The international community sold out the Palestinians decades ago on the right of return
“Gaza is an essential part of a future Palestinian state,” the EU Spokesman for Foreign Affairs Anouar El Anouni stated belatedly in response to US President Donald Trump’s announcement of taking over Gaza and remodelling into a so-called “Riviera of the Middle East”.
While the EU retained its diplomatic posturing over Gaza within the two-state framework, stating that there should be no further forced displacement of Palestinians, Trump announced that his plan did not include the Palestinian right of return. While that was evident with his first announcement of a hypothetical Gaza takeover by the US for Israeli interests – Trump said that Gaza would be populated with foreigners – the stark assertion that there is no right of return strikes a dangerous tone, one that exposes the international community’s continuous delay strategy when it comes to Palestine and Palestinian matters.
Let’s make it clear: the right of return is a legitimate right for all refugees, not just Palestinians.
It is an individual right that cannot be negotiated or taken away by anyone. That’s international law. However, despite affirming the Palestinian right of return in UN Resolution 194, the international community has never addressed the fact that Israel itself is an impediment to that right. It never addressed the fact that Israel was founded upon the illegal ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Palestinian population, which in turn made Palestinian refugees an unfortunate humanitarian problem.
With Israel’s establishment, a perpetual cycle of refugee creation was set in motion. To protect Israel’s colonial enterprise in Palestine, the world became complicit in the forced displacement of Palestinian refugees. It continued to do so after 1967; with each decision Israel took to appropriate more land from the Palestinian people; with each brutal assault on Gaza; with every settlement built and expanded in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem; with the genocide in Gaza; and with the apartheid regime’s attacks on Jenin. Wherever Israel decided to forcibly displace Palestinians, the international community was right behind it.
As is his style, Trump is openly rejecting the Palestinian right of return.
But has the EU, for example, advocated overtly for and worked towards the exercise of that right? How about the UN, which fragmented forced displacement from a colonial policy to disconnected human rights violations? The UN which even debated about humanitarian pauses in a genocide and which failed to stop Israel’s forced displacement of Palestinians in Gaza so that they could be massacred in greater numbers? The international community sold out the Palestinians decades ago on the right of return.
Moreover, it has ruined Palestinians by differentiating on forced displacement. It differentiated between 1948 and 1967, and keeps doing so to date. Let us keep in mind that the images we saw of Palestinians returning to their destroyed homes in Gaza is just a tiny sliver of the repercussions from an entire history of Zionist colonial violence.
Can Europe turn against the colonial ideology it legitimised since before it recognised Israel?
Diplomatic jargon aside, there is nothing to choose between Trump and the EU, or the rest of the world, with regard to stances on the Palestinian right of return. If Trump can state adamantly that there is no right of return for Palestinians in his plan for Gaza, there is an entire history of stalling supporting his claim. It is only the lack of continuous insistence to look at history that creates a veneer of difference between Trump and the international community on the subject. The road was always paved with silence and the humanitarian paradigm; for Trump, it was like laying out the red carpet.
OPINION: Trump’s Gaza plan: A green light for ethnic cleansing?
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