenda contradicts the traditional form of Israeli colonialism, predicated on the “incremental genocide” of Palestinians and the slow ethnic cleansing of Palestinian communities from East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

The Israeli military believes that illegal settlements are essential, but they perceive these colonies in strategic language as a “security” buffer for Israel.

The winners and losers of Israel’s ideological and political war are most likely to emerge following the end of the Gaza war, the outcomes of which will determine other factors, including the very future of the state of Israel, as per the estimation of General Yitzhak Brik himself.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

Via Middle East Monitor

Unless otherwise stated in the article above, this work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

On 17 August, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called for a seven-day ceasefire to allow children in Gaza to be vaccinated against polio. “I am appealing to all parties to provide concrete assurances right away, guaranteeing humanitarian pauses for the campaign,” he said.

The first such case of the devastating disease was discovered in the town of Deir Al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip. “It is scientifically known that for every 200 virus infections, only one will show the full symptoms of polio, while the remaining cases may present mild symptoms such as a cold or a slight fever,” said Palestinian Health Minister Majed Abu Ramadan on the same day.

This means that the virus may have spread to all parts of the Gaza Strip, where the entire healthcare system has been largely destroyed by the Israeli bombardment. And yet, the ten-month-old Palestinian baby who was first to contract the poliovirus, like hundreds of thousands of other children in the enclave, was not vaccinated against the disease.

To prevent an even greater disaster in war-stricken Gaza, the World Health Organisation (WHO), along with the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), said that they have to vaccinate 640,000 children throughout Gaza very quickly.

This is a difficult task, as the vast majority of Palestinians in Gaza are crammed into unsafe refugee camps, massive tent encampments.

These are mostly in central Gaza, with no access to clean water or electricity. They are surrounded by over 330,000 tons of waste, which has further contaminated already undrinkable water. It is this, say the experts, that may be the cause of the poliovirus.

The challenge of saving Gaza’s children is complicated by the fact that Israeli bombs continue to be dropped on every part of the Palestinian territory, including the so-called “safe zones”, which were declared by the occupation state soon after the start of the war and a number of occasions since.

The other problem is that Gaza has, for months, subsisted without electricity. Without an efficiently-cooled storage system, the majority of the vaccines could become unusable.

Israel’s bombs are leaving Gaza’s children with life-changing injuries – Cartoon [Sabaaneh/Middle East Monitor

However, there is more to the suffering of Gaza’s children than the lack of vaccinations. As of 19 August, at least 16,480 children had been killed as a direct result of the war, in addition to thousands more who remain missing, presumed dead, under the rubble of their homes and other civilian infrastructure destroyed by Israel. Those killed, according to the Palestinian Minister of Health in Gaza, include 115 babies.

Many Palestinian children have starved to death.

“At least 3,500 children in Gaza are facing [the same fate] amid a lack of food and malnutrition under Israeli restrictions on the delivery of food,” explained a ministry spokesman. Moreover, more than 17,000 children in Gaza have lost either one or both parents since the start of the war last October.

One of the main reasons why Gaza’s children account for a major segment of the victims of the war is that homes, schools and displacement shelters have been the main targets of the relentless Israeli bombardment. According to UN experts in April, “More than 80 per cent of schools in Gaza [have been] damaged or destroyed.” They added that, “It may be reasonable to ask if there is an intentional effort to comprehensively destroy the Palestinian education system, an action known as ‘scholasticide’.”

The trend of targeting schools continues. On 18 August, Palestine’s Education Minister, Amjad Barham, said that over 90 per cent of all Gaza schools have been destroyed, the official Palestinian news agency, WAFA, reported. Of the 309 schools in the territory, 290 have been destroyed as a result of Israeli bombing. This has left 630,000 students with no access to education.

While homes and schools can be rebuilt, the precious lives of children who have been killed cannot be restored. According to the Palestinian Ministry of Education, as of 2 July, 8,572 students in Gaza and 100 in the occupied West Bank had been killed by the Israeli army, with 14,089 students in Gaza and 494 in the West Bank wounded.

These are the worst losses suffered by Palestinian children within a relatively brief period of time since the Nakba, the destruction of the Palestinian homeland in 1948.

And the tragedy worsens by the day.

No child, let alone a whole generation of children, should endure this much suffering, regardless of the political reasoning or context. International and humanitarian law has designated a “special respect and protection” for children during times of armed conflict, the international humanitarian law databases of the Red Cross resolve. These laws may apply to Palestinian children in theory, but certainly not in practice.

The betrayal of the children of Palestine by the international community shall stain the collective consciousness of humankind for decades to come. This is indeed a war on Palestinian children, a war that must stop before a whole generation of Palestinian children is completely erased.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

Middle East Monitor

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

In the interview, Erdan expressed his wish to become the head of Likud, the right-wing party of current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. His choice of words could have been his way of appealing to the right and far-right constituencies that feed on such aggressive rhetoric.

However, there is more to Erdan’s hatred for the UN than the mere frustration of a disappointed diplomat. Israel has had a long and troubled history with the UN and its associated institutions. According to Israel’s political discourse and victim narrative, the UN is an “anti-Semitic” organisation, a label often invoked when Israel faced even the slightest criticism.

Israel’s relationship with the UN is particularly odd because the occupation state was created by a UN resolution.

That resolution itself was a direct outcome of UN political intrigues and western pressure. On 29 November, 1947, the UN passed Resolution 181, calling for the partition of historic Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state. It assigned most of the land, 56 per cent, to the Jewish population, then a minority, and the rest to the Palestinian Arab indigenous people. Shortly afterwards, the Jewish Zionist leadership began a military campaign that saw the nascent state occupy most of Palestine and ethnically cleanse most of its population.

Israel was admitted as a full UN member on 11 May, 1949, while Palestinians native to the land remain stateless. Although Israel’s admission to the international body was conditional upon the acceptance of Resolutions 181 and 194 — covering the status of Jerusalem as an international body, and the right of return of Palestinian refugees — Israel’s violations of these and other resolutions have not been punished thanks to strong backing from Washington and other western powers.

In June 1967, the rest of historic Palestine was conquered. Again, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were ethnically cleansed and, ever since, the Palestinians remaining in their land as either “Arab Israelis” or refugees have lived under a draconian system of military occupation, apartheid, siege and a constant state of war.

The ongoing Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip is the culmination of all the injustices inflicted on the Palestinian people over the past eight decades and more. The war did not start on 7 October, 2023, nor will it end when a ceasefire is finally declared.

Aside from the November 1917 Balfour Declaration, wherein Britain pledged support for a “Jewish national home” in historic Palestine, UN Resolution 181, which allowed the establishment of Israel, could arguably be considered the genesis of ongoing Palestinian suffering.

Throughout this bloody, unjust history, the UN has neither penalised Israel for its violations of UN resolutions and other pillars of international law, nor granted Palestinians their long overdue justice. It has failed to implement or enforce any of its resolutions recognising the illegality of the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

Nevertheless, Palestinians continue to resort to the UN, since it is their only international platform that could constantly remind Israel, and the world, that Tel Aviv is an Occupying Power, and that international and humanitarian laws must apply to Palestinians as an occupied people. Such reminders were made frequently in the past, at the UN General Assembly and even at the Security Council, always to the annoyance of Israel and its western benefactors, especially the United States.

“UNO,” Digital, Midjourney / Clip2Comic, 2024

The latest solid legal position was articulated through an Advisory Opinion by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on 19 July. After the testimonies and interventions made by at least 52 countries and countless experts, the ICJ resolved that

Israel’s occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, is unlawful, along with the associated settlement regime, annexation and use of natural resources.

Although the UN has not made any difference in forcing Israel to end its occupation, dismantle illegal settlements or respect the basic human rights of Palestinians, the international institution remains a source of frustration for the occupation state.

Ever since its establishment on the ruins of Palestinian homes, Israel has worked to change the status of Palestine and Palestinian refugees, and constantly challenged the very term “occupation”. It has done its utmost to rewrite history, illegally annex Palestinian and Arab land, and build illegal settlements to establish permanent “facts on the ground”.

In 2017, it looked as if Israel was succeeding in its quest to cancel the Palestinian cause altogether when Washington recognised Israel’s fraudulent claims to Occupied East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Golan Heights. The international community, though, did not follow suit, as demonstrated in the ICJ’s recent legal ruling. As far as the UN is concerned, Israel remains an Occupying Power, bound to international laws and norms.

For Palestinians, however, such facts remain devoid of practical meaning, while for Israel, the UN position is a major obstacle in the face of its blatant settler-colonial project. And this is why Erdan wants the UN “wiped off from the face of the earth”. Even if the angry Israeli diplomat gets his wish, nothing will alter this historic truth: Israel is and will remain a settler-colonial regime, and Palestine and its people will continue to resist, until justice is finally served.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

Via Middle East Monitor

Unless otherwise stated in the article above, this work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.